Intellectual Fashion Victim

“Relationships are exquisitely sensitive to balance in their early stages, and a great way to ruin things is either to give too much (you seem perhaps a bit desperate) or too little (you seem cold and rejecting). Rather, relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure.”—Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (2006)

I was all bent of shape. Or so says the diary. It was January 12, 2000. My new girlfriend Anna-Liisa and I had recently consolidated our book collections (that is, moved-in together). I was perusing her sweet contributions to the stacks when I stumbled upon an inscription she’d written to an ex-boyfriend. (Incidentally, the douche had returned the book after the breakup: a clear violation of breakup etiquette: keep or destroy, never return). Regardless, in her eloquent, paragraph-long inscription, she employed a beautiful turn of phrase which she’d once used in an early love letter to me! I was mortified! Heartbroken! Pissed! Felt like I’d been dealt a shabby hand of recycled Valentine’s Day sentiments. Felt like I’d been played.

But that wore off pretty quick. Outrage soon gave way to embarrassment, and I started to feel pretty stupid. She is who she is, I reasoned, and this turn of phrase is, at bottom, as much a part of her as her accent. It’s unreasonable of me to expect her to reinvent herself every time she gets into a new relationship. How could I have possibly come to see that as a reasonable expectation? How could I possibly be so lame? She can recycle good material as much as she wants to, I concluded, so long as she uses her lines on one dude at a time.

That’s when I realized, much to my chagrin, that I was a fashion victim, an intellectual fashion victim, of two broad cultural currents: Late Capitalism, with its obsessive focus on intellectual property, and 1960s-era Romanticism, with its obsessive focus on authenticity and originality. When I discovered my new girlfriend’s inscription in an ex-boyfriend’s ex-book, two turbulent tributaries—capitalism and romanticism—emptied themselves into the river of my mind, creating much white water, a fishy smell, and a will-o’-the-wisp that terrified me for a moment or two, until I saw him for what he was.

—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)