Recovery from romantic catastrophe requires an autonomous existence beyond the lover.
Evidence
The failure of absolute love is a productive ordeal only if the woman is capable of taking herself in hand again; separated from Abélard, Héloïse was not a wreck, because, directing an abbey, she constructed an autonomous existence. Colette’s heroines have too much pride and too many resources to let themselves be broken by an amorous disillusion; Renée Néré is saved by her work. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Liberation-from-control paradoxically requires self-control by a prior autonomous self; Healing her mother wound freed Beauvoir for relationships beyond the necessary-contingent dichotomy. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 146