Sandrine Alexander. “The tension of waiting for a message allows you to experience the pure state of love.”

Madame Figaro. – Waiting is inherent in the state of love. ?
Sandrine Alexandra. – The experience of waiting is equivalent to the state of love. It is even the criterion. And we can only recognize ourselves in the pages that Roland Barthes devotes to waiting Love quotes “The fateful identity of the lover is nothing else but I am the one waiting.” The tension of waiting for a phone call, text or meeting allows you to experience this enchanting and painful state of love and “declare” your own form of submission, captive in love. The anxiety in which we are immersed in the expectation that we enjoy being grouped together as a comedy, which will have a “little mourning” effect (the other one is not there yet, something must happen to him) too; a pretty surefire way to regain feelings for your loved one.

How is the pleasure sometimes more in the waiting than in the satisfaction? ?
The promise of pleasure makes us imagine with pleasure the moment of its satisfaction. In the period immediately preceding pleasure, I modify the object of my desire as I please. I am the master of my pleasures and the king of my sorrows. Therefore, the moment of actual satisfaction can be disappointing. This is what Rousseau suggests New Heloise.Reality is given in its homogeneity, and the object of my desire eludes my control. I imagined the meeting in a thousand ways, playing this or that role of the other person. And now the meeting offers me only one option, where I no longer control anything. But the anticipation of pleasure can also allow us to enjoy more and more of what we get. Rejoicing in anticipation of a pleasure or encounter provides us with the welcome pleasure to come, which finds greater density there.

The anxiety that waiting puts us into is also a pretty sure way to restore feelings for a loved one.

Sandrine Alexander, Philosopher

Is waiting a way to counter the immediate consumerist society, including in love? ?
Waiting often functions as a power device that differentiates between those who wait and people who wait. But it is still possible to reappropriate the experience of waiting from a liberating perspective. Including in romantic or sexual relationships, which sometimes take the form of a real market where we consume without delay according to very specific expectations similar to consumer expectations of a product. Contrary to the “acceleration of the world” that the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa characterizes capitalism, taking the time to wait and agreeing to listen to a different rhythm than your own has political merit. Choosing to wait versus immediate gratification of needs or desires, which are themselves stereotyped, means giving up certain kinds of relationships with others.

Slowness in relationships should not become the new norm again…
This is true because, like any deviation, the choice of waiting cannot be a “recipe”. Indeed, in the erotic context, waiting and slowness sometimes become real slogans, as suffocating as the paradigm of sexuality, which is associated with penetration and leads to a highly coded orgasm. Waiting as delay has a critical virtue only if it does not become a dogma valid as the only “solution”. Therefore, it is important to stay “on the lookout” to uncover both the normative shackles that sometimes oppress us without our knowledge, and to invent other ways of loving that can be open to the unexpected without specific expectations.

“Waiting. Or the art of losing patience by Sandrine Alexandre, Éditions L’Harmattan, 176 p., €20.50.