dialectical damage

Susan Rothenberg, Butterfly, 1976

Molly Donovan: “Susan Rothenberg's intuitive approach to painting led her one day in 1973 to spontaneously sketch the image of a horse—a subject that would preoccupy her until 1980. She later recalled, "I had been doing abstract paintings, using a central dividing line so as to keep the painting on the surface and call attention to the canvas. . . . The horse was just something that happened on both sides of my line. The image held the space and the line kept the picture flat."

Two questions for you guys: 1) I’m gonna be in Europe for the next two weeks… any kind of writing that you’d like to see? Travelogue? Food recommendations? Random musings? 2) I was wondering if we could do a Modern Love type of thing on the Substack… like, reader-submitted short essays about friendships and romantic relationships? Any interest?

On the walk a girl asked me why I wrote about relationships and I said it was because relationships, like clothes, are things you can’t avoid. Unless you’re a hermit, you come in contact with people every single day, and the decisions you make around who you like and dislike, who you keep close and avoid, who you love and how you treat them become the foundation of your life. Everyone has a philosophy on relationships, even if they can’t articulate it. If you’re good at relationships, you don’t need to be good at literally anything else; if you’re bad at relationships, you will never be happy, no matter what other virtues you possess or what you achieve in the world. Put that way, it sounds scary, and I’ve always approached relationships with a certain kind of terror.

Being in relationship with another person often involves a clash of styles. Like, someone else might have a similar philosophy on relationships, but they probably don’t have the exact same approach. And relationships are inherently a two-person game, so suddenly you’re subject to someone’s process—how they communicate, how they spend their time, who they like, what they value. And you have to decide if you like it, and more than that, are capable of adapting to it.

I used to believe that you should love someone for who they are. I still believe that, but with the caveat that I think that you should also love how they handle things. Is the distinction meaningful? Maybe it’s obvious—as a matchmaker, a lot of people certainly tell me they want to date someone whose judgment they respect. Of course, someone’s judgment can be broken down into a million little things. What’s their prose style? Do they talk slow or fast, do they think slow or fast? Are they confrontational? Are they direct or indirect? How do they talk when they’re angry? How do they apologize? How do they give feedback? Are they expressive or contained?

I mentioned offhand to a friend recently that I could never date one of our mutual friends. He has a habit—I’m gonna make it up for privacy—something like, he believes in only buying plane tickets when he’s already at the airport. My friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get past that. And my take was basically that it’s not about the habit itself, it’s about the way that it’s representative of a million other things about this person and their style of doing things and how they live. About their relationship with time, anxiety, control. The great thing about friends is that you aren’t exposed to every single downside of their style and general conduct—like, to some extent it doesn’t really matter if they’re messy or clean, if they’re avoidant or anxious, if they’re a good romantic partner or only an okay one, because you’re not affected by it. But if you’re dating someone and living with them, you are impacted by everything they do.

Often I wish I could approach romantic relationships with the loving detachment I bring to friendships. Like, sometimes you’re on the phone with a friend and they’ll be like, “I’m considering doing [The Worst Idea Ever]” and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I don’t think you should do that, but good luck if you do!” But that would necessarily be a rejection of the merging that occurs in romantic love, where what they do to themselves becomes partially something they do to you.

I keep thinking about this Gillian Rose line from Love’s Work: “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone's mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless.” Love necessarily involves exposure and damage. But another word for damage might be change, or expansion. Falling in love with someone’s style is not the same thing as believing it’s the one most compatible to yours. It’s more frustrating than that, and more magical.