Hello,
Contrary to the impression you may have gotten from my most recent newsletter, I do experience some joy! Though I must admit, there’s been a deficit of it in my life as of late. Or at least, I’m struggling to feel it due to difficult personal circumstances.
Having spent a week in sunny Tunisia and built sandcastles with my little brothers, my serotonin levels are up. So this week, I wanted to write about a universally cherished subject: love.
For a long time, I believed love was something you found. Whether platonic or romantic, it was a surprise you happened upon in school, a supermarket, a club or an after-party. And if you were lucky enough, it would stick with you forever.
The reality has, of course, been the total opposite. I have experienced as much loss in relationships as I have experienced beautiful beginnings and good middles. This is a natural part of the life cycle (nothing lasts forever yada yada), but these endings have also taught me a valuable lesson about the love that does last: all parties need to be willing to put in effort, especially during the difficult periods. Otherwise, it falls apart.
Sometimes, it’s the other person who doesn’t put enough effort into a connection, like that guy who ghosted me a few months into dating because I dared to ask for more regular encounters. Instead of using this experience as an opportunity to interrogate why more closeness freaked him out and even trying to work through it, he abandoned any sense of responsibility in the situation, leaving me to figure things out alone. If you ask me, this isn’t a very nice way to treat someone. I was convinced I had done something wrong at the time, but eventually forgave him with more distance and maturity.
Other times, you are the person not pulling the weight. Just recently, I realised that I had forgotten to listen to a voice note from a family friend, in which they described how hard life had been lately and asked me for help. The message was from two months ago. I also missed the last few communications before that. I am trying to make up for my lack of effort, but will understand if our friendship withers.
Then there are those times when two or more parties don’t put in enough effort to cultivate something deeper or are happy with the growing space within a previously strong bond. These low-maintenance relationships are fun at parties, but if you try to take them out into the daylight too quickly, they tend to feel a bit barren.
Or worse, if a friendship has outgrown itself, you might end up with a ‘brunch friend’ — a concept I came across when reading Anahit Behrooz’s BFFS: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship. The writer describes it as the kind of friendship that occurs occasionally and is lifted out of the everyday. “Something about the idea of brunch — not the meal but the concept, the social structure, the exaggerated performance of middle-class femininity that it represents — sets me on edge”, she writes. “It has come to signify everything I fear about how the friendships in my life will go: a bimonthly catch-up in a depersonalised space, the death rattle of what were once entangled lives, now pulled apart and frayed.” Instead of creating new experiences, all you do now is recall ‘the good old times’ over avocado toast. You meet because you feel like you have to, not because you want to.
I have learned that you can only foster relationships when imbalances or issues can be identified, safely voiced and addressed. Over a long enough period, conflict and life is bound to occur when different people come together. Love is not about avoiding such circumstances, but how you choose to adapt or deal with them, as well as what you learn in the process. Today, I feel fortunate to have friends and a partner who won't give up at the first hurdle and will instead put effort into seeking resolution. Isn’t it within this process that we learn how to love each other better?
What I’ve enjoyed this week:
I’m reading These Impossible Things by Salma El-Wardany and enjoying the plot so far, in which three Muslim women carefully balance the pressures of cultural and familial expectations with who they actually are in the outside world.
I watched Stacey Dooley’s Ready for War? documentary over the weekend in which she meets Ukrainian volunteers as they complete a six-month military training course in five weeks before heading to the front line. It made me think about the necessity of defending yourself from oppressors and whether it’s possible to do that without replicating a cycle of violence.
I’ve been very out of the loop on British politics, so I appreciated this piece of political analysis by Samuel Earle, a brilliant writer. His new book Tory Nation is out now.