Advice on writing and love!

“I’ve spent most of my adult life resisting the possibility of romantic love because I feared how it would distract me from my writing work.”

Welcome to the latest installment of my occasional advice column. Note: This week I’m also trying an experiment in communal reading that I’d love for some of you to join—details after the advice.

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Dear Subtle Maneuvers,

I’ve spent most of my adult life resisting the possibility of romantic love because I feared how it would distract me from my writing work (I’m 33). Truthfully, I also avoided it, of course, because I was scared of the vulnerability, time, and risk it would entail—all things that I was less afraid to lavish on what I always thought was my one true pursuit, my writing.

Well, out of the blue, I seem to be falling in love. With a person. I am completely flummoxed, blindsided, so so happy, and also so incredibly confused. Where did this come from?! It makes me realize how I wasn’t just scared of love for so long, I also very deeply believed that I did not deserve it. So much of writing, for me, has been entwined with self-flagellation, self-punishment, self-deprivation. All or nothing. Previous romances have very often ended because of my tendency to prioritize work over anything else—though I now realize that, in addition to this reason, I also often didn’t entirely love the person I was with. And for the past decade or so, I’ve worked under the idea that the amount of anxiety, care, and pain I put into my work basically winnows it into its best possible version. You can imagine how unpleasant it probably was to be in a relationship with me if you didn’t have similar tendencies.

Now, these structures on which I’ve built my life seem to feel like they could suddenly change. I want that—I figured out that I wanted to change my life in some fundamental ways before even meeting this new partner—but I’m terrified that I’m going to blow it: my new love, and also my new and serious book project, on which I’m standing at the cusp. My new partner and I are of the same persuasion: addicts, basically, who have been addicted to their work, primarily, with other things thrown in here and there. As such, we’ve vowed to go really slowly, to see each other twice a week on specific days, to keep communication as open as possible, to give each other lots of space and also support. But I’m wondering what else I can do to open my life and my work to love, and the reverse—to finally find the support I didn’t realize that I dearly needed, and have it somehow dovetail with the space, time, focus, and independence so essential to my writing. I want this so badly: and I’m only now realizing that if I play it right, both love and work, hand in hand, might be possible for me.

All the best,
L

Dear L,

First of all, congratulations on your new love—and your new and serious book project! What wonderful (and, yes, also terrifying) developments to carry forth into the New Year.

I wanted to start by congratulating you because I know I tend to greet good news by jumping straight past enjoyment into simmering apprehension, and it sounds like you might do the same thing. Such a bad habit! Not only because we miss fully savoring things, but because sometimes I think all our worrying has the opposite of its intended effect: Instead of staving off the negative outcomes we’re trying to avoid, we can end up manifesting them, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s like when you’re a kid learning to ride a bike: If you focus all your energy on not riding directly into that tree, somehow you end up riding . . . directly into that tree.