Why is real life never like I imagined?
The wedding, the move, the job: all checked off. Something is still missing. The usual conclusion is that the life is wrong. Maybe it's the yardstick.
Gustave Flaubert wrote about this gap in Madame Bovary. Emma grows up in a convent school, reading novels. She marries a country doctor, and after the wedding she waits for a feeling that never comes.
"And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books."
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, part I, chapter V, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling
Words first
Emma had the words before she had the experiences. Felicity and rapture were settled in her head long before she lived anything they could describe. When her real life started, she held it up against them.
She grew up on a farm, so calm was familiar to her and bored her. She wanted the extreme:
"She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms"
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, part I, chapter VI, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling
A calm sea didn't count for her. Neither did a marriage without rapture.
Where she puts the blame
When the happiness doesn't come, Emma decides she was wrong about love. She never doubts the words. She trusts a dictionary more than her own days. Flaubert doesn't say who is right.
A question the novel leaves
Flaubert doesn't correct Emma's definitions. The question left: whose words am I using to measure my life?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.