Tag Archives: new women

The Acoustics of Love

4 Mar

Koo and I, sitting on my couch a few nights ago watching poker, began talking about love.

It started when I asked him whether he felt the women that he had dated had “strong personal boundaries”.  The term, which I’ve taken from Dr. Paul’s usage, implies that the woman is capable of standing up for herself, determining what she wants, generally living on her own terms, and not sacrificing her desires and values and standards to those of the people around her.

You’d think we would favor women with strong personal boundaries.  And, frankly, we do.  But the most interesting part of the conversation came when Koo described women he dated who had strong personal boundaries but whose boundary was so strong that it prevented her from fully experiencing him.   She was missing what Koo called “a certain acoustic”, meaning that she lacked the happy, open space inside of her that could be filled with Koo’s life and enthusiasm.  Or, in his glorious phrasing, where he could “reverberate”.

It’s really rare to find a woman (or any person, for that matter) who has a strong personal boundary — and yet whose boundary is permeable enough that we get the pleasure of seeing our own life and influence reverberate around inside of her.

How strong is your personal boundary?  And to what extent does the life of your partner reverberate inside of you?

2008: The Year in Review

2 Jan

As usual, this was quite a year.

365 days ago, I was living with spartan furniture in a different city, deeply in love and joined in a life with a woman I no longer even speak to.  It was before Bon Iver, before The American Dollar, before my last birthday night, before the old apartment got new furniture, before Terry Richardson, before The Wire, before Facebook, before David Foster Wallace, before Gossip Girl, before AG, before the real estate project, before the apothecary, before Taleb, before creating the Legacy Strategy movement, before starting to make it work, before EB White, before the trips to Jersey City, before de Botton, before the summer, before love walked away with little explanation, before the aftermath, before the healing, before the new spots, before the new people, before the midnight swims and the new apartment, before Bammers and a whole new generation of change, before the new clothes, before the new deals, before the  marriage proposal videos, before feeling the whole world rush through me again, before the new friends, and — most of all  — before being completely changed by Alice Miller’s work on the origins of grandiosity & depression in the lives of adults.

The great lesson is that I have no idea — none whatsoever — what life will look like in a year.

And there’s something beautiful about that.

We.  Shall.  See.

on love

27 Oct

of all the ways I’ve understood — and, more recently, misunderstood — the nuances of love, there has always been one voice that I hear as a guide. It’s from the end of “Self Portrait in December”:

“I said I love. That is the promise. Now, I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word ‘love’ means something. As a reward, at the end of of this long undertaking, I will end up being he who loves. That is, I will merit the name I gave myself. A man, nothing but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he.”

- Jean-Luc Godard, JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre

I have kept this close to me over the past two and a half years. It seems so much brighter, so much more relevant this Autumn.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.