#12: Dear Baby: On sex, New York, and body hair

Plus a weird photoshop of me

Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,

Welcome to Dear Baby (which is “Dear Abby” scrambled….hope you love that), my asked-and-answered column that runs on the last Sunday of the month. This week I’m covering: desire in long-term relationships, my writing process, making friends in New York, my inner conflict vis-a-vis fashion, and body hair. Are your ears closed or are they perked? Ideally perked but there’s a lot going on right now so I understand if not.

Also wanted to give you all a heads up that I’ll soon be launching a paid component of Maybe Baby, to which Dear Baby will be exclusive along with a few other perks (all other newsletters will remain free!), so this will likely be the last free one. More on all that in July, and thank you so so much if you’re already a supporter of Maybe Baby on Patreon (when I launch the paid subscription service on Substack you’ll be the first to know/join). I will never be doing sponsored content on here, so being reader-supported would be a dream and an honoür. Now let’s get to the questions.

An Evergreen Question on Life/Love

“Do you believe it’s possible to have intense passion and psychological safety in the same romantic relationship long term?”

This question perfectly embodies the “safety versus freedom” debate, which is one of my favorite things to ponder and write about, not only in the context of romance but life in general. I think of the tension between the two as a kind of life force, because we all want both and yet implicitly understand one must be sacrificed for the other: You can either be home safe or you can be out and vulnerable. You can live where you know or move somewhere you don’t. You can do what you’ve done before or try something new. When I reflect on my life, most points of conflict revolve around the negotiation between these two qualities, and most points of growth come from recognizing (over and over, always in new ways) that I can’t have both.

When I feel indecisive, the question at the heart of the problem is often: Do I want to feel safe or do I want to feel free? And I think most of my ennui comes from convincing myself that if I think hard enough or wait long enough I won’t have to choose, which makes me feel like a victim of the right thing not happening rather than an agent of my own life. I don’t completely blame me for this—the desire for both is baked into the American mythology, whereby you can supposedly have it all if you just do everything right. It’s baked in the Westernized love mythology, too, whereby if you find the right person, you can enjoy a life of passion and excitement as well as unconditional love and security with one partner for 50+ years. Both ideas probably set us up for failure.

In the context of relationships, psychotherapist Esther Perel refers to the safety-versus-freedom debate as “love versus desire,” or the essential paradox of love. In her famous book Mating in Captivity (which I referenced in a previous newsletter as a book that transformed how I think about love and sex), she examines and diagnoses the Western trope of desire dying out in long-term relationships. In the book she explains love as the experience of “having” someone, and desire the experience of “wanting” someone. This is the paradox, and she believes all relationships are defined by the push and pull between both. In her estimation, the Westernized love ideal does include desire/wanting, but the way we practice it often precludes it: There is a sense of ownership inherent to our idea of love. We must tell each other everything, rely on one another for everything, have eyes only for each other. This leaves many people feeling let down despite doing everything “right.”

Her solution for long-term monogamous couples who want to achieve that balance is to make a concerted effort to nurture “separateness” in the relationship—that is, not just foster individual lives and interests, but also acknowledge and embrace that you cannot fully know or have your partner, and that their attraction and interests will lie beyond just you. This distance is something we all understand in the beginning of a relationship, which is part of the excitement of early love (there’s a thrill to not knowing everything), and if we hope to maintain that long-term, we have to be willing to endure some of that risk over time. When I first saw this articulated in Mating in Captivity, I was terrified. I knew I wanted what she was saying, this balance between having and wanting, but sacrificing some of my security to get it felt alien to me.

In the years since I’ve made it a more active consideration in my relationships. When I started to reframe my partner’s unknowability as an exciting thing rather than a threat, it opened me up to so many possibilities. It’s made me less jealous, more curious, and less bound by the idea of commitment I grew up with. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch—Avi and I come back to these ideas all the time—but I do think that internalizing the tradeoff of safety and freedom has changed how I think about love. And life, too. It asks us to consider not “how can I have it all?” but “what do I really want, and what am I willing to sacrifice for it?”

Writing About Writing

When you sit down to type your newsletters do you just start in and see what emerges or do you journal or make notes or some other method of gathering your thoughts over the week? A continuation of this question might be do you prefer to handwrite or type generally? Trying to find a flow for myself and a process that works and I'm just interested in how others write.

I do a combination of everything! When I sit down to write for Maybe Baby, the first thing I do is refer to my Notes app, where I keep a note called “Newsletter” pinned to the top, and copy/paste everything I’ve jotted down that week—random ideas, realizations, or recommendations—into a fresh Google doc. (For instance, two things on my list for next week are “the pleasure of a house hoodie” and “mushroom math in the trees.”) This way I don’t have to rely on a spontaneous stroke of inspiration and can instead sort through my ideas and see what’s clicking for me that day. Sometimes something I assumed I would write more about just becomes a one-liner in my recs section, or vice versa, and I appreciate having that flexibility once I’m actually writing. When I was working full-time as an editor I didn’t really have that luxury—it was a running joke around the office that you often got “stuck” with your own pitch, a stupid idea you had once and then brought to a pitch meeting (probably because you were too busy to think of more pitches) and now had to write 500 words on.

Once I get writing I don’t always know where it’s going, and that’s one of the joys (and frustrations) of the process. My best advice for getting through that is learning the difference between what I call “the bad part” a.k.a. when the process of translating thoughts to words is so difficult you want to crawl out of your skin but should keep trying anyway, and burnout, when it’s actually not best to force it (ed note: see this flowchart to tell the difference). I also edit while I’m writing, and then do a heavier round again when I’m finished. Entire paragraphs are cut, the thesis is changed, the end moves to the beginning, etc etc. (As an editor I can always tell when a writer skips this part!) In the end my newsletter is usually still a little too long, but I send it anyway and accept that my open rate will hover around 70% because a third of my audience won’t be up to reading it. This does make me feel a little guilty.

The other thing I rely on is Pocket, an app where I store all the articles I want to read and have already read. When I get to my recommendations section, I will go to my Pocket archive and see what I read that week to see if I want to pass anything on. Or I might read a few things I’ve been meaning to read if I think they might resonate.

Oh and I could never handwrite. My weak left hand would give out within two sentences. I also rework every sentence like 10 times so it just wouldn’t make sense.

Friendship in a Lonely Place

What was it like to move to New York without knowing many people (or anyone)? I lived in New York very briefly and found it to be immensely lonely. However, I loved the city itself, and would like to give it another go. How did you do it? And by do it, I mean, make friends? How did you create a life for yourself in a strange, new, often unfriendly place? 

I was lucky in that both of my siblings (Andy and Kelly, two and three years older respectively) lived in New York when I moved here. It was a huge draw, since we’ve been strangely attached since we left our hometown of Mountain View, California. We all went to school at Cal Poly, studied business, worked in the same computer lab, moved to San Francisco after graduation, then New York. Basically I’ve trailed them everywhere because I’m obsessed with being together, so that was a comfort. Still, when I got here I was crushed by the anxiety of starting a new career and life, and found that first year incredibly difficult even as it was exhilarating. I wrote about that time in a piece called “10 Things I’ve Learned Since Moving to New York,” a rare old one that doesn’t make me cringe (I guess I’m nostalgic).

Brief pause while we observe the strange photoshop that was used as the feature image for that essay:

Another year later I was still occupied by what I felt was lacking in my social life (“Does Everyone Have a Friendship Complex or Just Me?”), a reckoning that ultimately led me to reframe my relationship with friendship to one of social nourishment over box-checking. We’re fed so many narratives about what friendship means or should look like, and I think everyone needs to rewrite that definition for themselves. In time I also learned that I just needed to be a bit more patient. Four years later I feel super fulfilled by my social network in New York, and even though I do owe a lot of that to reaching out and making time (a lot of “Hey! Want to grab a coffee/drink?” and then staying in touch afterward), it was also just by simply living here for a while. The connections come in time, and are often random, so I think as long as you stay open and shameless and say “yes,” the city will do a lot of the work for you. It’s special in that way.

Shopping “Politically”

How do you square your own consumerism (especially around clothing) with your critiques of late capitalism?

My complicated relationship with fashion was one of my primary drivers for leaving Man Repeller. It started as a more personal crisis and ultimately extended to a more collective concern. The personal crisis was my discomfort with the fact that my clothes could govern my mood, meaning the lens through which I saw the world was connected with my outward appearance. And since my aesthetic tastes were heavily influenced by currents I didn’t completely agree with, my self-worth often felt out of my hands, which I wasn’t okay with. I tried to write about this for Man Repeller, and did a few times, but I distinctly remember being sat down by a higher-up at one point (I believe after this story, wherein I wrote that “my interest in fashion engenders shallowness no matter how I slice it”) and told: If you don’t believe in fashion, maybe this isn’t the place for you. Ultimately they were right, but I waffled for a long time.

If my first set of doubts was born of the idea that “just because an outfit makes you feel good doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for you,” then my second set was born of the idea that “just because an outfit makes you feel good doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.” The harm can cut so many ways: the fashion industry can be exclusionary, exploitive, and wasteful, and relies on a largely predatory ethos whereby its continued success depends on consumer dissatisfaction (this is even true of most “ethical” brands). I felt this at Man Repeller and I feel it as a quasi-influencer: Success is often measured in how much someone looking on wants what’s being presented (and by extension, is dissatisfied by what they already have). This isn’t an exchange I was or am comfortable with—I never wanted my work or self to make anyone feel worse after engaging with it. Beyond that, it of course feeds a capitalist beast that’s breeding mass inequality, global warming, and a hostile quality of life for most people.

That’s not to say I don’t give a shit about style (or that MR can’t cover style in nourishing ways!). I was never passionate about fashion, but I still have an affection for the medium of clothing that feels earnest and joyful, and even a less noble kind, and I’m navigating how to engage with that within a moral and political framework, and in a way that feels additive to my life rather than parasitic. I resist the idea that the solution is only about making better individual consumer choices (over systemic change, which I commit more of my energy to), but I do try to incorporate my ethics when I consume or make business decisions, which I feel a little more flexible to do now that I’m freelance. There is so much more I could unpack here (paid content! media freebies! identity by consumption!) but I’ll save it for a future newsletter.

On Army Hairpits, as My Grandmother Called Them

I would love to hear more about your navigation of being a stylish, feminine, cool woman with body hair! This is personal, but I feel like you can handle it (lol) - I am so comfortable with my bush and think my happy trail (I am sorry, but I don't know what else to call it) may be my cutest feature. The tufts beneath my armpits, which I personally love, seem to start quite a ruckus, however. I am so sick of talking about my fuzzy armpits! Did you have a similar experience? How did you navigate nagging comments from friends and family (assuming you had them)? I decided to stop shaving while in a committed relationship that I am no longer in. I keep thinking about what happens when I am allowed within six feet of a sexy, hot single and god willing we smooch and then it's like, do I have to disclose that I have hairy armpits to this person? Am I tricking guys on Hinge by not revealing my armpit hair? I am so well aware of how silly these questions are, but I mean it when I ask! Would love to hear your thoughts.

Lol. I love you. My relationship with body hair is one of gentle ambivalence. The first time I experimented with actively not shaving my legs (as opposed to just skipping it for months out of laziness), I think I was 24, and I remember being curious and eager to experience being a hairy creature again, and then dreading it after about six months. It was then that I realized how deep my conditioning went, how much I’d internalized a disgust for female body hair, which I couldn’t track to any aesthetic preference absent shame. This was the beginning of my questioning choice feminism. When I moved to New York two years later, I stopped shaving my armpits in a similar attempt to push myself, and I only ever remember having to explain it to someone once! Although my own feelings about it wavered; sometimes I thought it was cute and other times I was embarrassed. I love that you love your happy trail! Was that a hump you felt you had to clear or did you always feel that way? I think a lot of people don’t realize there is an adjustment period where you have to detox your brain.

Today I shave maybe twice a year (when it sounds fun/nice) and give it very little thought. It’s pretty easy to forgo shaving in Brooklyn, where so many femme-presenting people have body hair to the point that it’s almost a kind of status symbol, but also because I have pretty light and thin body hair (this will sound fake but I swear it got thinner after I stopped shaving it…), so in growing mine out I’m not confronting bias as much as others are. Still, I’m grateful for the people in my life and on the internet who have normalized body hair, it’s important work that’s paving the path to reconditioning. It’s also made me pretty resolute that I wouldn’t stand for anyone who tried to dictate my choices, especially a romantic partner (although I will grant someone preferences, whether I heed them or not).

As for announcing it on Hinge, I say let people discover it! You wouldn’t announce it if you shaved, so I don’t think you need to announce it otherwise. Anyone who says you tricked them sucks! A hairy armpit seems pretty low on the list of surprises you might encounter on a date. Or maybe you should use “Would they care?” as a hypothetical litmus test for whether you should even talk to someone in the first place. I feel like that would be pretty effective, because even if someone is new to the idea, any decent person will understand their reticence is worth examining.

This is irrelevant but I’m pretending it’s not because I recently watched this episode of The Sopranos.

Okay that’s all for this week. If you have a question of your own drop it in the comments, otherwise just squeeze the nearest paw for me.

Haley