Analog Love

“So we were making out,” my friend said, “and she stopped to say she wanted to see me again.” There was a palpable reaction from everyone in the room but me, an “oooh” that seemed to say she had broken some rule or other. “Wait,” I said, “I don’t get it, why is that an issue? Explain it for an old man.” I was at least ten years older than most of the people in the room, and had been off the dating market for a long time. Although I’d read plenty of articles about the woes and pitfalls of app dating, I still felt out of the loop. It was an unspoken rule of hookup culture, they explained patiently, that you couldn’t ever show too much interest. You had to play it cool.

I wondered about the deeper reason behind this. What did it mean for her to show interest? That she was clingy, needy, too quick to push for commitment? A lot of ink has been spilled about dating and gender conflict, the way dating apps give successful men a seemingly inexhaustible supply of women so that they’re always looking for someone a little better than whoever they’re with, the tragedy of women looking for intimacy and only getting careless sex, the shame of unsuccessful men being squeezed to pay for more chances at a right-swipe. But what I want to talk about here is how people are being forced to flip-flop between two poles: awkward hookups where it’s forbidden to even hint at love and commitment, and becoming partners for better or worse until death do us part.¹ It feels like a light switch for love, when what we really need is mood lighting.

Maybe these two poles represent the most selfish primal desires of men and women: men want to spread their seed as widely as possible, while women want stability to raise children in. These two desires are locked in competition, and a fragmented society allows them to bounce us back and forth like ping-pong balls instead of reaching any kind of compromise. Traditional societies compromised toward the feminine ideal by supporting the family and forbidding sex outside of marriage, and the sexual revolution, instead of liberating us from patriarchy, ironically ushered in its truest face: an infinite supply of hopeful young women for the most successful men while an infinite string of empty hookups turns everyone else cynical and hopeless of ever finding a life partner.

at the rubber duck store in Amsterdam

I was staying out of all this, trying not to think about it too hard, trying to figure myself out before I re-entered the dating pool, and then something happened that got me searching for a solution. I had met Alex at Jesscamp,² and we had a few conversations; there didn’t seem to be any kind of romantic spark between us. But on the last day she gifted me a small bottle of palo santo oil which I kept in the top of my backpack, and the smell kept reminding me of her. We stayed in touch via occasional text messages. One night in Berlin we were both crashing in the living room of our friend Simon’s house. Just as I was falling asleep, she gathered the courage to ask me if I wanted to snuggle. I did. I put my arm around her and as I surfed the edge of the sleep wave, I could sense her body’s energy shifting: it was a tall tree, something soft and feathery, a hillside of blooming cactus flowers. She said it felt like I was a bird enfolding her in my wings. I was fascinated... and turned on. But it was her last night in Berlin, and I wasn’t sure what she wanted, and I didn’t want things to get complicated. I let my desire diffuse. We decided we weren’t going to fall asleep this way. She gave me a massage, and later said that when she touched my chest she also felt a deep desire, but pulled back from it because the massage was supposed to be for me and not for her.

Over the following week, we discussed this experience through text and voice messages. It wasn’t clear that we were meant to be together, and in fact she was pretty sure we wouldn’t work as a couple, and I went along with that, but at the same time there was clearly something there and we both wanted to explore it. Could we navigate the territory between being fully platonic and fully romantic? What was in store there for us? We decided to travel in Turkey together for the month of November to find out. We both wrote about this in-between place on Twitter:

Alex:

There’s a whole wide world between perfectly platonic friends and ideal partners

What do you do in that world?

Jesse:

you meet someone, and for a while the nature of the relationship is ambiguous and the ambiguity is exciting because it could go anywhere

maybe someday you come to the conversation "what are we" and it's like a train station with two tracks leaving it, marked PLATONIC and ROMANTIC

the tracks are comfortable, each in its own way, but the cost of this comfort is losing the excitement of exploring the lands between them, all the rivers and lakes, fields and shady groves

on the train your shoes won't get muddy but also you won't be swimming and sunbathing

on the PLATONIC train you might stop finding the erotic in the ordinary, and on the ROMANTIC train you might stop welcoming the ordinary into the erotic

between is play, alive and nourishing to connection

maybe the conversation we need is not "what are we" but "how are we"

me at dawn as the sun rises over the Rila mountains in Bulgaria

For the moment, our plans kept us apart. Over the course of a month, I worked my way down to Istanbul by train, staying with old and new friends along the way,3 and Alex and I kept exploring our connection through voice and text messages and occasional phone calls, admitting and allowing our desire for each other, but leaving it open-ended, never framing it in such a way that we’d need to bound and define the relationship. It was clearly no longer platonic, but on the other hand we both hesitated to let it slide into romance, maybe out of fear of the many possible complications and consequences. But there was a strong attraction, and just as the waiting started to feel unbearable, there we were in Istanbul together. Being in physical contact was everything we’d hoped for and more, and on our first full day we went on a date that was romantic as hell, and yet we were still resisting it.

The next day though, I noticed her turning her head away and letting out a sigh, as if to discharge some energy. “What is it?” I asked. She hesitated, and then admitted she might be falling for me. I admitted that I might be falling for her too, could we just let it happen? “I don't want to break your heart,” I said. “I'm willing to get my heart broken,” she said. “Me too,” I said. And then, slowly but surely, the dam began to break, washing all our accumulated cynicism downstream. Strangely it didn’t feel quite like my memories of falling in love, because there was so little fear and anxiety around it, just a release into the comfort and safety and wonder and excitement of our togetherness. Hesitantly at first, and then more and more seriously, we started to entertain plans for the future, how we could build a life together, our secret hopes and dreams. Were we being swept toward the other shore? Would we get trapped in a web of certainty and familiarity and expectations, selling all our precious freedom to buy a sense of security?

We needed a way to dream together, to change our plans and buy airplane tickets, to get into our first fight without risking everything on it. We needed some kind of container to hold us but not too tightly. To give us a reliable firmness of interdependence without being so rigid that we couldn’t follow where our hearts led us and transform in the ways we needed to. Thinking about this, I remembered something from when I was a kid: I had gone to a handfasting, a neo-pagan ceremony based on an old tradition of getting married for a year and a day. I remembered practically nothing about it except that it was in the woods and the couple’s hands had been tied together with ribbons, but the idea had stuck with me, that after a year had passed the bond could be renewed or dissolved, a marriage without the pitfall of taking forever for granted. I mentioned it to Alex and she loved the idea of it, and then later I gathered my courage and told her that I wanted to be handfasted with her. “Me too,” she said immediately, “we could do it in Konya.” She consulted the weather forecast, the phase of the moon, the alignment of the planets. We would have vows and bracelets and read three poems. Later in bed, she said, “I want to read your blog post about this.” “That’s such a good idea,” I said, “I’ll start working on it.”³

And that brings me up to the present moment, at a cafe on our first morning in Konya, the City of Hearts, Alex typing next to me, sending me snapshots from her journal that make me cry and then laugh and then look over at her to mouth “I love you” and then reach out to reassure myself that she truly exists. She has a soul full of beautiful dreams, and I have strong hands that can make anything real. She shines like the morning sun and plays like the spring breeze, and I have my feet solidly in the dirt. She has endless lifetimes of torment and transcendence in her eyes, and I have endless healing in my touch. What are we? I have no idea. How are we? We are so unbelievably good.

Alex and me wearing our handfasting bracelets

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Epilog: We held our ceremony in the rose garden outside Rumi’s tomb. True to our style, it was spontaneously a day earlier than we’d planned because the sun was out. We invoked the five senses with a candle for vision, poetry for hearing, the palo santo oil Alex had gifted me for smell, honey for taste, and bracelets for touch. These were our vows:

for a year and a day i vow to to make a place in my heart for us both to sit

i will speak in the ten sweet tongues of love:
1. loving touch
2. attuned care
3. deep listening
4. clear seeing
5. kind and honest words
6. appreciation
7. devoted service
8. loyal being
9. materialized dreams
10. bringing you joy and delight

whether we rejoin or part, i vow to treat you always with honor and with care

The first poem is by Yunus Emre, my translation but with a few stanzas removed (you can read more like this in my book of translations):

My eyes are for beholding you
My hands for reaching out to you
Today my soul goes seeking you
I hope tomorrow finding you

Today my soul goes seeking you
Tomorrow you’ll give me my voice
Your heaven’s what I’m longing for
I don’t have any wish to fly

To fly to heaven, so they say
To that reward the faithful chase
With virgins lounging round the place
I have no lust for their embrace

I’ve been longing for your presence
As you long to show your essence
In your work there is no cruelty
Making this world as it should be

The second poem is by Rumi (probably about Shams Tabrizi), not sure who the translator was but I got it from here:

A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.
We feel the flowing water of life here,
you and I, with the garden’s beauty
and the birds singing.
The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
what it is to be a thin crescent moon.
You and I unselfed, will be together,
indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.
The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar
as we laugh together, you and I.
In one form upon this earth,
and in another form
in a timeless sweet land.

The third poem is by Shams Tabrizi, paraphrased by me from the translation in Shams-e Tabrizi: Rumi’s Perfect Teacher:

Lovers know best what it is to love
Devoted lovers know best of all
If I show what true devotion is,
even some noble lovers will despair
Devotion means:
not complaining about the path,
or, if one does complain,
never do they abandon devotion

Besides being poems about love that resonated with us, there’s also significance in the fact that Yunus Emre brought me to this place, and Rumi and Shams had a life-changing bromance in the very rose garden where we held our ceremony. At the perfect moment at the end of the ceremony, the call to prayer rang out from the minarets of the Sultan Selim Mosque, and then just as we were almost ready to leave, a guard came to tell us very sweetly that we couldn’t sit on that part of the lawn. All in all an auspicious beginning for our next chapter.

Alex has written the story from her perspective, and although I liked her version so much I was tempted to revise mine to be more like it, I’m learning how our different styles enhance each other. Go read her blog to get a fuller picture.

1. In theory, but of course the 50% divorce rate will always be a looming presence.

2. Somewhat like vibecamp but smaller, chiller, and in Europe.

3. If you’re enjoying this blog post, you know who to thank!