Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on How All Phases of Love Are Equally Valid

All life is motion: electrons circle an atom’s nucleus, planets hurl through space.  Earth turns on its axis at a speed of roughly 1,000 miles per hour: day dissipates into night, night disappears into day.  Life hibernates in winter only to be reawakened in spring.  Nothing is stable— not even the ground beneath our feet.  Seas crash into shorelines, transforming mighty mountains into minuscule grains.  The land we stand on isn’t steady and unchanging— it’s composed of constantly shifting Tectonic plates.  We imagine life is static but if we observed a map of our Earth 250 million years ago, it would look entirely different from what it does today.

The only constant in life is change yet nothing terrifies us more than the idea that things never remain the same.  In love, we’re especially resistant to change.  The moment we sense a shift in our relationship, we become overcome by a paralyzing sense of dread.  Maybe after a few years together, our sex has become less imaginative and less frequent.  Maybe our calendars are no longer bursting with social activities and soirées and concerts and comedy shows and parties.  Maybe our love life seems like a pathetic exercise in monotony.

In the stable security of a long-term relationship, we yearn for the rapturous intoxication of young romance.  What happened to the all-night conversations, the giddy school girl excitement of getting a text message from our beloved?  What happened to the intense, impassioned, “I need to have you” sex? 

In her immeasurably insightful book Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh suggests it is natural for some of the fervor in a relationship to fade.  In much the same way that a flower wilts in winter, our romance will occasionally decay.  Nothing lasts, all is flux, all is change.  But there’s no need to worry.  Our love will be reborn in another form in the spring.  

Lindbergh spent nearly half a century married to aviator and American hero Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic alone.  In their 45 years together, Anne learned firsthand the trials and tribulations of being one half of a couple.  In a lyrical passage of uncommon insight and uncommon beauty, Morrow concedes that nothing— not even love— is everlasting:

“The ‘veritable life’ of our emotions and our relationships…is intermittent.  When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.  It is an impossibility.  It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.  We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.  We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb.  We are afraid it will never return.  We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity— in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even.  Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what is was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.  For relationships, too, must be like islands.  One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits— islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides.  One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”

Ultimately, life is a pendulum that swings between opposite poles: hope and despair, joy and sorrow.  The Lindberghs understood this fact perhaps more than any other couple.  In their 45 years together, they experienced agony and ecstasy, storms of adversity and moments of calm.  Called the “First Couple of the Skies,” Charles and Anne seemed to live a charmed life: over the course of their career, they flew tens of thousands of miles across four continents to explore transatlantic air routes.  Their work took them everywhere from the Orient to the Amazon jungle.  Both Charles and Anne were celebrated as heroes.

Despite their many triumphs, tragedy struck when their 20 month year old son, Charles, was kidnapped from his nursery and killed in the spring of 1932.  Besides having to cope with the unimaginable loss of their son, Charles and Anne had to endure the ensuing media frenzy and the paparazzi’s unremitting flashbulbs.

Much like life, our relationships pass through cycles.  The obsessive infatuation of a crush will eventually give way to steady companionship after a few years.  At times, the flames of passion will burn ferociously; at others, our desire will only be a few smoldering embers.  Over the course of a relationship, there will be affectionate nicknames and four-letter words, amorous whispers and  enraged screams, moments of domestic bliss and nights soaked in tears.  We must not glorify the honeymoon phase or fear our relationship changing as we get older.  Each phase of life, each phase of love has its own lessons to teach us.  As Morrow writes,

“Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”

Want more wisdom from the lovely Lindbergh?  Read the pioneering aviator on love’s many phases,  why we should seek solitude and why we should shed the shell of our ordinary lives and go to the beach.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Love’s Many Phases & How to Save a Relationship in Crisis

Human beings crave consistency.  We want our relationships, especially our romantic ones, to remain the same.  However, all things change.  Love goes through phases.  At different times, love waxes and wanes.

When we first fall in love, things are novel, exciting.  With the mere mention of our beloved’s name, our heart dashes, our stomach fills with butterflies.  In the beginning, the object of our adoration can do no wrong in our eyes.  Everything he says is endlessly captivating; we find his jokes hilarious, though they meander and he often doesn’t land the punchline.  We’re so in love that we can spend hours just staring into each other’s eyes.

But as days elapse into months and months elapse into years, our relationship inevitably becomes burdened by work and other responsibilities.  No longer are we two carefree, giddily-in-love twenty-somethings— we now have marriage, a mortgage, a baby.  We’re more likely to snap at our husband for forgetting to buy milk at the grocery store than stare at each other longingly.  Our conversations no longer contain hints of light-hearted flirtation and sexy bantering— they’re defined by practical, distinctly uninteresting topics like what to buy our nephew for his birthday and whose turn it is to fold the laundry.  Our relationship more closely resembles the relationship between business partners or roommates.

In her timeless treasure trove, Gift from the Sea, which also explained why we should seek out solitude and shed the shell of our ordinary lives and go to the beach, Anne Morrow Lindbergh reminds us all romantic relationships pass through such phases as certainly as night follows day.

The honeymoon phase— what Lindbergh calls the “double sunrise” phase— is pure bliss.  Because we’re not yet deadened and desensitized by habit, there’s still carnal connection, there’s still mystery, there’s still romance.

But when the flames of first love inevitably cool, we panic.  What— we wonder— happened to passion’s fiery flames?  What happened to the “spark” we had in the beginning of the relationship?  

But the fact is nothing is wrong with us if our relationship changes.  All things change: waves crash and recede, plants grow.  In much the same way that we only want to experience the flower-filled rapture of spring and avoid bleak, biting winters of the soul, we idealize the honeymoon and dread the moment we have to pack up our bags and come home.  But love is not the giddiness of a summer fling— it’s building a life with someone in the real world.  As Lindbergh writes, 

“It is true, of course, the original relationship is very beautiful.  Its self-enclosed perfection wears the freshness of a spring morning.  Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love, when two people stand as individuals, without past or future, facing each other.  One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution.  Like its parallel, physical passion, the early ecstatic stage of a relationship cannot continue always at the same pitch of intensity.  It moves to another phase of growth one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes summer after spring.”

Sometimes, however, there really is a problem.  Perhaps after decades together, we no longer make an effort to express our affection or spend quality time together.  Instead of visit the Van Gogh exhibit or make reservations at the French bistro, we spend our Saturday nights sitting next to each other on the coach, together but not truly together, as we mindlessly scroll through our phones.  In the rose-colored haze of nostalgia, we reminisce about the good old days when our lover surprised us with bouquets of tulips and couldn’t wait to chat over red wine and spaghetti bolognese when he came home.  

Bored of our passionless union, lonely and longing for connection, we might be tempted to seek excitement in an affair outside of our marriage.  After all, if the problem is our partner, the solution must be someone else.  Someone else will bother to plan a date every once in awhile.  Someone else will pamper us with flowers and thoughtful handwritten notes.  Someone else will occasionally listen instead of be endlessly engrossed by his phone.  

However, “someone else” is almost never the answer to our martial woes.  It’s futile to try to recapture the ecstasy of early love.  Even if we do find someone else who’s intelligent and interesting, our infatuation will eventually wear off.  At first, an affair can be sexy, stimulating: sneaking around to see each other, stealing clandestine kisses on our lunch break.  But after a few weeks or months, our furtive fling will be just as predictable as the marriage we so unsuccessfully tried to escape.

So what’s the solution?

Rather than have an affair, we should commit to rediscovering our sense of self.  Most often, a dissatisfaction with our marriage is a dissatisfaction with ourselves.  Despite the romantic notion that finding our Platonic soul mate will finally complete our incomplete souls, another person cannot save us.  Before we can be content in matrimony, we must be content with ourselves.  According to Lindbergh, women can find contentment by committing to their creativity and carving out time of their own away from the pressures of motherhood and domesticity:

“But neither woman nor man are likely to be fed by another relationship which seems easier because it is in an earlier stage.  Such a love affair cannot really bring back a sense of identity.  Certainly, one has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions.  But can one actually find oneself in someone else?  In someone else’s love?  Or even in the mirror someone else holds up for one?  I believe that true identity is found, as Eckhart once said, by ‘going into one’s own ground and knowing oneself.’  It is found in creative activity springing from within.  It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself.  One must lose one’s life to find it.  Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.  Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem— the neglected pure relationship.  Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship.”

Though we can’t entirely resurrect the fire of first love, we can rekindle some of the flames.  One easy way to restore some of the romance of the “double sunrise” stage is to go on vacation and step away from our ordinary lives and usual routines.  At home, there are a million and one distractions that interfere with intimacy: carpool, crying children, client calls, endless emails and meetings.  But in a cabin in the countryside or a cottage by the sea, we can finally focus on our partner.  Nothing revives love like a hotel room in a foreign city (As British philosopher Alain de Botton so insightfully observed, new settings can inspire us to see things in new ways).

However, a romantic getaway doesn’t always have to involve traveling thousands of miles away.  We can rescue our relationship in our own kitchens— not just in bungalows in Bora Bora or villas in Tuscany.  Sometimes a quiet breakfast over orange juice and banana bread muffins is all we need to feel reconnected.  As Lindbergh writes gracefully, 

“Husband and wife can and should go off on vacations alone and also on vacations alone together.  For if it is possible that woman can find herself by having a vacation alone, it is equally possible that the original relationship can sometimes be refound by having a vacation alone together.  Most married couples have felt the unexpected joy of one of these vacations.  How wonderful it was to leave the children, the house, the job, and all the obligations of daily life; to go out together, whether for a month or a weekend or even just a night in an inn by themselves.  How surprising it was to find the miracle of the sunrise repeated.  There was the sudden pleasure of having breakfast alone with the man one fell in love with.  Here at the small table, are only two people facing each other.  How the table at home has grown!  And how distracting it is, with four or five children, a telephone ringing in the hall, two or three school buses to catch, not to speak of the commuter’s train.  How all this separates one from one’s husband and clogs up the pure relationship.  But sitting at a table alone opposite each other, what is there to separate one?  Nothing but a coffee pot, corn muffins and marmalade.  A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Juno Dawson on Finding Love, Finding Yourself & Why No One’s Too Busy to Reply to a Fucking Text

What’s the secret to finding love?  Is it a convergence of  chance and fate?  Is it hard work or just dumb luck?  

Why are some people blessed enough to find the man of their dreams the first week of college when so many more of us have to wait what feels like eons until we find the right person for us?

If we complain about our doomed single fate to the happily-coupled, they’ll give us practical advice.  “Get on the dating apps!”  “Put yourself out there!”  

In the swipe-right age of Tinder and astonishingly in-depth compatibility tests, it seems like there’s no excuse for being single.  Of the millions of men at our finger tips, there has to be someone out there with whom we’re compatible.  

Despite the seemingly boundless sea of possible partners, we’ll never find love if we don’t first do the difficult work of finding ourselves.  In her tough-minded interview in Conversations on Love, author and transgender icon Juno Dawson suggests you can only discover long-lasting love after— as the old adage goes— you learn to love yourself.  After twenty-nine years of living as a man, Dawson made the courageous choice to transition.  Now as a woman, she has learned to embrace the truth of who she is, stop pretending in her relationships and ultimately create meaningful, authentic connections.  When asked how her relationship with her fiancé Max was different from her former failed relationships, she made an astute observation:

“What I would say is that this relationship isn’t necessarily different— I’m different.  There’s so much emotional literacy that goes into being with someone: instead of dramas, there are compromises.  Instead of tantrums and storming out, you learn how to read signals and when to back off and which hills to die on.  These are all things that are difficult to navigate without self-understanding.”

In the end, you are the common denominator in all your connections.  The quality of your relationships is directly proportional to your self-awareness.  You can find a handsome, intelligent, successful man who shares your love for Thai food and Otis Redding but— if you haven’t done the hard work on yourself— you’ll continue to encounter the same issues time and time again.

Say, for example, your first boyfriend cheated on you.  Your current boyfriend might be the most loyal partner on the planet, but if you’ve never taken the time to cope with that first betrayal, you’ll continue to have trust issues.  You might be so paranoid and distrustful that you snoop through your boyfriend’s phone.  You might pick fights with him for staying out too late at the bars because you’re convinced he (like all people of the male persuasion) is incapable of keeping his penis to himself.

The result?

Your unfounded suspicions and rampant insecurity cause such an irreparable rift in your relationship that your boyfriend breaks up with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke once said, “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.”  Being in a committed long-term relationship requires basic compatibility but it also requires patience, understanding, forgiveness, mercy, compassion.  Love demands we become the best person we can be.  For love to last, we have to possess the self-awareness to know and communicate our needs; the willingness to examine and improve upon our shortcomings; the self-confidence to not be overly jealous or possessive; the selflessness to occasionally sacrifice what we want for the sake of maintaining harmony.  We have to know when to bite our tongue, when to just listen and shake our head sympathetically, when to have a difficult conversation to maximize our chances of being heard and minimize misunderstanding (not right when our husband walks through the door or when either of us is sleep-deprived, hungry or grouchy). 

Though love is our most demanding work, it should— to some extent— be easy.  Yes, all couples encounter difficulties; however, we should never use the truism that “love is work” to rationalize staying in a tumultuous, dysfunctional relationship that is ultimately harmful to our well-being.  Love should be a source of joy— not torment and anxiety.  As Dawson writes with equal parts plainness and poetry:

“It’s like mixing paint: sometimes when you mix two people together you get a horrible color.  Some people do bring out the absolute worst colors in you and, if that’s the case, it’s the relationship that’s flawed, not you.  You’re not meant to lose sleep or cry over love.  You shouldn’t have to fight for it.  If it feels like a fight, don’t waste your time.”  

Before meeting her fiancé, Dawson— like most of us— suffered a string of shitty relationships.  After all the heartbreak, she learned one thing: have high standards for the person you’re with.  You should never have to beg for the bare minimum.  If a guy likes you, he’ll make the effort to make you feel loved and appreciated; he’ll shower you with attention; he’ll call when he says he’s going to.   (One is reminded of Justin Long’s iconic line in He’s Just Not That Into You: “If a guy treats you like he doesn’t give a shit,” he tells a slightly pathetic Ginnifer Goodwin, “he genuinely doesn’t give a shit.”)  In dating, there’s no excuse for someone to abuse/mistreat/neglect you.

Though this is obvious, nearly all of us have wasted precious tears crying over scumbags.  I can’t count how many irretrievable hours I’ve frittered away dissecting men’s poor behavior.  “Where is he?  Why hasn’t he reached out?” I’d wonder weepy and inconsolable after some jackass I was dating randomly decided to disappear.  How many weekends I’d spend, distracted and depressed, unable to enjoy myself!  How many sleepless nights I squandered overthinking and obsessing, worrying that some guy I was seeing was secretly seeing someone else!  After all the games, it’s a wonderful relief to be in a stable, long-term relationship with a supportive man who never makes me question his feelings and always directly expresses himself.

With humor and wisdom hard-won, Dawson reminds us dating doesn’t have to be a drama.  Love isn’t insomnia-ridden nights or wondering “will he or won’t he?”  It’s safety, security, and consistency:

“When [Max and I] met I was seething from a shitty relationship with an absolute time waster.  He made me into a crazy nightmare person who couldn’t sleep, because I didn’t know if he was going to reply to my messages for three days.  That’s an important lesson in love: no one is too busy to reply to a fucking text message!”

Need a sherpa to scale the Everest-like mountain of love?  Read Alain de Botton on idealization as the opposite of love, Natasha Lunn on love, loneliness & the torment of not knowing, Sarah Hepola on books as a source of connection, companionship & community, Dolly Alderton on friendship as a more satisfying, everlasting form of love and Emily Nagoski on the myth of “normalcy.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Emily Nagoski on the Myth of “Normalcy” & How Letting Go of Impossible Expectations Can Improve Your Sex Life

In our culture, a satisfying marriage equals good sex.  To have a fulfilling union— we’re told— we must have mind-blowing, multiple orgasm-inducing coitus.  Sex columnists inform us there’s a “normal” number of times “happy” couples have sex.

Yet most of us fall short of these expectations.  Compared to Samantha’s evermore scandalous sexcapades on Sex & the City and the glossy pages of Cosmopolitan, our erotic rendezvous seem shamefully tepid.  Usually after work, we’re not racing to hit the sheets with our husbands— we’re looking forward to dozing off with some NyQuil and heading to bed.  Our time in the bedroom isn’t an X-rated porno— it’s most often as routine as reciting a grocery list.  After the blissful honeymoon phase, our lovemaking becomes more and more mundane and less and less frequent.  We make less of an effort to seduce our partner; we no longer surprise them with racy lingerie or experiment.  Our most imaginative sex position is missionary.  There’s no more provocative dirty talk or tantalizing foreplay.  The majority of our conversations circulate around practical, business-like things: who’s going to get milk from the store, who’s going to pick up Sarah from her soccer game.

For many, this shift in our sex lives is a source of endless doubt and insecurity.  Have we— god forbid— become boring?  After twenty years of marriage, have we let the fire of our lovemaking fizzle out?  Have we lost the lust and longing of our younger days?  Is something irreparably wrong with us if we’re not red-hot with desire for our partner or having sex the recommended once a week?

In her paradigm-shifting interview in Conversations on Love, writer, researcher and sex educator Emily Nagoski debunks many of the myths surrounding sex and normalcy.  According to Nagoski, desire isn’t the most important thing in a relationship.  In fact, biologically, our bodies only want sex because it’s a way to form attachment.  In the early stages of a romance, we feel more carnal longing for our lover— not because we’re so head-over-heels or because they’re so attractive— but because we’re trying to solidify our union.  Our desire is directly proportional to the instability of a connection.  If, for example, we’re dating an emotionally unavailable guy who showers us with affection one minute only to forget to return our call for six days, we’ll lust after him because, from a biochemical perspective, we want to secure the connection.  Ironically, the more safe and secure we feel with someone, the less we want to have sex with them.

“This is at the core of why desire is bullshit,” Nagoski says.  A decline in desire does not spell the doom of a relationship.  Our libido naturally wanes once we’re in a committed, long-term marriage.

In our rose-colored culture, we’re obsessed with romance.  Jack & Rose.  Rick & Ilsa.  Romeo & Juliet.  We want passion and infatuation and drama.  We hunger after whirlwind wedding proposals and bold proclamations of devotion.  We think that if we “loved” our partner as much as Jack loved Rose, we’d be overcome with all-consuming, uncontrollable longing.  Our midnight romps— we imagine— should be as fervent and frenzied as their steamy sex scene.  

When our sex lives aren’t as explosive as the ones we see on the silver screen, we feel like failures.  Why, we worry, don’t we ever just want to rip our partner’s clothes off?  Why do we so rarely feel filthy, primal hunger?

Surely, there’s something wrong with us.  

For Nagoski, the only thing wrong is our culture.  Though movies portray love as a heady, passionate affair, in real life, we rarely feel spontaneous desire.  After several years with the same partner, we seldom want sex out of nowhere; we feel what Nagoski calls responsive desire— we want sex in response to the act itself.  It’s like writing: when we first sit down at our desks for the day, we’re almost never in the “mood” to write.  However, the act of writing inspires us to write one sentence after another (“Writing will create the mood,” the phenomenally prolific Joyce Carol Oates once assured blocked writers.)

In the same way, sex creates desire.  We might not be in the “mood” when our husband first longingly looks into our eyes, but— if we’re open— his amorous kisses and playful flirtations will often whet our sexual appetite.  If we want to sustain a relationship over the long haul, Nagoski suggests, we need to take a decidedly unromantic approach to sex.  Rather than wait until we’re magically “in the mood,” we must make the mood: light some candles, pour a few glasses of red wine, wear our raciest lingerie to bed.  The reality is our desire won’t always be a blazing flame— sometimes it will only be a few glowing embers.  But love means reaching for our partner time and time again and trying to fan the fire.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Dolly Alderton on Friendship as a More Satisfying, Everlasting Form of Love & How Friendship Metamorphoses

When we’re young, friendships are romantic, intense, intimate.  We see our friends nearly every day.  Usually, they’re are at most a few blocks (if not a few doors) away.  Because our most pressing responsibility is turning in our term paper by 5 o’ clock on Friday, we have plenty of time to see each other.  Weekends overflow with mimosa brunches, spontaneous day trips, Saturdays in wine country.  In our twenties, our pals are there to help us weather life’s catastrophes and crises.

In our thirties, things change: people get married, have children, move several cities (or states) away.  Rather than see each other every day, we see each other only occasionally.  Burdened with the responsibility of working a full-time job and raising a family, we might only see our closest confidante once every few months instead of nearly every day.

In her poignant interview “The Beauty of Vulnerability in Friendship,” one of many profound pieces from Natasha Lunn’s Conversations on Love, millennial memoirist Dolly Alderton explores this at times heart-wrenchingly painful change.  In an insightful moment, Alderton explains why it becomes harder to be honest in friendship:

“…you spend your twenties figuring out who you are, and so by the time you’ve carved out an identity you share less with each other, because the stakes are higher.  I think that’s true, you do spend your twenties trying to work out what your job is, what your politics are, what part of the world you want to live in; and you do that with a band of brothers and sisters.  You create an identity patchwork in a group, as well as on your own.  Then when you get to your thirties, you have to declare who you are in a permanent way.  It’s either, ‘I’m someone who is going to live in the suburbs’ or ‘I want to be a stay-at-home mother’ or ‘I want to retrain and start a new career.’  Your identity hardens.  You have to defend this edifice of who you are, because it’s too late in the game to change it.  One you declare that, it can feel more dangerous to say, ‘I don’t know if I should have married that man’ or ‘I don’t know if my job makes me happy.’  To admit that in an authentic, vulnerable connection with someone close to you is scary in a way that it’s not in your twenties, when everything is in flux.  For all those reasons, letting people in and allowing yourself to be unsure or vulnerable becomes harder.  It’s more of a potential threat.”

In our thirties, lives diverge in several different directions: many buy houses, settle down, have kids.  If our friends choose one path and we choose another, it’s hard not to feel abandoned.  Why isn’t our married pal making more of an effort to stay connected?  Sure, she just had a baby, but she can’t spare 5 fucking minutes to return our call?  Is she really so preoccupied with the all-so-important, all-so-consuming task of changing diapers that she can’t reach out?

It’s heartbreaking when we see our close friends, who were once starring characters in the story of our lives, fade into the background.  Rather than play one of the lead roles, they become minor characters who show up every few episodes.

In college, our best friend knew everything about us: they understood the dance move that signaled we were blacked out drunk; they could decipher the hidden meaning behind our text messages (ellipses meant we were upset about something/”I’m fine” translated to mean “I’m verging on a mental breakdown…come over with Cruel Intentions and some Haagen Dazs”). 

10 years later and our best friends no longer know the most basic facts about us.  When we do reconnect, we have to tell them what’s going on in our lives— they’re not there to witness them themselves.

At first, this shift in our relationships is devastating.  As she transitioned to her thirties, Alderton found herself missing her friends, who were once her surrogate family.  She yearned for the simpler days when she could spontaneously call one of the gals and meet up for martinis.  Now her former partners in crime were too busy juggling mortgage payments and engagement rings.  If she wanted to hang out, they had to make plans months in advance.  She missed their former intimacy.  Though her twenties was a turbulent period in her life, her friendships were marked by an effortlessness and ease.  Then her life was manicures and margaritas; now it was unanswered text messages and the blaring silence of the phone not ringing.

Though Alderton initially struggled to cope with the shifting topography of her friendships, she eventually learned to navigate the terrain.  Part of growing older, she realized, is coming to terms with how friendships change.  Yes, her and her friends might not see each other as often and yes, many of her friends with spouses and children might occasionally forget to return a text message, but that didn’t mean their bond was any less significant:

“…because your twenties are a fraught time, you spend a decade adjusting to the fact that you’re parentless.  I spent those years creating a surrogate family within my friendships, and that meant that I could go out and have a wild, risky and exciting time, both creatively and romantically, because I always had that unit to return to.

Now I’m more relaxed about how often friends and I speak or meet up, or how much time they spend with their partner as opposed to me.  I’ve sunk into the safe, precious solidness of their love for me, and I know that, although it will take work, it is also a love that will be there forever.  True friendship is about taking it easy on each other, knowing that life has tides that take you to various places, and that you’ll find a way back to each other at different points.”

Alain de Botton once said our lives are defined by two great love stories: the quest for romantic love and the quest for love from the world.  I’d argue our lives our defined by yet another story: the quest for friendship, what the ancient Greeks called philia and regarded as the highest form of love.  Though our culture glorifies romantic love, in many ways, the love between platonic pals is more long-lasting and far less fraught.  Lovers come and go— lifelong friends take up permanent residence in our hearts.  So though our friends might momentarily sail out to sea and stray far from shore, if they’re true friends, they’ll always return to port.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Sarah Hepola on Books as a Source of Community, Companionship & Connection

Though “love” is an expansive word containing a multitude of meanings, most of us have a rather restricted definition of the term.  Love, we believe, is limited to wedding bands and chocolate-covered strawberries, candy hearts and Valentine’s Day cards.  Rather than celebrate love in all its fathomless forms, we tend to glorify romantic love.  Indeed, our monomaniac obsession dominates films and top 40 music charts.

Despite our cultural fixation with eros, there are many perhaps more important and enduring types of love.  In her gorgeous, glorious book Conversations on Love, generous spirit Natasha Lunn celebrates reading (and writing) as one as of the purest, most perfect expressions of love.  If love is— as Lunn suggests— “a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen,” nowhere can we find more love than in the shelves of a local library.

Though as human beings, we fundamentally want connection, companionship, and community, we’re more lonely than ever before.  We’re not getting married, we’re having less sex, and studies show we have fewer close confidantes.  Books offer the intimacy we lack in the alienated modern world.  What’s wonderful about books— and films and paintings and poems— is they connect us with the finest minds from centuries and civilizations ago.  With the turn of a page, a lonesome 21st century reader can find a friend in Tolstoy or Kafka, Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  

Like a close friend who comforts us during dark nights of the soul, a good book can cheer and console.  Books remind us we’re not alone in our anxiety and neurosis, our despair and sorrow.  Losing ourselves in the world of another, we realize our feelings belong to the whole of the human race— not us alone.  Books are rafts we can cling to when life’s thunder-stricken storms leave us stranded far from shore.

In her insightful interview from Conversations on Love, unflinchingly honest memoirist Sarah Hepola suggests reading can be an inexhaustible source of love.  Though she has yet to meet someone in her 40s, her life isn’t without a love story: she has the love of family and friends and, most of all, of books and writing.

Poet J.D. McClatchy once observed that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”  Sadly, most of us overlook the simple pleasures and little delights our lives bring.  The first cup of coffee in the morning.  A bouquet of tulips.  The fact that nearly every day we possess the freedom to do whatever we want.  Instead of notice the magical and miraculous, we focus on what we don’t have, what we have yet to achieve, why who we are and what we’ve accomplished isn’t good enough.  Our habit is to stumble mindlessly, mechanically.  Our natural state is discontent, dissatisfaction, craving.  But to be happy, we must shift our perspective and appreciate our bountiful blessings.  As Hepola writes so beautifully, 

“As humans we have a default setting that’s cranky and lazy and self-interested and slothful.  The people that I see that live good, meaningful lives have rigorous exercises to push back against that setting, whether through prayer, meditation, gratitude journals or running.  We’re creatures of wanting, but also of consciousness.  So the way that we can push back on longing is to pay attention to what we have.  I can see the fact that I live in a house alone as a prison sentence.  Or, like this morning, I can wake up and spend time with my beautiful cat and feel so grateful to be alive in this world.”

When Hepola feels lonely or self-pitying, she finds company in her library.  For her, reading is a passionate love affair, a marriage of two like-minded souls.  The pages of a book are a one-of-a-kind space where two people— of different genders, of different races, of different ages, of different sexual orientations, of different cultures— can infiltrate the walls of “us” vs “them” and find commonalities where there seem to be none.  In those magical moments when a book expresses exactly something she’s seen or heard or thought or felt, she remembers her interconnectedness with all of humanity and feels less alone: 

“[Reading] is an emotional realignment, like somebody’s cracked my spine.  If I get lonely, I reach for those pieces of writing that feed the soul.  That can lead you back to the best in yourself, or articulate the things that you can’t find words for.  When you stumble on something you didn’t know that somebody else felt too, you think, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one.  That is a falling in love— it’s the self recognized in someone else.  A union of souls.”

When asked Lunn’s final question— “what do you wish you’d known about love”— Hepola responds:

“That the love of a partnership can be an incredibly important and transforming experience, but only one of many important and transforming experiences…I think that the search for love, as I understand a lot of my life and my work to be, is also the search to see that I already have it.”

For more warm-hearted wisdom on the love, read Natasha Lunn on love, loneliness & the torment of not knowing, Alain de Botton on idealization as the opposite of love & the manifold miraculous ways to live this life, Juno Dawson on having high standards while dating, and Emily Nagoski on the myth of “normalcy” & how letting go of impossible expectations can improve your sex life.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Natasha Lunn on Love, Loneliness & the Torment of Not Knowing

After you’ve broken up with someone, your calendar transforms into a terrifying abyss.  Without a significant other, weekends becomes an agony of loneliness.  While you used to look forward to the weekend, overflowing as it was with adventure and excitement— mimosa brunches and flea markets and seaside picnics and romantic dinners and day trips — after a breakup, Friday thru Sunday feels as interminable as a root canal at the dentist.  As Elena Ferrante once said, an empty day is a “noose to hang yourself with.”

The weekend feels especially lonely if most of your friends are in serious long-term relationships. While your married friends are busy with soccer games and children’s birthday parties, you have too many hours and too little to fill them.

In her lovely essay “The Unbearable Unknown,” one of many insightful pieces from Conversations on Love, wise, warm-hearted writer Natasha Lunn reflects on the sometimes intolerable loneliness of being single.  As a single twenty-something, Lunn always made an effort to visit a cafe on Sunday mornings to combat weekend loneliness.  Though she was still alone, she felt comforted by the grinding of coffee beans and murmur of strangers’ conversations.  On weekends like these, empty hours beckoned with possibility: she could read a novel, she could take a yoga class, she could go on a hike, she could visit an art gallery, she could take the tube to the city.  Yet none of these things sounded appealing without someone to do them with.  “I resented time for underlining my loneliness,” she writes, “and I resented myself for wasting it.”

What’s the most difficult thing about the quest for love?  Lunn argues it’s the torment of not knowing whether you’ll ever find it: 

“The obvious story was that I was unhappy being single.  Beneath that, a private fear that I always would be; and worse, an anxiety born from not knowing either way.  The simple fact of the unknown was one I could not resist wrestling with.  Like hauling a heavy suitcase up the stairs at a station, I imagined it would be easier if there were an endpoint in sight, because when you see the top of the station stairs or the finishing line of a run, it’s easy to dig deep for an extra bit of strength to get there.  What I found tiring about looking for a romantic relationship was that there was no way of knowing for certain if there would ever be an end point.  I would tell friends, ‘I don’t mind if I don’t meet anyone for another ten years, I just want to know that it will happen one day.'”

Unfortunately, uncertainty is a fact of our existence.  We can never know if a meteor will strike Earth, if Europe will erupt in world war, if the stock market will crash or if human civilization will obliterate itself in the next hundred years.  We can never know how long we’ll live or when we’ll die; we can never be completely assured that our choices were “right.”  Did we make the right decision when we walked away from our tumultuous ten-year marriage?  when we quit our office job to study French cooking in Provence?  Though this “not knowing” is often torturous, it’s what fundamentally unites as humans.  As Lunn so beautifully writes, 

“Unless you believe in psychics, all of us will face some measure of this uncertainty— it’s part and parcel of existence.  Maybe there is comfort in knowing that, whatever we have or don’t have compared to each other, we share this same vulnerability to randomness.”

The unknown is a terrifying void, a fathomless, frightening darkness.  However, it can also shine with potential and possibility.  Not knowing when (or if) she’ll ever find a partner, Lunn finds herself suspended between two possible futures: how will her story end?  She isn’t sure but she knows the experience of being single will teach her invaluable lessons in resilience and self-reliance: 

“Maybe not having something you want wakes you up to another kind of romance.  And when life forces you to live in the intensity of the unknown, between two possible futures, it’s also a chance to develop the inner resources and love that will serve you well in the years ahead.”

In her pursuit of romantic love, Lunn forgets a crucial fact: love can take many forms.  Though she doesn’t have a partner, her life never lacks love.  In fact, her so-called “lonely” life already overflows with many of the things she wants: connection, companionship, passion, tenderness, intimacy, physical touch.

Most of us imagine we’ll be happy when we attain “x”: when we buy a house, when we get married, when we land the promotion.  Happiness, we contend, exists in the future— not this moment.  Lunn is no exception.  Throughout her single years, she believes the equation for happiness looks something like this: happily ever after = finding the “one” to share her life with.  The result?  She misses boundless opportunities for contentment in the present.  Love, she soon realizes, isn’t going to gallop into her life as a charming prince— it’s right here, right now in her life as it’s currently constituted:

“[I was so] focused…on receiving love instead of giving it; on waiting for it, instead of building it.  Many of the things I was looking for a relationship to provide— physical company; connection; the opportunity to be a mother— were actually available to me without one.  And yet, at the time, I could not see the role I played in my own loneliness.”

Rather than bemoan her unfortunate fate, Lunn decides to write a more empowering story about her singledom.  She doesn’t have to be a lonely cat-lady spinster who dies alone under mounds of decades-old newspapers— she already has the love she desires.  In the end, romantic love is only one piece of the puzzle: the good life consists of the unbreakable bond of family, the miracle of friendship, the unparalleled feeling of fulfillment upon reaching a long-awaited goal, the magic and marvels of small moments.

After what feels like an endless stretch of singledom, Lunn eventually does get her “happily ever after.”  In a contemplative moment, she imagines looking through the space/time continuum at her former self, the sad, lonely girl at the cafe who worried she’d never find a partner:

“Part of me wants to…tell her…that one day she will sit at the exact same table, eating pancakes with a primary schoolteacher she’s been seeing recently who she’ll grow to love.  And that, even then, even though that will be wonderful, it will only be one of many memorable mornings she will spend in that cafe.  There will be the coffee with a new friend who will become a great love; the one time she will come there to grieve; the breakfast she will share with her brother in the sunshine when they first to decide to move into a flat together round the corner.  And then all the Sunday mornings she will come there on her own, to write this book, to understand— finally— the difference between loneliness and solitude, and the romance of trying to find meaning in the latter.  But perhaps I would not tell her, even if I could, because to do so would be to steal the strange, complicated, sometimes tiring gifts of the unknown.  The thrill of all the places she has yet to go, all the faces she has yet to know.

Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence.  By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that life beautiful.  And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.”

Want more thought-provoking and heartfelt essays from Conversations on Love?  Read Alain de Botton on idealization as the opposite of love & the manifold miraculous ways to live this life, Sarah Hepola on books as a source of community, companionship & connection, Juno Dawson on having high standards in dating, and Emily Nagoski on the myth of “normalcy” & how letting go of impossible expectations can improve your sex life.

 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Alain de Botton on Idealization as the Opposite of Love & the Manifold Miraculous Ways to Live this Life

What is love?  Though we often imagine love is restricted to the romantic arena, there are many kinds of love: there’s the helpless obsession a young girl has for her first crush; the tender, unconditional love a parent has for their child; the deep intimacy shared between a brother and sister; the miraculous mutual understanding of friends who’ve known each other since they were 12.

Love can be romantic, platonic, erotic, familial.  It can last a single night or persist over a lifetime.  It can be as red-hot as an affair in Paris or as routine as folding laundry, as fun and frivolous as flirting or as serious as cosigning a mortgage, as giddy as a middle school crush or as steady as a 25 year marriage.  As Cheryl Strayed so beautifully said, love “can be light as the hug we give a friend or as heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children.”

Love is easy and effortless and hard and steep; love is rapture and torment; love is ecstasy and agony.  Love is everything and nothing.  Love is both in the small moments and grand gestures, the open doors and “good morning” text messages, the string quartets and bouquets of flowers.  Love touches our tenderest branches and shakes us to our very core.  

In her lovely, large-hearted book Conversations on Love, Natasha Lunn explores this mysterious element of the human experience.  Determined to shed light on this oft-uttered, but often misunderstood concept, Lunn asks artists and writers, philosophers and psychologists, sex experts and advice columnists to share their experiences.  Her conversations focus on 3 central questions: how do we find love?  how do we sustain love?  how do we recover when we lose it?  Part personal memoir, part reportage, Conversations on Love features interviews with wise, wonderful minds along with Lunn’s own musings and meditations.

One of my favorite chapters comes from Britain’s beloved philosopher of love Alain de Botton, whose work I cherish and write of often.  Botton, who himself has written extensively on the subject, argues the trouble with love is we romanticize it: we think our significant other should be our soul mate, a divine, consummate creature— not an ordinary mortal with difficult flaws and displeasing habits.  

With the cynicism that is characteristic of his British heritage, Botton suggests we’d be better off if we adopted a more realistic attitude and patterned our romantic relationships after the less rose-tinted love between children and parents: 

“One of the best models of love is how parents love their children.  At the same time, sometimes they don’t like them— they get bored of them, they think they’re awful, they want a break from them.  And all those things go on in the love that an adult might have for another, too; sometimes we’re fed up and aware of someone’s glaring faults, but still very much on their side.  They annoy us and we still love them.”

Botton defines love not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it is not.  Despite the romanticized portrayals of love in cheesy rom-coms and sappy Hallmark cards, love is not idealization— it’s seeing (and accepting) someone for who they truly are.  As Botton observes, 

“No one really wants to be idealized— we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments.  So to be on the receiving end of somebody’s idealizing feelings can be alienating.  It looks like we’re being seen and admired like never before, but actually, many important parts of us are being forgotten.”

For those of us who have yet to find a life partner, how do we hold on to hope, especially when our society expects us to “date in our twenties, find the ideal partner by twenty-eight, and have children by thirty one”?  Botton maintains we must let go of timelines and relinquish control.

Sometimes we’ll love someone and they won’t love us back.

Sometimes we’ll endure countless dull conversations in dimly-lit bars and go home alone to an empty bed.

Sometimes we’ll sign up for every dating app and go on date after date after date and still not find someone.

Our fates are a convergence of choice and chance.  The idea that we’re masters of our fates is a reassuring but ultimately untrue myth.  We can’t control if we’ll meet someone— or when.  We can only create a Tinder profile and put ourselves out there again and again.

No matter what our society says, there are no “right” partners, no “right” choices, no “right” ways to live.  We can follow the well-trodden road— get married, have children, buy a house with a white picket fence— or forge our own path.  We can find the love of our lives in college or when we’re 77.  We can choose to commit to one person or stay single.  We can get married in a poofy princess dress in a formal ceremony or barefoot on a Brazilian beach in front of only a few people.  Our dream life can contain toothaches and play dates and Play-Doh or world travel and boundless freedom.  When asked what he’d wished he’d known about finding love, Botton says:

“To be calmer about the whole process.  And that things would work out or they wouldn’t, and even then, that would be fine too.  This black and white model of ‘it’s got to be like this and then it will be perfect’ just doesn’t work.  It doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger.  So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it’s likely to be wrong.  In fact, there are many ways of living this life.”

When a relationship ends, we often find it difficult to move on because we imagine the life we could’ve had is infinitely better than our life as it actually is.  We’re haunted by the phantom of our other possible existence.  What if we could have actually worked things out?  What if I/they finally changed?  What if we suddenly reconciled all our issues and fundamental incompatibilities: our dissimilar taste in movies, our contrasting views on marriage, our completely opposite political beliefs?  What if we finally moved to our dream city and built our own life in our own house?

In a poetic, profound passage, Lunn suggests it’s unproductive to romanticize what could have been.  Would we be happy if we didn’t end our relationship?  Perhaps, but that doesn’t negate the possibility for happiness in our lives as they’re currently constituted.  Every choice involves gain and loss.  If we chose the other path, our lives wouldn’t necessarily be better— just different.  As Lunn writes, 

“Alain made me see the situation of being alone not as an unflattering reflection of my ‘less impressive sides,’ but as an unimaginative story I was telling about connection.

All the times I had been casually rejected, I realize now were either future blessings or facts to be accepted, rather than resisted.  I had wasted energy trying to keep these relationships afloat; there was no need to waste more asking why someone didn’t love me, what I could have done differently to change the outcome.  The only outcome was the one that happened.  And as Alain pointed out, ‘There’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger.’  If I’d stayed with someone I’d met in my early twenties, moved to the seaside, got a dog and had a baby at thirty, there would have been wonderful and mundane chapters to that story, just as there were wonderful and mundane chapters to the life I lived in those years instead.  For every depressing date, there was a precious friendship formed.  For every lonely Sunday, a new ambition discovered.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Alain de Botton on Why We Should Set Boundaries

What is a boundary?  We hear the word all the time in psychology but few of us truly understand its meaning.  Boundaries are standards for how we expect to be treated.  Setting a boundary means clearly and confidently communicating what we need to feel happy and respected.  At home, setting a boundary might look like a parent telling their child that— after a quick snack of apple slices and peanut butter— it’s time to do their homework.  At work, setting a boundary might mean saying a strong, definitive “no” to our boundary-less boss.  In love, it might mean telling our significant other that— though we appreciate how close they are with our sister— we felt it was inappropriate to reveal so much intimate information about our latest fight with her.

If someone crosses our boundaries, there are consequences for their behavior.  Say, for example, we catch our child playing Fortnite instead of doing their homework.  “I don’t want to do long division!” they might whine as we take out their textbooks and turn off their computers.  A consequence might be banning them from video games for the rest of the week or limiting their screen time for the year.  Enforcing a consequence isn’t about retribution or punishment— it’s about teaching people how we want to be treated.  By disciplining our child in this instance, we’re sending a message: we will not tolerate tantrums or misbehavior and expect to be respected.

Though boundaries are essential to our happiness, most of us haven’t been taught how to set limits.  In the modern era, we’re more educated than almost any other generation: we can use the Pythagorean theorem to identify the length of a triangle’s sides, we can examine the themes of Anna Karenina, we can recite the fourteen points of the Treaty of Versailles.  Yet we remain woefully ignorant of crucial life skills such as how to understand ourselves, how to deal with depression, and how to express our true feelings and remain loving and respectful during a fight.

To remedy this serious shortcoming of our education, Alain de Botton, whose books I write of often, founded the School of Life, a global organization dedicated to developing emotional intelligence.  In the latest addition to the series, A More Exciting Life, Botton explores why we don’t set boundaries— and why we absolutely have to.

So why are so many of us hesitant to utter a firm and forceful “no”?

As with most psychological topics, the answer lies in our childhood.  According to Botton, those who have trouble setting boundaries in adulthood were not allowed to assert themselves as children.  Perhaps an alcoholic father didn’t much care if he had to pick us up from school or a mother with a violent streak and explosive temper didn’t allow us to oppose her.  Maybe our dad hit us when we refused to get him another beer.  Maybe when we asked our mother why she didn’t help us with our homework after school like Susie’s mom, she got mad, called us an ungrateful brat and sent us to our room.  Maybe when we asked our sisters to stop calling us names, they refused.  “You’re too sensitive,” they’d say, “It’s just a joke.”  Saying “no” to an abusive or otherwise dysfunctional family member meant being physically, emotionally, or psychologically abused.

Our formative years are the blueprint for adulthood.  Because setting boundaries in our past often led to conflict, we avoid expressing our needs as adults.  We’re scared that if we set a limit with someone, they’ll be angry, maybe even hate us.  Say, for instance, our partner invites us to a movie after work.  Though we want to decline his invitation because we’re exhausted, we go because we’re afraid a gentle, politely-phrased, perfectly-poised “no” will cause friction in the relationship.  “What if,” we worry, “he gets mad at us?”  “What if he wants to break up?”  

Though it seems ridiculous to think someone would break up over something so stupid, the boundary-less person is this irrationally afraid of confrontation.  Because of their upbringing, they fear that setting a boundary will lead to dismissal, rejection, or abandonment.  They were taught that being a good girl or boy meant obeying Mom and Dad and putting other people before themselves.  If they do find the courage to deliver a diplomatic but decisive “no,” they feel a terrible sense of guilt.  After all, who are they to assert themselves?  

Despite these qualms, we can set a boundary and still be kind, selfless, and good.  A boundary isn’t a cruel, heartless “no” to someone else— it’s an affirmative “yes” to ourselves.  We decline our partner’s movie invitation, not because we want to hurt his feelings or because we don’t love or value him, but because we’re tired from a long week of work and would much rather be luxuriating with a good book in bed.  We say no to our boss’s request to come in on a Saturday, not because we’re lazy and don’t take our career seriously, but because we deserve rest and value our time with friends and family.

Regardless of what we’ve been taught, we have a right to have our own needs and wants.  As Botton would say, “we are not a piece of helpless flotsam on the river of others’ wishes.”  Rather than ride the currents of other people’s preferences and opinions, we must remember we are our own ships: we can use our rudders to change course and steer us in our desired direction.  Drifting aimlessly and following any wind doesn’t make us happier or promise conflict-free relationships— it only leads to exasperation and bitterness.  Imagine you say “yes” when your friend invites you to a rowdy New Year’s Eve party though you’ve been dreaming of having a quiet evening in.  Do you take pleasure in the rollicking revelry of the blaring party horns and confetti?  No, you spend the seemingly endless evening simmering with resentment and secretly hating your friend.  And therein lies the irony: by making other people happy, we often make ourselves miserable.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Alain de Botton on How to Argue More Honestly

There are several stages of a fight.  In the first stage, we present our perspective with logic and rationality.  Much like a lawyer, we marshal evidence to support our case.  For example, if we find our husband guilty because he forgot to pick up our son from soccer practice, we’ll call witnesses to the stand, present proof of our claims.  Exhibit A: we left a note in bright bold letters on the family calendar which clearly said “Dad picks up James from practice @ 4:30.”  Exhibit B: we even texted to remind him 2 hours before.

At this point, our husband will respond with a rebuttal.  “But you usually pick him on Thursdays,” he might mutter in an attempt to defend himself.  Or he might deflect and simply say, “He just had to walk home.  What’s the big deal?”

Now we arrive at the fight’s more explosive second stage: confrontation.  When our partner refuses to acknowledge the indisputable logic of our case, things usually devolve into an argument.  The more our husband refuses to see our perspective, the more we get angry and vindictive.  We might exploit each other’s insecurities, use our partner’s self-doubts as ammunition.  Soon the civility of the courtroom gives way to a brutal kind of warfare.  We scream, we shout, we slam doors.  We call each other horrible, unforgivable names like “asshole” and “bitch” and “cunt” and “whore.”  We regard our significant other— not as someone we’ve devoted our life to— but as a hostile enemy to be overpowered.  At times like these, it can feel impossible to leave the battleground and actually talk like two people who love each other.

In his endlessly enlightening A More Exciting Life, Alain de Botton suggests if we ever want to reconcile and reach an understanding, we have to be courageous enough to say what we truly mean.  Ultimately, every argument has two layers: the surface and the substratum beneath.  At the surface, a quarrel is usually about petty things: we might battle about age-old resentments (the fact that we stayed in our home town for our husbands though we’ve always yearned to move to a new city) or squabble about sex (why we’re not having any).  We might bicker about how our wife never hangs her coat in the closet or how our husband is always 20 minutes late.  We might squander our Saturdays quarreling about dirty laundry and PG&E.

However, these things only symbolize the more serious issues lurking beneath.  We’re bickering so bitterly about the coat our wife leaves out— not because we actually think she’s an inconsiderate slob or because we’re such neat freaks that we can’t stand the sight of a single coat strewn across the sofa— but because her refusal sends us one heartbreaking message: you don’t value me.

In an argument, we only want one thing from our partner: reassurance.  Though we hurl grenades of bitter accusations and hurtful names, we don’t hate our partner or want to “win” exactly— we want them to remind us that we do matter, that we are important to them.  We want to be acknowledged, heard, seen.  We bring up the fact that we remained in our hometown and sacrificed our dream of living in the city because we worry our relationship lacks reciprocity: that our partner loves us less than we love them.  Will our partner ever make such a sacrifice for us?  Or will the reminder of our relationship require us to compromise who we are and what we truly want?  Behind our indignation lies insecurity.  

We lash out angrily at our partners when they don’t want to have sex— not because we’re selfish, sex-obsessed nymphomaniacs— but because we feel hurt and rejected.  Do our partners no longer find us attractive?  Though we never admit it, their lack of interest in sex makes us worry that we’re unlovable and repulsive.

We get irrepressibly irritated when our husband is (yet again) late for an event— not because being 20 minutes late to our daughter’s choir performance makes much difference— but because his perpetual lack of punctuality communicates a lack of respect.  If our husband loved us, we think, he’d value our time.  He knows how much we despise tardiness.  Why can’t he just make an effort to leave a few minutes early?  Is it really that hard to get dressed and out the door?  to account for traffic and parking?  The fact that he continues to do something that upsets us just shows how little he cares for our feelings.

If we are to become better at fighting, we have to fight more honestly.  Rather than remain at the surface and squabble about dirty laundry and PG&E, we should communicate what is genuinely bothering us.  Instead of make a bitchy comment when our husband leaves his dirty boxers on the bathroom floor, we can say what really ails us: “When you leave your boxers on the floor after I’ve asked you to put them away, I feel unheard and unseen.”  

Why is it so hard to communicate in this way?  Why— rather than simply demonstrate emotional maturity and express how we feel— do we resort to schoolyard antics like tantrums and name-calling?  Botton argues that many of us avoid expressing our feelings because doing so requires a vulnerability we find terrifying.  To say “I miss you”/”You hurt me” is to essentially admit that our partner has the power to hurt us profoundly.  The idea that we so completely depend on another human being, that— with a few cruel words— our lovers can shatter our hearts and irreparably damage our dignity— is petrifying.  Therefore, when our partner hurts us in some way, our first impulse is to go on the defensive.  The moment we feel attacked, we counterattack; we fortify our walls and strengthen our fortresses.  But as Botton so eloquently expresses, “in love we will be much safer (that is, much more likely to be a recipient of affection and atonement) if we manage calmly to reveal our wound to its (usually unwitting) perpetrator.  The best response is not to make ourselves more impregnable, but to dare to be a little less defended.”