Lifestyle
This Valentine’s Day, be grateful a man failed to meet your expectations
I’m so disheartened at the ability of men to work through their emotions. I’ve been chronically lovebombed and ghosted. I changed therapists, did nine months of celibacy, started dating slow and sober, chose more “stable” types and it still happens the same way every time — they ghost and get back with a less challenging ex who they feel more control over, because with them, they’re not required to grow or change. I have a Capricorn Sun, a Taurus Moon, and a Libra ascendant, with Venus in Pisces. Help.
I’m going to (very lovingly and gently) hold your hand when I say this — the fact that you are doing everything “right” and following what you (and even professionals) believe to be the most evolved and healthy way of doing things, does not guarantee that your ideal romantic relationship will materialize in your life at the time that you want it to. Or even in the way that you want it to.
Women are the most empowered they have ever been to be the sorceress of their own success — especially materially. As a Capricorn woman, no doubt you’ve made dedicated efforts toward optimizing your experience of life, and seen well-deserved results. Your frustration at not seeing the same outcome manifest in your dating life is understandable, particularly considering the often-infuriating tendency of men to be less emotionally evolved. (This, of course, is a direct result of how society has, for millenniums, not provided them with the incentive to be anything more than the equivalent of sentient pools of stagnant fleshwater). However, love and relationships constitute a completely different realm, where the rules of girlbossery do not apply. And thank God for that, because don’t us hardworking women deserve a break from having to control everything?
The point of optimism here is that women who have made the commitment to love themselves are providing the societal structure needed to incentivize men to do the same. Women do that with the power of choice. In refusing to engage men who do not meet our needs for partnership, we set a standard that, with time, they will be forced to meet if they indeed do desire the companionship of women. Which they should if they also love themselves. Statistically, men who are equipped to form meaningful long-term relationships with women enjoy better lifelong mental, emotional and physical health, with an increased quality of life as a whole.
The complexity of the situation lies here: The invisible yet palpable alchemy of two souls dancing with each other through life in harmony is just that — a dance. Yes, choreography can add much-needed order and structure to an artistic work. But what makes a dance truly inspiring is the intuitive improvisational style of the dancers themselves, one that can’t necessarily be mapped out and predicted. Humans are not financial milestones or career accolades. They are not an impeccably furnished apartment, or a satisfyingly executed Pilates sequence at the end of a long workweek. Humans are gorgeously asymmetrical, thrillingly undefinable, wonderfully unpredictable — a work of art authored by an infinitely inspired Creator.
The invisible yet palpable alchemy of two souls dancing with each other through life in harmony is just that — a dance.
Goth Shakira wears a Miss Claire Sullivan corset and skirt, Shushu/Tong shoes, Blumarine earring, Hirotaka earring, Pianegonda ring, Xeno underwear and stylist’s own collar.
The magic of encountering a lover who moves your soul involves realizing that while there exists a person who does encapsulate a smattering of critical non-negotiable traits on your list (the “choreography”), it would not be the magic of love without understanding that there are things you could have never predicted you would adore in the first place (the alchemy). It can be anything from a particular vernacular that they only employ when they’re deeply moved, or the way the light falls across a one-in-8-billion facial structure you could never have dreamed of. When we try to control all of the parameters of our attraction and devotion, we leave no room for the great Dancer to improvise the next move in our life. Creativity needs space. And love comes down to divine timing and fortune. That can feel like a threat to the girlboss part of your brain. But it can feel like a salve to the lover girl part of your soul, if you let it.
So what to do about your underwhelming past lovers, your Pisces Venusian yearning, your throbbing heart, your efforts to prepare yourself to love from the most whole place you possibly can? Reframe your mission. Instead of your ultimate goal being the acquisition of an ideal partnership, your task should be becoming the best lover you could possibly be. You’re already doing that.
There is a lot of discourse these days about decentering men, which is healthy. I would go so far as to say that we need to go one step further, by decentering partnership, and centering love. Being alive is an act of love. Let life itself romance you. Be courageous enough to ask it to, every day if you need to. Practice romance in every human connection you have in the exquisite life your sweet Taurus Moon has created for you. Invest, especially, in love of self. Because we can’t wait for men to catch up to us. They need to take responsibility for the quality of life they want in the same way we are. Let them flail. Let them be inadequate. Let them be disappointing. Let them show you if they can’t keep up. And thank the universe for that information, because that is a blessing that shows you when you need to move on to what actually serves you. Trust that your person, the one that is more of a reverie that even your own mind could conjure for itself, will arrive in your life not a moment too soon, nor a moment too late. Enjoy the agency you have over what you can always control, which is your approach to life, your reactions to whatever may occur within it and the degree to and depth at which you choose to love yourself. Know that true love feels peaceful and calm, and trust that you’ll be able to recognize that feeling when it arrives.
Blumarine jacket, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top from Wild West Social House, Jane Wade bra, vintage Maison Margiela pants from Wild West Social House, Narcisz Made shoes, Pianegonda ring, Thirty1 Ring and Ariel Taub earrings.
Reality can hurt, but it presents the gift of sanity. If you know your husband wouldn’t treat you like that, great — that’s not your husband. With every impostor removed from your life, more space is created for your person to move in. Keep doing the things that make you feel powerful and whole. Practice love in all of its forms. Use the skills you’re developing along your journey to be the best friend, family member, colleague, neighbor and lover of self — and above all, lover of life — that you can be. Love yourself by letting go of what was, thankfully, never ours to control in the first place — the divine divination of love. If you position that as your true purpose, a man’s failure to live up to your expectations will cease to debilitate you. You might even end up feeling grateful for it.
In need of relationship advice? Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love. Submit your inquiries here.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo assistant Joe Elgar
Styling assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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