It's Just Him

I finished The Reader the other night. I got something much more out of the book than I did the movie, and I had to wait til the end of it to catch it. It's not any revelation about the horror of the holocaust; it's not the perplexity of the subjectiveness of one kind of shame versus a worse kind of shame; and it's not the overarching theme of the book -- at least I don't think it is supposed to be. It's the distance one can feel from a partner in a dating or pseudo-romantic relationship. I've felt that distance before and wondered where it came from. Why didn't the person get attached to me? Why didn't the person give himself a chance to get to know me? There wasn't enough time to notice any particular deficiencies in me; I'm not talking about not measuring up. I'm just talking about distance, crafted meticulously so that the other person doesn't get emotionally involved. I've wondered where that can come from, the history in the person's life that would cause a person to purposefully distance himself when I know that it's not my fault (some might argue it is my fault, but I beg to differ). In The Reader, the protagonist has his first affair when he is 15, with a woman who is 36. He falls hopelessly in love with her; she disappears one day without warning. He never has a significant relationship with another woman in his life, which spans the book until he is about 50. A woman he talks to at the end of the book says to him, without knowing much about him at all except that he had this affair when he was 15, that he was a victim too, of the woman he had an affair with. Since his first experience with being in love was with someone he could never have, he would spend his life trying to find her qualities in someone else and was not successful, could not be successful. This woman at the end of the book surmised that he had married, had children, and it had not worked because he was emotionally distant. Someone once told me that people who are emotionally distant in relationships are that way because they have lost something very important to them when they were young and impressionable. She told me that this tends to cause people to have hollow consciences and to be unable to form emotional attachments. I tried to believe it was true, in one particular case (I didn't know him well enough to come up with any significant loss he might have had in his youth, other than losing a very important appendage in his mid to late 20s). He very quickly got into a new relationship, right after parting ways with me, and married her very soon after, and soon after that they became parents together. I just wonder if they have a happy-ever-after. Sometimes it's so hard to believe "it's just him; it's not me," but when I read a story like The Reader, it helps me believe that it is just him.