Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible. Will you upgrade to support the work I do here every week? It’s only $6 a month. (Or $5 a month with an annual subscription.) Paid subscribers get full access to my weekend roundups, as well as a discount on Dire Straights, my new podcast with Amanda Montei. Nothing to sayExcept a few thoughts on monogamy, intimacy, and the difference between being wanted and being seen—and the possibility of having both at once.
I’m sitting here by the window in my living room—the world outside is gray and misting—and I’m feeling like I’m on a boat at sea. Not in the feeling adrift sense, exactly, although there is so much going on in the world that does make that metaphor feel appropriate. In this moment, though, it’s a cozy at-sea feeling. As I write this, the thought in my head is: I have nothing to say. My brain feels dehydrated from so many recent mental sprints. But that fog—its impermeability—feels affirming somehow. Sit in the fog! Just sit in the fog. C. just left for his office, which he has started to do once a week. I’ve been doing this thing that I find funny but that I’m sure is cringe-inducing to read about: As he’s leaving, I pretend to howl like a dog with separation anxiety. It’s a joke, kind of. That is the paradox of cohabitation, parenthood, and domesticity—the way that closeness, habit, and constancy can be both suffocating and sustaining. I wanna run away—but don’t leave me! We had a cheeky little back-and-forth this morning. C. was feeling himself. He put a nice dark blue sweater on and was checking himself out in the mirror a little bit. I was razzing him about getting ready to be witnessed by the women on BART. He has done similar to me. We have found lately that there can be a thrill in acknowledging these forbidden truths: You might be attracted to other people. Other people might be attracted to you. It’s so silly and obvious when you put it like that, but it’s forbidden nonetheless. The thrill comes from telling the truth—being allowed to be your human desiring self—but also that heady mix of danger and jealousy. Esther Perel has this line about the “shadow of the third” in monogamy—someone or something outside that injects energy into the relationship, whether it’s an attractive stranger or a compelling hobby. She calls it “the fulcrum on which a couple balances.” The third is the guy at the pizza place who kept checking me out during our family dinner—and who has been brought up more than once in the weeks since as an inside joke and an aphrodisiac. This is a common dynamic and also—perhaps!—something especially alive for me, given that I wrote a book literally titled Want Me. Anyway, C. got ready to leave in his nice blue sweater, grooming his brand-new beard. Meanwhile, I’m wearing a t-shirt from my favorite bookstore that reads, “All my friends are books.” There’s a drawing of a person holding hands with a circle of anthropomorphized books. The shirt is worn and ragged with holes in it but I won’t throw it away. My pajama pants legs are inexplicable pushed halfway up my calves. “Well,” I said, addressing the aforementioned threat of women on BART, “I can say for a fact that this is one-of-a-kind.” I gestured to the whole of me, ragged shirt and all. The other day, I was wearing something similarly unbothered, my hair undone and a wild mess. C. was talking about my public self versus my private self, the way I button up publicly and unbutton at home. I think he was riffing off the fact that I’d organized a night out at a local karaoke bar with friends but only very reluctantly got on the mic myself; meanwhile, I belt songs at the top of my lungs every night at home while doing the dishes. “It’s like how you go out and do your style-y thing but this is so essentially you,” he said, gesturing toward the outfit, the hair. I complain sometimes about the hair. When I wear it down, as I mostly only do at home, it is wild. If I try to style it to go out—blow dry, hot iron, whatever the hell—it brings about a crisis of femininity. It feels off and not me, like a betrayal of self, even. “I love your shock of hair,” C. has said, many times. There’s this old photo of me that he sometimes references. I am maybe 5-years-old and painting a watercolor on an overcast Northern California beach, a piece of driftwood acting as my artist’s table. I’m wearing pants and no shirt, my long hair blowing in the wind. That photo, he has similarly said, is “so essentially you.” I think he sees a little girl who is in a state of flow, within herself and with the world. I don’t flow so easily outside anymore—I think that stopped not too long after the photo was taken—but I access that state often. It is frequently my state when at home with my family. On this day where I have “nothing to say,” I’m thinking about the intimacy of unbuttoning, and how that—much more than the ideology and institution of monogamy—feels like a protected and hallowed space. I am thinking of how the sacredness of that space is often brought alive—and made electric—by real and imagined threats, and how we crave a little narrative friction in our lives. I am thinking about the difference between being wanted and being seen, and the fluctuating desire for one or the other, or both at the same time.
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četvrtak, 2. listopada 2025.
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