I’m closing out the summer with a roundup of relationship content I’ve found interesting over the last few months.
If you want to submit a question or topic for a future post or send me relationship content you found interesting, I’d love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously here. Or DM on Substack:
I’ve never heard the word gangbang used in such a wholesome way.
We need more examples like this of women living love-filled lives in untraditional ways.
I found this podcast about male friendship incredibly endearing.
This is a beautifully written description of grief interwoven with music references and an analysis of how effective EMDR therapy is for acute trauma.
Between The Great Romance Slump, Forty First Dates and Still Searching, The Good Man Shortage and Why I’ve Given Up Dating the dating landscape seems bleak. It makes me think there’s some truth to this quote:
“Men want women that don’t exist anymore and women want men that don’t exist yet.”
We’ve lost some incredibly inspiring people recently; so I’ve been in a bit of a Gloria Steinem/ Dolly Parton/ Wendell Berry rabbit hole. I want to underscore that what I’ve included below focuses on their relationships because that’s the focus of this Substack, but it is not intended to diminish the incredible work they’ve done in the world.
Gloria Steinem
I remember reading about Gloria Steinem’s marriage when I was younger and thinking how devastating that she didn’t meet her person until she was 66, only to lose him three years later to brain cancer.
And of course it is devastating that she lost him but I stand corrected on defining him as her person—
“In 2015, Steinem would tell me that her marriage reminded her of how outdated our thinking about love is. “Some people still assume that because we got legally married, he was ‘the love of my life’ — and I was his. That’s such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness. He had been married twice before and had wonderful grown children. I had been happily in love with men who are still my friends and chosen family … each of our loves is crucial and unique.” source
She went on to say in her final words that she didn’t have one singular love of her life.
I love this reminder that her power and her effectiveness came from her love of men, not from hate:
“Men could disappoint her profoundly because she actually loved them, believed in them, wrote their speeches, worked alongside them, fucked them eagerly and unapologetically, sometimes fell in love with them. That she could love men so much, even while ferociously bemoaning and challenging their unequal grip on power, was one of the things that gave her power: She could never be accused of man-hating.” source
I always enjoy a list. Here’s Gloria’s love/ hate list.
Wendell Berry - If you’re not familiar with him, he was a Kentucky farmer who advocated for human-scale, sustainable farming and a prolific writer/poet/activist who wrote more than 40 books and hundreds of poems.
I keep thinking about the last line of what he wrote below; what we gain when we maintain the faith to stay in a marriage.
“The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife — none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying “a while”: to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all of these disciplines that they will not stay to find that they should not have stayed.
That faith has nothing to do with what is usually called optimism. As the traditional marriage ceremony insists, not everything that we stay to find out will make us happy. The faith, rather, is that by staying, and only by staying, we will learn something of the truth, that the truth is good to know, and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.
Wendell was married to his wife, Tanya, for 69 years and it sounds like it was not without its temptations.
And I’ll leave you with Dolly—
In Case You Missed It
I wrote about leaving a relationship that I wanted to be a life story. And then my ex responded, which went viral. Highly recommend you stay for the comment section of that piece.
I was given a Soul Code on my 40th birthday, which contained my worst fear.
A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership.
I’d Love to Hear from You
I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to say hi and tell me what about dating and relationships is on your mind right now.
You can always submit a topic or a specific question, anonymously, here. Please note I will potentially publish the actual question in a future Substack.
You can send me a DM:
I think that one can meet the love of their life across the street and be married to them for the next 50 years. I think one can have many loves. Because there are 8 billion people on the planet there can be an incredible diversity in life experiences.
In our culture of overtherapized self-talk where everyone is a narcissist or a sociopath or some variation of that term, it can help to remember that some fundamental truths lie on the middle road.