He's Just Not That Into You
Reprinted without permission from Smithsonian Magazine, March 2006
Tulla Larsen was the wealthy daughter of Kristiania's leading wine merchant, and at 29, she was still unmarried...[Munch] first set eyes on Larsen [in 1898] when she arrived at his studio in the company of an artist with whom he shared the space. From the outset, she pursued him aggressively. In his telling, their affair began almost against his will. He fled--to Berlin, then on a yearlong dash across Europe. She followed. He would refuse to see her, then succumb...Larsen longed for Munch to marry her. His Aasgaardstrand cottage, which is now a house museum, contains the antique wedding chest, made for a bride's trousseau, that she gave him. Though he wrote that the touch of her "narrow, clammy lips" felt like the kiss of a corpse, he yielded to her imprecations and even went so far as to make a grudging proposal. "In my misery I think you would at least be happier if we were married," he wrote to her. Then, when she came to Germany to present him with the necessary papers, he lost them. She insisted that they travel to Nice, as France did not require these documents. Once there, he escaped over the border to Italy and eventually to Berlin in 1902...after more than a year's absense, Larsen reappeared. He ignored her overtures until her friends invormed him that she was in a suicidal depression and taking large doses of morphine. He reluctantly agreed to see her. There was a quarrel, and somehow--the full story is unknown--he shot himself with a revolver, losing part of a finger on his left hand...His anger intensified when Larsen, a short time later, married another artist. "I had sacrificed myself needlessly for a whore," he wrote.
I think I would have given up around the time he "escaped to Italy" to avoid marrying me, or maybe when he compared kissing me to making it with a dead body. But I suppose we all have our own standards.