Dunhamisms Issue #1
Hard-won advice from an almost 40 YO
Hey Pals,
Thank you all for writing in with such thoughtful and tender questions. As I mentioned, I’m going to use the five weeks until my fortieth birthday to dispense whatever meager wisdom I have accrued during these four decades (I stuffed as much of it as I could into Famesick, but what can I say- my friend Matt says I’m a “grade A yapper” and a yapper’s gonna yap.)
Today’s questions are about love- particularly, how to spot it, how to make yourself available for it, and what to do when you don’t understand how everyone around you seems to be able to find these flowing connections and your riverbed is dry as a GD bone.
Both of these questions really touched my heart, and I felt compelled to answer them with as much earnest vulnerability as they contain. Please note: I am not a professional therapist, agony aunt, anything- but I feel I have to pay it forward, because: when I was nineteen, I wrote in to my favorite Time Out New York sex columnist Jamie Bufalino. I was still a virgin, and as far as I was concerned I might as well be a forty year old one. I was away for the summer studying poetry in Colorado, practicing my free verse and hitchhiking all over Boulder in stone washed cut-offs with a girl named Kaitlin who I thought would be my best friend until I died but we never saw each other again. We met a boy with his own house- no furniture, sinister- who was majoring in “jazz listening” and we drank warm beer on his ratty carpet and talked about what happens when we die. This is all to say, we were right on course, but I was carrying the terrible secret that I had not yet charged my “v card.” One day my brother called me on my Nokia flip phone, screaming like we’d been chosen to star in a Kings of Leon video (it was 2005!) I had asked him to look out every week for my letter in Get Naked, and lo and behold there it was!
Jamie had answered me so kindly, with so much regard for the time of life I was in. I was sitting in the sun by the river, wearing a white bikini my mom had found at the J. outlet and- inexplicably, since we were going tubing- matte red lipstick, and it was the first time I let myself relax into the moment and think what a wonder it was to be so young and have all of this, even the awkward tussle of sex, stretched out ahead of me like the yellow brick road.
Hi Lena! I feel a little silly putting this into the public void and you totally do not have to answer however since I am only 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on substack and I feel the need to expand on what I submitted from your Instagram story, the public void it must be! My big query is about love - why do things we think are romantic turn out not to be? For context, I (a gay 17 year old boy) had a big crush on someone in my friendship group and was 1000% sure he liked me back based on his actions, words, etc. Anyway long story short I ended up asking this guy out and he said... no! I was upset, a little angry, but mostly confused. And while this is great material for my upcoming pop-rock debut album, I am left wondering how do you make sense of situations where something feels real and mutual and it turns out not to be? - and how do you trust yourself after that? p.s. ily and am SO excited for my signed copy of Famesick to arrive!
Signed, Giles
Giles! You had me at “I’m 17 and therefore cannot DM anyone on Substack.”
Firstly, I’m so sorry that your crush didn’t “go your way” as they say in Hollywood when we lose out on a job. It was really brave and noble of you to make your intentions clear, and to accept a “no” is also brave and noble. It hurts and yes, you’re allowed to be disappointed, mad even. But adulthood will involve many kinds of no’s, many shades and shadows and flavors of disappointment, and they’re not a bad thing to learn about early, to process and integrate and move past.
Because your life will also involve many “yeses.” You will be accepted to schools, jobs, parties and you will even fall in love. And when you do, you will know- really beyond a shadow of a doubt- how it’s different than these earlier experiences of nebulous romantic connection. I’m sure this guy you liked WAS sending you lots of green light go signals. I’m sure he was flirty and playful and really enjoyed your company, because you’re clearly very witty and I for one cannot wait for your pop rock debut (might I suggest the stage name “gileless”? Tell people the lack of capitalization is a choice. My choice.) Why he was giving you all these vibes and then not actually down to date is mostly and usually not about you. Being seventeen is a hormonal torture chamber and all you do is get in your own way. I once liked a boy a LOT and we kissed during a free period and less than an hour later I stormed up to him and said “we can NEVER do that again” (we did, three years later and then five years after that, because what goes around really does come around- and he got his vengeance by asking me for taxi fare about seven minutes after I’d performed a fairly vulnerable sexual act for the first time.) But why did I tell him to get lost, when I’d actually felt a frisson of something rare and pleasurable when he put his peach fuzz mustache on my previously untouched neck? Because the feelings were new, and therefore terrifying, and it felt like falling down a void. It felt like loss of control. It felt like changing in real time, and I wasn’t ready.
But you are going to encounter many people who are ready- some you will meet with all the force of two magnets snapping together in a science demo. Some you will confuse and maybe even hurt, just like this boy confused and hurt you. You may leave them heartbroken and never even know it. And some will last for an hour at a party and give you a pep in your step for the next month. You sound like a curious, engaged person, and curious and engaged people draw experiences, dynamics, dare I say energy, toward them. Pump this song if you need a reminder.
You asked how you trust yourself after this false start and the answer is that in love, it’s all we’ve got. I remember the first time I kissed my husband- we’d been holding hands for a charged thirty minutes- he took a moment to really kiss me back. And for that moment, some old dread shot through me like bad drugs: “he’s repulsed, he’s horrified, I read it all wrong.” But he’s just sort of a lizard boy, and he moves with reptilian calm, and after a beat he was there, right with me, letting me know we were feeling the same thing.
And very soon, you and someone else will feel the same thing. It will probably be the wildest and most intoxicating thing you’ve ever experienced, and it will also have moments of conflict and confusion. Listen. Be open. And also trust yourself if you feel you’re not being treated like the precious little faberge egg you- and all of us- are. As long as you stay connected to that essential instinct we all have, but so often beat out of ourselves, you’ll know when to stay, you’ll know when to go, you’ll know when to lean in for the kiss.
Hi Lena. I’m 30 and have never been in a romantic relationship. I have barely even put myself out there. I am fatter than all of my friends and was the pudgy one at school, so have always occupied the headspace of ‘being desired isn’t for me’. Now I’m a fully-grown adult watching my friends pair up and leave me for boyfriend island and I am all alone. I don’t have any dating experience to build upon and continue to tell myself that I don’t deserve romantic love. Any advice you’d have as to how I might go about changing my circumstances and blossoming into a person who is ready to share their life with someone would be appreciated. Pretty easy solution I imagine. 🙃
Hey, sweet girl. I related to this very deeply. It’s truly wild how the devil of comparison causes us to categorize ourselves in these absurd ways. “I’m fatter than all of my friends” is certainly a story I’ve told myself (and it’s also a story that’s been told to me, by- like- the internet.) But when I look back with some degree of clarity and ruthless self-analysis, I recognize that I was never lacking in affection because of what my body looked like. It was because of the way I perceived myself, the kind of affection and attention I thought I deserved. I’m actually so glad you waited to put yourself out there until you could do some work on that (age ain’t nothing but a number!) because my poor self-regard led me down some very dark alleys (literally) and made me stay put for some very poor behavior. I once broke up with a guy I had dated, for six soul crushing months. I was twenty-five and he was a little older. I lived with my parents and he lived alone, in a very tidy apartment with blood red walls. He was ornery, combative, critical and often downright rude. And when I ended things, he screamed into a pillow then growled “you don’t get it, THIS IS WHAT LOVE FEELS LIKE. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO TOLD ME YOU’VE NEVER REALLY BEEN IN LOVE. WELL, THIS IS IT.” And reader, I spent the night, and another night, and another, only escaping weeks later when I told him to drop me at a Soulcycle class, ran around the corner and texted him “please don’t contact me again.” I don’t recommend this strategy, but somehow I didn’t think that girls who looked like me (chubby it had been said, mousy it had been implied, different than my girlfriends who were petite and sleek as little seals) had the right to tell boys who looked like him (abs, upper cartilage piercing, wrench hanging from his belt) to fuck right off if they couldn’t be sweet. I had no idea of my own power, and apparently he still can’t say my name without absolutely losing it, because I had minx-like charm I was utterly incapable of owning (which may have been its own form of manipulation, to make myself into an eternal victim of life and never an agent, but that’s for another day!)
Yes, it’s true, we live in a culture. That culture sends us some pretty clear signals about who is and isn’t worthy of desire. And yes, some men are really superficial- and that’s actually not about desire as much as it’s about their self-perception. I used to joke with Judd Apatow that he’d ruined things for women who looked like me, because now every guy with a potbelly and a mangy beard thought he was meant to accidentally impregnate Katherine Heigl. But the fact is, men have always looked at women as a reflection of their value, and made choices about who to be with based on how it elevated their stature: made them look to their boss or made them feel cool at the drive-in or maybe her parents offered her up with 72 cows and 16 gold doubloons! But here is the important part: not ALL men are like this, and some men are actually smart independent thinkers who are genuinely horny and inspired by exactly the thing you are at this very moment.
I’m going to give you a little assignment. Can you start to think about what a positive romantic and/or sexual relationship (they don’t have to be the same thing!) would look like for you? Make a list of qualities that this mythical person should have. Then, read your way down it and cross off any that are actually learned through osmosis. Which are things your parents made you think are important? Which are things your friends have told you are hot? And which do you find genuinely sexy, exciting, cozy? Try a version of the list where none of the qualities are physical- now, where does that leave you?
Then, I want you to… watch Love On The Spectrum. I’d start with the Australian one, it’s the most tender to me. I say this because during the pandemic, I spent almost two years extremely celibate. I’d been through a lot physically, and I didn’t recognize myself. I remember looking at some magazine spread of a model at home with her boyfriend, strumming guitars and wearing vaguely French hats. She had long tan legs in worn ballet flats, and I remember thinking “well, that’s what you have to look like to have someone fall in love with you, I guess.” I had spent years trying to clear all this noise from my head, to represent something a little different on television, and yet my brain was still gunked up with all these ideas about what constituted a woman worth caring about. Somewhere in there, I stumbled on Love On The Spectrum. I watched it all alone with my dog, weeping at the openness and joy with which these people- who had spent their lives fighting against a perception of them as odd and broken and infantile- threw themselves into the process of finding romantic connection. When they did, it was romantic in a way I had never seen before, because it wasn’t the romance of two traditionally gorgeous people doubling their own sexiness (I’m looking at you, Love Story!) but instead the romance of complete acceptance. It was evidence that all you have to do is offer your purest self and be open to surprise.
I did that. I got my heart broken one more time, but I knew by then that there’s nothing a little Fiona Apple won’t cure. That model in that photo spread with her boyfriend posted on Instagram story saying that he was a sex addict and hadn’t been home in nine days and could he please come and get his fucking dog, because even pretty people get the blues. Not too long after that (only a few weeks, actually, which made me look kind of loose and wild to the guy who had just kicked me to the curb but that was fun!) I met my husband. We were set up on a blind date. He had no idea what my job was and, seeing that I had more Instagram followers than he expected, assumed I was a “curve model” which was EXTREMELY FLATTERING. At the start of our relationship, I looked for all kinds of signs that he wasn’t actually into me, or that he was courting me for nefarious reasons. He was thin and I was not. He was cool and slinky and British and I was intense and blurted my feelings out like Robert Durst burping in The Jinx and needed a lot of time in bed. It took me awhile, I won’t lie, to believe- to really believe- that he found me beautiful. But he stuck it out, and made it clear, and now I take advantage of that by sitting at my desk in a bonnet and eating cottage cheese out of the container while he tries to sleep. Real love has the power to make you feel unassailably beautiful, in a far less brittle way than so many people get the chance to feel in this lifetime because of cages they have built for themselves.
I wish you luck, courage and absolute safety.
Love always, Lena
This was such a tender read Lena. 🥹❤️ We’re so lucky to have you here.
You write so beautifully. Reading this was the best part of my day.