What do we owe each other?
Here's my rate card, baby
Valentine’s Day is a funny holiday. It has been around and associated with romance for centuries but often gets derided for being a more recently manufactured Hallmark holiday. Galentine’s Day- which I love deeply and throw a brunch for every year- is arguably more commercial. Its associated products and events have expanded every year since its Parks and Recreation inception in 2010.
In our society that’s allergic to nuance in all forms, it shouldn’t be surprising that we have to have separate holidays designated for different kinds of love. (Also it’s easier to sell more stuff that way.) Each holiday comes with its acceptable forms of celebration, too. You “owe” your sweetheart dinner, roses, and expensive wine. You “owe” your girlfriends mimosas, waffles, and Instagrammable moments.
You “owe” the people in your life a performance of your love for them (one day only!!) and it can be deeply held and sincere or it can be a beautiful, empty gesture— or anywhere in between.
Don’t go off of (cultural) script
In grad school, I learned about “Garfinkeling1” or consciously breaking an unspoken social rule- like walking into an elevator and facing the rear wall- to demonstrate that the rule exists. I can speak from experience that people get very uncomfortable when this happens.
We have a lot of these rules- or cultural scripts- around relationships too, reinforced by centuries of social performance. Deviation from the acceptable norms was largely only done in private. It’s incredible how hard America in particular seems to cling to these cultural scripts about what relationships, particularly marriage, are supposed to be.
This makes me love things like old letters even more because they are beautiful proof that humans have always Been Like This.
In the past marriage was both freedom and a cage for women: the only way to gain independence from their families of origin, but only under what was ostensibly “new ownership”. Jewelry and fine gowns were things women wanted not because they were frivolous, but because these were portable forms of wealth that women 1. were allowed to own and 2. could be sold in the event their father or husband died and they had no other prospects (see: Jane Austen).
Yesterday’s excellent episode of
with Lyz Lenz (of ) tackled these lingering cultural scripts around women, marriage, divorce, and freedom. My favorite quote from Lenz:“We don’t know how to ask for freedom and we don’t know how to get it and take it and then what do we do when we have it?”
It’s less common to be forced to stay in a relationship because you have no other prospects— but freedom remains terrifying simply because of its lack of structure2. The blueprints we have been given have often been painted as social pariahs, particularly for women: the maiden aunt, the “roommates”, the scorned, bitter spinster. You might have more freedom but at the cost of becoming a cautionary tale.
In the present, what do we owe each other then? Not just in marriage, but in long-term, long-distance, low-commitment, casual partnerships?3 What do we owe our family anymore, our friends, our neighbors?
In the face of all this modern freedom and love, what new scripts will we write?
One weird trick to human connection
I know this: we have to figure out how to show up for each other and not just on one corporately mandated day a year. We owe each other sustained connection. Community. A kind of love that goes beyond mimosas with your most photogenic friends or a performative date night with your partner. Freedom does not have to be equated with loneliness.
In an epidemic of loneliness, performative love will not heal us. Only the real work of showing up for each other repeatedly will— especially when we don’t feel like it. That means working on ourselves so we can show up, again and again.
We are definitely going to fuck it up sometimes but we do not have to be perfect. We just have to decide to do it and then we have to keep trying until we get it kind of right.
Get Rec’d
What I’m reading, watching, being haunted by.
What I’m reading: Ander and Santi Were Here for the Vintage Books & Wine book club.
What I’m watching: Please tell me what your go-to Valentine’s movie is! I personally love Warm Bodies because a loose zombie version of Romeo and Juliet is what Shakespeare would have wanted.
Reality: “You’re not ugly, you’re just poor!”
Escapism: Mychal the librarian loves you and is proof there are already people out there doing the work of building a better, more connected world.
Wildcard: There is drama in bird nerd world!!!
Until next time— love you. Mean it.
If you want to nerd out here: he pioneered a new form of sociological research outlining that “the social world is…built up of arbitrary rules, made up of a dense and often contradictory set of tacit understandings about what is going on.”
A lot of echos in jumping from the corporate ship to build your own freelance life raft but I’m not trying to make this one About Me
Barbie wink