Some of you will remember my partner John Young Shik Concklin from Let’s Talk last summer. Every year in early January, we celebrate the anniversary of our first date. This year, to honor that, I invited John back for a conversation about love, commitment, and what it means to share a life.
It's been 11 years since our first date, my love. How do you remember it?
Well, let’s go back to 2009. Since a bunch of us east coasters found ourselves in central time, the story begins early, around 7 AM on a bright and unreasonably hot summer day. We were in Oklahoma. I was using my new electronic toothbrush and you, being in the boys’ house suspiciously early in the morning, inquired what it was. A long-play inside joke began to work its way through our conversations. About six months later, on what was an unspecified-but-hoped-for first date, I presented you with a tightly wrapped package containing the newest model.
I had intended it to be a completely platonic gift to congratulate you on finishing your graduate recital back in October of that year, but it was backordered. Consequently, over those three wonderful months between October and our first date, what started as a platonic gesture turned into a full-blown long-distance, Elizabethan romance filled with innuendo and anticipation. Of course, texting wasn't much of a thing yet, and less frequent but more personal emails and phone calls were the modus operandi. So at the time, I remember being aware that something different was happening, but because I had never experienced anything like it before, I wasn't sure what to make of it other than feeling excited to see where it went. Now, a decade later, it is all evidently clear.
As it happened, you planned to travel to Aiken, SC for the holidays, and I, living in Atlanta at the time, wondered aloud if you'd be interested in making the drive to go to the Coca-Cola museum. We agreed to meet at 1 PM at Stats, a local bar and restaurant close to the museum. About six hours later, realizing we had completely missed the museum, we went off to Flip Burger for dinner, then a stop back at Stats for a night cap and to pick up your car. The rest is history. In fact, I'm fairly certain we were on the phone for most of your drive home, save about 20 minutes when you were around Augusta.
Was that when I was busy with the cops? I wasn't sure what it meant that I got a ticket on the way home from our first date, but it seemed positive.
The fall leading to our first date was special in that our correspondence seemingly came out of nowhere. It brought a lot of joy and delight. I remember being shocked at how badly I did want to see you in Atlanta that Christmas.
When I realize 11 years have passed, I feel sad about the way time is slipping through my fingers. I also feel grateful we've been able to live these chapters together. That's including some hard stuff.
Do you think spending 11 years together has shaped who you are? Or maybe you'd be who you are regardless of romantic partnership?
As you are well aware, time fascinates me insofar as it is an ingenious construct of human brains to process the physical stimuli around us—or more specifically, to process the transfer of heat, or entropy. Mind boggling. The way this plays out for me is that I guess I believe we have always been together, will always be together—it's just that you and I can only experience it in one time-direction, not all at once.
Suffice it to say that 11 years has not felt in any way like what the term “decade” connotes. Looking back, I agree with you—my first and overriding feeling is gratefulness for both the good and the difficult.
The easy, happy moments are what I think of first; however, I will say the skills and perspectives resultant from the difficult times are possibly more cherished. Maybe that’s because they feel earned or won, or perhaps because they are clear signposts that signify growth, or times we entered and emerged together. Bottom line, I wouldn't trade anything.
As far as our togetherness shaping me as an individual, the short answer is yes, and with genuine sincerity and awareness of cliche, for the better.
Imagine two balloons tied together floating in the air. The breeze will affect both of them individually and together as a unit. But they will also invariably affect one another, which affects the eventual destination. It's like a dance.
Right, and there are times where it’s easier to approach life as two balloons tied together, and times where it makes things more challenging. Balancing two creative careers, for example, is significantly harder than managing one—a feat in itself, these days. I wouldn’t trade anything either, not only because of the loving moments we’re trying to shape a life around, but because we’ve faced so many big issues like our house burning down, careers being spread across multiple cities, and family surprises of the worst kind. Those things were challenging to face as partners, but would have been harder to navigate alone.
A dance is a wonderful description, because I’ve learned a lot—and am still learning—about the give and take of when to put my own needs first, and when to focus on the other person’s. The year we lived in Nashville, for example, was hard because I desperately wanted to be back in New York. But staying true to the priorities we’ve chosen, I went to Tennessee with you and ended up with amazing friends and life-shaping moments of my own. So supporting your needs opened doors for mine to be met, too.
We entered the job market at the end of the recession and, as a result, struggled to find stability. We worked our @$$e$ off and held multiple jobs, including low-paying stints in retail for both of us and a 5 AM Starbucks shift for you, before finally feeling our feet were on the ground. We didn’t have family safety nets to fall back on, and things felt incredibly precarious—though of course I benefitted in some ways from being a white cis woman.
Once we were finally stable, we made the perhaps-questionable, perhaps-brilliant, perhaps-stark-raving-mad decision to turn everything on its head. We left our jobs to pursue things we really believe in. I wanted to be part of creating a more loving, equitable world and contribute to the healing of humanity on some level but wasn’t sure how, and you committed to your most serious of many talents—music. You also stayed active in nonprofit anti-poverty work. Do you want to say anything about how those decisions have affected us?
In my own life, I’ve learned to seek out the feeling that I am being pulled through life rather than pushing. In my experience the former allows space for less doing, pleasant surprises, and a more zoomed-out perspective at any given moment. I’ve found that the pushing approach, which I used to do at 150%, inevitably leads to wheel spinning, is barraged by disappointment, and is so close to the weeds that even small setbacks feel like a big deal. Moments of success are forsaken for more pushing. There are moments where pushing forward is required, but doing so relentlessly over time is unsustainable.
I think at some point, whether we explicitly said it or not, we chose to make our lives and our union about mastery. Not mastery in the technical sense, although that is often part of it; it’s mastery in the spiritual sense. Masters of all ilk appear to share a similar spirit, perspective, wisdom, self-awareness, and kindness that is intangible and transcendental. Perhaps it’s the achievement of Zen, Nirvana, Bodhi, enlightenment, or, in the religious framework we grew up in, ascension or salvation.
So we’ve kept that in mind for all of our work. It should pay the bills, yes, and be fulfilling. But we hope it also serves ourselves and humanity.
There have been gut-wrenching moments where things didn’t work out the way we wanted; there have also been successes beyond what we could have imagined; but looking at the big picture, we’ve only just begun. The balance is toward the positive, and our direction, examined from all angles, feels aligned.
Yeah. Since I’m socially-conditioned as female, I’m not comfortable with words like “mastery.” That’s why you’re here. Put another way, we are trying to shape our life around a value system that centers freedom, creativity, justice, and service. There’s an expansiveness of spirit I feel when things are flowing for us that I never want to trade.
The other thing I want to say is that because we fall prey to the packaging and commoditization of our lives as quickly as anyone else, we often present a bright and shiny narrative. The highs. When the truth is that both the highs and lows have felt very exaggerated since making those changes.
We have rejoiced, cried tears of joy, become truer and more powerful versions of ourselves. We have also been stretched to our breaking points, felt like giving up, and lived with some pressure and anxiety we’d prefer to be without. Do you agree?
Acknowledging the double standard but setting it aside for now, your description of our joint venture is far more elegant.
Realistically, any significant undertaking involves doubt, setbacks, and moments spent thinking, “What have we done?”
The social media age allows all of us to paper over those things and fool ourselves into thinking others don’t experience it, which only makes everyone feel worse. But everyone encounters struggle and doubt. It’s human nature.
It is. Yet even when people try to share those struggles, with now-legendary “vulnerability posts” online, I find myself resenting how deeply human narratives are squished into flat, one-dimensional boxes for consumption. Jia Tolentino is brilliant on this topic; in Trick Mirror she calls mining our personalities and emotions for content the “last frontier of capitalism.”
I want to close with a classic relationship question.
After that first date, it wasn’t long before we “knew.” We considered ourselves fully “in love” within the month, and I moved across the country to start a life with you six months later. How did you know? Was there a jolt of certainty or a particular moment?
It’s one of those things that’s categorized by a clear before and after. The change occurred somewhere between December 4, 2009, a notable night in our correspondence, and January 4, 2010, the day of our date. Yet, and it’s weird how time works, I can’t pinpoint an exact moment. I can, however, distinctly recall an inexplicably rapid growth of deep care for you.
What took a little time was coming to the realization of what that feeling meant, considering I had never felt such a thing before. So by the time we got to our date-non-date, I can now see that I was already convinced. Maybe that’s why, subconsciously, I brought a gift.
Put in a cliched but more concise way, at our first date, I already couldn’t imagine my life without you.
Nothing I say could top that. On my side, I remember feeling pleasantly bewildered, delighted but uncertain, repeatedly following a feeling that said in my gut, over and over again: Yes.
Between you and me—
In case you missed it, this year we’ve discussed the stories we should carry forward, cultivating the kind of love that drives change (and making soup), the complexities of entering a new political era, and tending your inner flame. I’m really glad you’re here.
WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE is written by Lauren Maxwell. If you’d like to support this newsletter, you can become a sponsor, click the heart, share online, or forward to a friend! It all helps. Many blessings.