To my friends who have given up on love

There's great joy to be had in wanting

1. It’s hard to say anything categorically true about women. But here I go. It does not often occur to us that we shouldn’t suffer for what we want. From childhood it’s a nunnery. Everything is shame, everything could go wrong, and if you want to feel free you better be robust, because you’ll be disliked for it, for the wanting. From the first acquisition of language, as a girl, it’s as if you are haunted by the spirit of the early 20th century sculptor Camille Claudel who was imprisoned in an asylum by her devoutly Catholic younger brother, Paul. But today, madness is almost an escape. There aren’t asylums anymore, so if you lose your mind maybe you’ll be left alone with your dreams.

2. I keep thinking about how the subject is always love. It was that way even for Godard. Even when the subject is madness, affliction, corruption, or cynicism—the subject is love. The bumbling beauty of the quotidian, it is only possible because of the off chance of romance.

3. A certain type my age, arriving at 30 hurt and disappointed, convinces herself that life-altering romantic love is oppressive. That it is nobler to be wholly invested in a web of aromantic relationships we call community. Well, everything depends and almost no single orientation, when it comes to these interpersonal matters, is more or less noble. You can be colossally disappointed by friends you’re not sleeping with. You can put years, decades into platonic friendships that you realize too late were emotionally one-sided or otherwise severely limited. It’s not just marriages. And the disappointment doesn’t mean they weren’t worth it, the friendships or the marriages. You always walk away with a deal you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. They may just not have been worth that much time. You have to learn something so that you’re quick on the draw next time. When you forsake that possibility, when you tell yourself there is nothing for you in intimacy, in trying again and again to get it right, you allow yourself to waft through the everyday hopelessly naïve, believing that some other, purer promise will save you. Nothing saves you; you just try again and again until you die.

4. It can be a nice feeling though, the coldness of extreme independence. You burrow into your isolation, make every interaction optional, never ask for anything, are conflict-free and easygoing, are consistently pursued by the cluelessly romantic, never fully reciprocating. But then you have little to say. Without the risk and the friction, nothing, not even the safely neutered errand, is alive.

5. Back to women. We have a reputation for clinginess. For wanton desire. We are ignorant virgins, evil sluts or relentless nags. Patriarchy depends on a muting of that desire—I think everyone knows this. It also means we are liable to direct this desire not towards genuine intimacy but approval. Caught up in this, you really don’t know how to pick ‘em. You seek after the love of someone who looks at you disapprovingly or doesn’t look at you at all. Benevolent neglect is the flip side of resentful mistreatment. If we listen to the shame we can miss a world of mutual enthusiasm—of not merely getting what you want, but discovering, like a child, what you didn’t have.