Gabriel Rolón: There will always be a wound, an absence beside you that moves you through memory

Gabriel Rolón rejects the idea that happiness means escaping every wound. In an interview with LN+, the psychoanalyst says memories often carry both tenderness and pain because they preserve moments and people who are no longer present.

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There will always be a wound, an absence beside you that moves you through memory, but because pain is stronger than happiness, the memory of a happy moment is a little painful.

“There will always be a wound, an absence beside you that moves you through memory,” he says. The memory of a happy moment can hurt, he argues, because the pain of absence can outweigh the happiness the moment once brought. Building a life that can embrace this imperfect happiness requires courage and intelligence.

Rolón describes memory as an enigmatic place where people keep what they have lost so death cannot take it away forever. He warns against the search for magical or instant solutions in a society focused on immediate results. Happiness, he says, carries a major responsibility because it must be built by someone who knows they are mortal and already carry memories of wounds and losses.

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You have to be very brave and very intelligent to build that world, one that embraces imperfect happiness.

In his book La felicidad, Rolón uses the word “faltacidad” for a form of happiness capable of embracing a person’s absences, pain and wounds. He places happiness in the present, saying that locating it only in the past or an uncertain future empties the present of meaning. “Happiness is imperfect,” he emphasizes.

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There is no happiness. There is faltacidad, a happiness capable of embracing all my absences, my pain and my wounds.

He also presents love as a human invention that briefly deceives death, softens loneliness and makes sadness less disturbing. But love carries a risk: “To love someone is to give them power over you,” he warns.

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To love someone is to give them power over you.