Toni Le Busque's stories.

Today’s good thing…NOT…was filling a good deal of my minds time with obsessive thoughts of the end of my marriage.
I was remembering back to a few months ago when I posted this poem on my blog.
My soon to be ex wife sent me a lovely email telling me that I was wrong about myself; that I was good at love.
And that was the reason she loved me; me being so good at love.

Fast forward a couple of months and it seems I am no longer good at love, and many other things besides.
I am too selfish to be in a relationship and apparently I make a much better friend that partner.
And my soon to be ex wife?
She has gone from being a pedastalised icon of womanly adoration to the person I would most like to…. something else.

I find myself thinking things that I never thought I would about this small person who, on just a glimpse of, I would once smile, feeling my soul, or that ‘empty place inside’, filled to spillage with joy.

And all this because yesterday I listened to this episode of This American Life-The Valentine’s day episode and possibly the saddest episode I have ever listened to.

In one segment, a couple who have been together for 13 years, decide that before they get married they should have sex with other people.
Up until this point they had been perfectly happy, great friends, their relationship the envy of their peers.
Needless to say, they eventually broke up.
But the thing that struck me most was the foolish notion that they had to go out and try something else, just in case they missed out on something.

There’s wasn’t even a case of the grass being greener.
It was simply they wanted to do something they hadn’t done.

To me that’s like saying I think I’ll open my mouth and eat everything in the ocean even though I have a perfectly good lobster at home in the fridge.

It’s not funny and it’s not clever.

It’s destructive and it’s a waste.

Would you eat poo just because you wanted to know what it tasted like?
Because you thought you might find out poo was a TASTE SENSATION?
No.
Well, I wouldn’t.

What is most interesting is the way, years later they rewrite their history while they justify breaking up.
Saying things like maybe I wasn’t as happy as I thought I was and maybe we would have broken up eventually.

I’d call this trying to tell themselves they hadn’t fucked up.

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These details are from You were once mine; my Valentine
70x100cm
Black ink and coloured pencil on white paper