When a lover changes their behavior suddenly, their partner is left reeling. What are they to make of this new behavior, is this just some passing mood or has the person they once knew been replaced? Has some strange doppelganger donned the appearance of their once well-known lover? Vergil and Flora Cash both acknowledge this rather uncomfortable part of love – the lovers themselves changing.
Flora Cash’s melancholy song “You’re Somebody Else” describes the plight of the singer realizing that his lover has changed on fundamental level, “Well, you look like yourself/But you’re somebody else/Only it ain’t on the surface/Well you talk like yourself/No, I hear someone else though/Now you’re making me nervous”. Their lover superficially looks the same, but the singer is picking up on something much deeper being different about them. This change makes the singer nervous as it calls into question what the relationship was built on – if something in the core of the lover has changed, is the singer in love with the same person? Or have they really become someone else – and is that someone else a person that the singer can love? The singer feels distinctly uncomfortable with the entire situation, especially when considering how important their lover was to them.
Poor abandoned Dido also must deal with a changed lover. Her once doting partner, Aeneas, is suddenly forced by the gods to return to his original plan of going to Italy. Just like that, Aeneas sets the wheels in motion to leave and throws Dido to the wayside. Dido laments this drastic change, and it is noted that “no tears moved him, no one’s voice would he attend to tractably. The fates opposed it; God’s will blocked the man’s once kindly ears” (Virgil, The Aeneid, lns. 607-609). Once, the pleas of his love and her sister would convince him to stay, but he has undergone a change, forced by the gods to harden his heart. So, lovers today and the ancient world both had to deal with the discomfort of change. Strong relationships are said to grow and change together, but neither the singer nor Dido/Aeneas seem to have that experience. Aeneas’ sudden change, his re-dedication to his fate, is enough to break Dido “So broken in mind by suffering, Dido caught her fatal madness and resolved to die.” (Virgil, The Aeneid, lns. 656-657).
Therein lies our major difference. For our singer, the change in character of his lover is enough to give him pause and wonder at what this might mean for his relationship. For Dido, Aeneas being ‘replaced’ by a hard-hearted doppelganger is what leads her to die by suicide. The singer’s reaction is considerably more sensible and leaves the option for him to come to terms with all that has changed.
“no tears moved him, no one’s voice would he attend to tractably. The fates opposed it; God’s will blocked the man’s once kindly ears” (Virgil, The Aeneid, lns. 607-609)
“So broken in mind by suffering, Dido caught her fatal madness and resolved to die.” (Virgil, The Aeneid, lns. 656-657).