Dear Love Attorney,
Last week, after six months of dating, I found out my boyfriend was part horse. The top part is horse, not the bottom part, unfortunately. Things have been weird since then. I just feel like I can’t relate to him anymore. Even our favorite activities, like eating sugar cubes, now feel forced and have lost their luster. I should point out that my father ran a glue factory, and so I grew up with a very slanted view of horse-people. Can you help me? Because up until I found out, I felt so close to him, and I don’t want to lose him because of my own prejudices.
From,
Sticky Situation
Dear Sticky,
Yes, a most unfortunate dilemma indeed. Would you happen to know your boyfriend’s ancestry? I ask this only because the Scythians—those equestrian masters of early history—used to marry their horses. It was from witnessing these offspring that the Greeks first imagined their mythical creature, the centaur.
“How could they have ‘imagined’ a half-man, half-horse being, if those actually existed?” you ask. Well, I say “imagined” because those anthropocentric Greeks could only imagine the centaur as a man’s head on a horse’s ass—the exact opposite of how the Scythians appeared, which is like your lover. This is to say nothing of the fantasies that those Greeks projected into their mythology: The firm, robust buttocks muscles of the horse and the noble color and texture of horsehair probably filled those Greek men with lust in the same way a slave filled their glasses with wine: overflowing the rim, onto their hands and…
I’m getting off topic. I apologize. My Classics degree gets the better of me sometimes.
In your situation—one juxtaposition between the ignorant but happy past and the alienated present where the truth is uncovered, but for the worse—you must pretend. You must lie to yourself and say, “He is not a horse. He is not a dirty Scythian. He is 100 percent human…” and if you say this enough, you will actually believe it. It’s called cognitive dissonance, and everyone already does it. For example, I don’t like being divorce lawyer. It’s immoral and parasitic, and I would rather sing on Broadway. However, I tell myself over and over that I care about the money, that humans that marry for love and not for advantage deserve what they get, and that I get pleasure from making them regret their decisions. Eventually I stop feeling suicidal. Try it for yourself!
Love,
The Love Attorney
