Let's generalize for a moment here (actually what follows is not a generalization but my personal experience which I pretend to be general)
...when you talk to the woman or the girl you're with, the so called partner, and express whatever feeling of discouragement or desperation or weakness, she will immediately give you words of continuous and pressing solidarity that will revolve around the concept that whatever feeling you are experiencing it is simply not true. It is unmotivated. It is silly. It is probably the opposite, instead. There probably is some detail you didn't considered thanks to which things aren't so bad. You are probably doing perfectly fine. It goes so much so that you both get to a stage where she asks: "what's going on?" and you quickly: "nothing!" although you really need to talk. Because her prompt caring denial would be worse than silence.
On the other hand if you talk to your ex or to a girl you're friend with, you have a chance that she might express her solidarity in a less censoring way, which --if talking serves a purpose-- is the only way for you to move forward. She might even find the words to look in dismay at your condition without denying it. That's because she doesn't feel threatened by it. You're not her man, so your defects can be observed more objectively. This might explain why men seek love and then get bored by it. And why they keep falling in love with friends and exes. And why probably your girlfriend is a splendid talker and listener and helper --but not with you.

"How do you move in a world of fog, that’s always changing things. Makes me wish that I could be a dog"
-- Tom Waits, "I don't wanna grow up"

Vanni says that thinking too much about the fact that you are getting old, makes you even older. I haven't seen him in five years and he still has that power to make most of my arguments powerless.
He is right, of course. Why do I think so much about it?
"The lost occasions" I defend. They proportionally or even exponentially can increase your anguish to grow up and get old.
"Not to think about it is the answer" he says. "They do not exist."
Yeah I always thought that. It's like the others-- or life itself --keep putting them before your eyes without a good reason. But it's hard or pointless to explain that I also need to speculate on the sheer fact of growing old and wasting the time of life away. Or think out the mystery. Because there is no actual way not to waste time, since this is the only compromise possible in being alive unless you want to embrace the rules of nature in their entirety, which would be a nightmare, although not a waste of time --if you're lucky.
"Why would that be?" Vanni asks.
Because the reasons of genes and selections, which I would never doubt since they are a scientific fact, are also one of the most depressing things on earth. They cause immense suffering and injustice and any decent life of a free person should be imagined with at least one foot and one hand outside those boundaries.
"It can be fine inside the boundaries" Vanni says.

I never really could find a pal whom with share my speculations. The maddening efforts to describe the trap aren't really worth it to most of us. But on the other hand I always masturbated alone.

I feel his eyes on me as I am climbing the slope at the beginning of Naviglio Pavese. I wonder how is it possible that I "feel it" when someone is looking at me. I am both alert for the traffic rushing around and absent-minded in my daydream but I feel and look back. The city was washed by the rain today, and in the white light, the fresh wind is gathering waters in the puddles near the sidewalks, where trees and wires reflect. People hasten by with grocery bags, dragging children, complaining on the telephone, driving in the mess with the tongue sticking out of the left corner of their mouth. Girls are smoking white cigarettes in the shadows of the fancy cockpits, honking & lined behind the trams. His face is in focus in the noise of the city as I move towards him.

We smile at each other, and O.K., I manage to greet him warmly. We haven't seen each other in four years or so, but he's so at ease in dealing with all sort of people he deals fine with me. Pretty soon I am updated about the enormous range of things he did and places where he lived in the past four years. He says he just had his second baby and now he's back to his work. He says he paints too. "Huge paintings. Two-three thousand euros a picture" he says. Makes me think at that character in "Hannah and her sisters".
He asks me what I do, and I say "unemployed", where I live, and I say, "at this girl's".
"Don't you work at the university anymore? I heard you had a career there."
"No."
"But why?" he is surprised. We both are repeaters from Art School and once troubled hard to fit-in boys. Being the one with a career at the University was what made me a real loser, so he's disappointed. Or this is what my paranoia figures.
"I don't know. Long story. I was tired," I say.
"You still write?" he asks.
I hate him for asking this. I had this thing that I wanted to write a long ago, when we were at school and briefly after that. He shouldn't be so aware I am still stuck with my unfulfilled delusion.
"Sure" I say reluctantly. Somehow I know he never ceased to look at me as at an alien.

Then it's time we part, as the energy of the encounter dissipates.
"Let's keep in touch" he says.
"We'll never see each other again" I smile.
"Don't say that!"

As I move away, it's O.K. that I still have a long way to walk home. I m slowing down in the crowd of Viale Bligny to let the impressions of the city do their job on me. I try to meet girls' eyes as they approach me and pass by. But they all seem so angry and impatient today.

I only imagine these characters who look at me with complicity, much irony, a possibility to get away from it all together. It's all invented. I draw them and they come out when their expression is right, but then again the expression doesn't change, and it all remains dead. I am trapped in my daydreams, an enclosure under the sun or the dark clouds and the sudden showers, my friends are long gone ('cause I ignored their calls), my heart is too wrapped up in itself for love, and just like I was obsessed with pleasing my father in the past, now I am obsessed with displeasing him. But I just want out.