The last frontier of shame is: love ❤️
Hi friend,
can we please take a moment to appreciate the divine tour de force that is Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Little Women? Also, spoiler alert – if you still intend to see the movie (which you should), save this newsletter for later.
I finally went to see it last week, cried more than I did during Titanic at age twelve and am still in absolute awe of what Gerwig has created. I'm especially impressed by how she has taken Jo, who has been an icon for independent women for centuries, and turned her into an even more relatable voice of women today. Without losing any credibility. I mean, can we talk about this monologue?
"Women have minds, as well as just heart; ambition and talent, as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for. But I’m so lonely.”
It's raw, it's true, it's the eternal struggle of being an independent woman in this world. The quest for a successful career as a writer makes Jo lonely, but what makes her even more lonely is that the love she encounters in real life does not at all resemble the love she read about in books.
The magic of this scene, for me, was how it made me overflow with compassion for Jo – and, by extension, for myself. In a sense, leaning into Jo's heartache offered a liberation from the nagging (utterly constructed) dichotomy between the feminist ideals of striving for an independent life and craving romantic love.
I don't know when it happened that wanting love and actively looking for a long-term partner became unfeminist and something to be ashamed of, but here we are.
As with so many things, there's no doing it right: If you're on the dating apps, you're desperate (and there will be plenty of coupled-up people telling you that "you will find love when you stop looking for it"). If you don't date, you're a shrew (same people as above: "you have to put yourself out there if you want to find love"). Or, and this is the worst of all: If you pine for love as a grown woman, you have obviously failed to self-actualize ("maybe try loving yourself first, honey?").
I love Brandy Jensen's very personal take on the matter in this Outline column, and I whole-heartedly agree with everything she says:
"It is humiliating to admit how much I yearn to be in love, which is sort of funny considering admitting humiliating things about ourselves has become a kind of social currency (...) But this confession is not wry or self-deprecating; it is corny."
It is really hard to find a constructive take on it, other than: compassion. We cannot force love, but we can admit that we long for it and allow ourselves to mourn its absence in our lives. And we can allow our friends the same, without offering advice on how they should be feeling. Wanting to be loved is nothing to be ashamed of. It's human.
⭐️ My first #popculturepleasure of the week is right on topic:
I got introduced to the music, or shall I say magic, of Alice Boman this week. Her debut album "Dream On" is absolutely mesmerizing. The melodies are soft and light, the lyrics full of heartbreak and longing – and it's just perfect February music. 🎵
More music, but very different: The 16-year-old in me got very excited when I found out there was a new Nada Surf album out. Rightly, so: "Never not together" is indiepop perfection as it used be, only with even better songwriting. As one of the many impressed reviewers wrote: "like an old friend open to new tricks". 🎵
My excitement over the upcoming Friends reunion got seriously dampened by David Schwimmer's appearance on Table Manners. I dropped everything when the episode appeared in my feed – because #TeamRoss – but my disappointment could not have been greater. I usually do not write things off in this section, but this has to be addressed. He seemed incredibly dull, borderline rude and just really uninvolved in the whole conversation. 🎧
Thankfully, one of my new top three podcasts, the BBC Woman's Hour, came to the rescue and offered a fantastic interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Yes, I have recommended a lot of PWB-content in the past, but I'm sorry, she's amazing. What I like about this interview is that we learn how she developed the role of the hot priest together with an actual priest (not sure if he was as hot as Andrew Scott) and her saying that her best friend is the love of her life – not her partner. 🎧
Needless to say, I'm rewatching Fleabag. Season two, of course.
🇩🇪 Eine Podcast-Empfehlung habe ich noch, und dann lasse ich euch in Ruhe. Ich habe es endlich geschafft, die Hotel-Matze-Folge mit Sabine Rückert zu hören. Dagegen habe ich mich eine Weile gesträubt, weil a) die Folge sehr lang ist und b) Frau Rückert in ihrer Außenwirkung nicht immer eine Ikone des Feminismus ist.
Naja, jetzt wünschte ich, die Folge wäre noch länger und finde Frau Rückert ist eine ziemliche Wucht, im positivsten Sinne des Wortes. Ich habe selten einer Frau zugehört, die sich ihrer selbst so sicher ist, weiß was sie kann und ihre Fehler reflektiert, ohne sich dabei klein zu machen.
So richtig nahbar wird sie, als Matze sie fragt, wie sie ihre Mitarbeiter*innen führt. Daraufhin kommt sie so sehr ins Schwärmen über ihr Team, dass ihr die Tränen kommen. Schließlich sagt sie: "Diese wunderbaren Menschen müssen nicht geführt werden. Man muss nur aufpassen, dass ihnen nichts passiert." Welch ein Glück diese Menschen mit so einer Chefin habe.
❤️ That's it for today. Spread love, spread this newsletter and I'll talk to you next week.
Anna