Emotions and contradictions: Today’s challenges seen through a newspaper’s advice column

A newspaper’s advice column, which is often referred to as the ‘The agony aunt’ is a place where hopes, happiness, but also pain, are shared. Many doubts too. I write the weekly Amore moderno [Modern Love] column in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, where readers send in questions about emotions and relationships. Since I started, I have found myself responding not only to others but also to myself.

Ethics, religion, habits, and education all blend in the heartfelt words that reflect the moment of those who write to me. “Everything must change for everything to remain the same,” said the young Tancredi in the 1958 novel Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. And in matters of the heart, it seems to me that this is often the case.

Times have changed, along with morals, the strength with which religious commandments are imposed, and even aesthetics, yet the pains of love remain the same, rooted as they are in our primal fear of being alone, of losing that other half we have been taught is a necessary complement—or of not finding it at all in the first place. For many couples, saying “yes” in Church doesn’t just mean walking a path dictated by their faith but also signing a pact which is stronger than a civil one; a form of guarantee.  When a man at nearly 70 years old wrote to me, desperate over the end of his marriage after 40 years, he spoke of his loneliness and the disappointment of a pact he believed was inviolable, regardless of happiness. Many, especially men, feel betrayed by their partner’s decision to leave when things go wrong, when passion has transformed into a mature feeling without chemistry, but with the strength of habit, cohabitation, and affection. 

Resistance in the name of a shared project, whether that be the family, or children is becoming increasingly rare, even though people still go to church on Sundays. Catholics who decide to chase happiness or escape from unhappiness or, worse, from the loneliness felt of being a couple, still feel guilty for not honoring that commitment, which is a marked path. This certainly influences their journey, and sometimes their choices.

A divorced man, who was a churchgoer, wrote to me saying he found comfort in the words of the Pope, which were spoken in the historic interview he gave just a few months after his election as Pontiff to Father Antonio Spadaro for Civiltà Cattolica. “What the Church needs most today is to heal wounds and warm the hearts of the faithful,” Pope Francis said in the interview. Because it is always the heart that is the center of the world and our serenity, no matter what we believe.

by Maria Corbi
Journalist, La Stampa