For Lise and Patrick, the possibility of sex with other people has allowed their own love life to blossom – providing it’s within limits
How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously
Once, Patrick had really nice oral sex with someone and told me what she did, and suggested we try that
Continue reading...From serious injury and coping with different levels of fame to resentment and ping-pong – a powerful insight into a life shared by two charismatic creatives
It’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. Certainly, having got to know affable, driven, sweet-tempered Joel personally in this intimate portrait, it’s a natural desire to want to see even more of his extraordinary work: 60 years of photographs encompassing street photography, official documentation of the 9/11 disaster site in New York, still lifes and more.
At the same time, it’s also entirely apt that this feature isn’t just an adjunct to Meyerowitz’s career, given it is so profoundly about Joel and Maggie’s marriage, a kind of passionate truce (as its title suggests) between two equally forceful and charismatic characters. As we see here, the two struggle with the way Joel’s fame and career so often overshadow Maggie’s, personally and professionally. It’s a constant push-pull friction-producing mechanism that suddenly flares up into a massive dressing down from a furious Maggie, invoking decades worth of resentments and slights, when Joel carelessly refuses to take a phone call in another room from the one she’s resting in. The sequence is pure magic: fascinating, compelling and repellent in equal measure, spontaneous and just a bit performative too. It’s the kind of material that’s a cinematic Rorschach blot, capable of being read any which way, depending on the viewer’s perspective. And how apt it is that the film was itself made by a married couple, Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter – who, like Maggie and Joel, come from different cultures and disciplinary backgrounds.
Continue reading...Trying to dazzle others with our brilliance all the time can lead us into dark places and take us further away from who we really are
Many of us suffer from a wish to be special. We toil away in the unconscious belief that a special person is a better person, and a special life is a better life. Whether that specialness is conferred by the glamour of celebrity or social media likes, or by the dignified success of reaching the top of your profession, or by the glow of being anointed head girl (no, I wasn’t, and I’m not bitter about it, not at all), this craving to be raised above others, to be “the special one”, can lie at the heart of everything we do.
This wish might be lurking under the making and breaking of your relationships, as you seek the person who will make you feel special, and reject the ones who don’t. It might hide in the extra hours you spend in the office to get something “just right” for your boss, rather than settling for good enough. It might ring out with the alarm that wakes you far too early to train for a marathon, or to perfect a yoga pose.
Continue reading...I wrote a romantic fantasy for myself to cope with my fear and vulnerability. Would it hold?
It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Which is a bold claim about a breakup with someone I’d known for all of 18 months. I can be a little dramatic sometimes. But honestly? Not about this. I have never known agony like it. An older pain, the kind caused by far more shocking blows dealt to me in the past, seemed to lie dormant in my bones until the anguish of heartbreak reanimated it. I felt all of it – the old pain and the new – erupt at once. My body was burnt up by it.
In part, the devastation was caused by the rupture catching me unaware, like a natural disaster no one sees coming. It had been my private little earthquake, and it razed me to the ground. Many of us have experienced this kind of breakup. The kind that nothing prepares you for. The kind that leaves you existentially unstable. The kind where the only reasonable response to the first note of an Adele song on BBC Radio 2 is to wrench the car radio out by brute force and toss it out of the window.
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