“I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth,”, Frida wrote in a love letter to Diego
I had to really look at my own relationships once I knew Frida and Diego’s stories. I chose the wrong kind of men, but chose them from me being in the wrong kind of space. I made abrupt decisions and each decision fulfilled its promise. I spent years of entanglement and my relationships went from a ‘19 year and seven children’ volatile relationship to a few years and then spaces of aloneness and then to loss of the one great decision I made, and then, finally, to a decision for simple comfort and companionship. All of us have reasons and all of our reasons have a deep-seated complex reason for being. Frida and Diego had a volatile relationship that helps to understand why some women make some of the decisions they make. Frida met Diego when she was a child of 15 and he was a 37-year-old older man that she immediately had a crush on. She was tiny. He was huge. Her parents called them “The Dove and the Elephant”. The metaphors are not lost on those who seek to understand the intensity of their relationship: His part in the relationship was that of a bull elephant in a china shop and hers a flitting dove seeking peace and comfort and relief but chose a man who would wreak havoc in her life to give her the stimuli for the intense kind of art she would do throughout her life. Their comings and goings, the resentment, the passionate adoration, the enmeshment, the abandonments, the real-life metaphor for a woman choosing someone who would help her actualize the symbols of her pain. And, that is the crux of why we sometimes choose the worst (or ‘the best’) for actualizing our own woundedness or needs or wants that we never received earlier in our life.
Why we choose/chose partners for ourselves, or let them choose us, is totally personal and unique, each int heir own ways. I had a friend who choose five marriages for status, each higher than the other in some way, and she laughingly said, “I got a diamond and fur coat from each divorce.” Another friend chose passion in her relationships and each ended in abandonment of some kind that came from her woundedness and each fulfilled her unconscious wounded desire to keep that original abandonment alive in her present. Other friends chose needy men (hello, here I am posted on their/my forehead), “I will nurture and care for you and let you make me sick too”. Others chose men who fulfilled their sense of “not enough” and were unobtainable, again, fulfilling their sense of being “not enough”.
Throughout time, women have sought someone stronger, someone protective, someone who they unconsciously felt would fulfill what the women felt, deeply and, sometimes, unconsciously, drew to them. Frida and Diego’s relationship drove them to deep and meaningful art to become some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Each unique identity in their bodies of work would cause shivers up the spine of women who see their work and identify with it. Some of it is horrible. I went to the museum gathering of their work in St. Petersburg, Florida. I walked in expectant, came out bearing the broken child of my own relationships. Provocative work that lead me to knowing how my choices progressed as I became more ‘awake’ in understanding self. Life would then throw me a huge curve ball and I was left holding a broken bat of a heart. I felt so betrayed and yet… and yet… life fulfilled my inner themes of abandonment, albeit his was through his death. A long only walk of aloneness led me to make my final decision in a partner who would provide comfort and peace and companionship. It was, perhaps, what I needed all along.
©Carol Desjarlais 30.11.20
**In this painting I chose, as you see, to have her big and him little, expressing my own sense of how big her want was.
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