They All Count

I like Chuck Klosterman a lot, even though his take on the nemesis thing is sexist and he got bounced as The New York Times Magazine ethicist for I don’t know why.

One of my favorite Klosterman books is the not-critically-acclaimed Killing Yourself to Live, which features Chuck ruminating on his exes while completing a cross-country assignment for SPIN Magazine, visiting the sites famous rock musicians died by suicide.

In it he makes a useful point about romantic partners in general while writing specifically about “Lenore,” the pseudonym for one of his exes:

“The problem that has always been between us: Lenore wants me to be a slightly different person than who I actually am, and I can’t force myself to care about the things that are important to her. So even when we both ‘win,’ nothing really changes.”

Moral: Don’t try to make it work with someone who will always want you to be a slightly different person than who you actually are.

And since it’s Valentine’s Day, here’s a more sentimental one, about the templates for who we love.

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I loved was someone I knew in sixth grade…The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years.

But there’s still one more tier to all this: there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred… This is because the person does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real — but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”