Insecurity, Love, and Debating Monogamy
How developing my spiritual gifts helped me heal and grow in my capacity for love
When I first set out to become a screenwriter, the year after I graduated from USC’s screenwriting MFA program, I rebelled against the type of writer my professors told me I was supposed to be (someone who writes dark sad indie films and/or thrillers, which is what I was encouraged to write in school) and I wrote what I actually wanted: two R-rated “anti-romantic” rom coms with strong female leads.
It was these two rom coms that got me my first agent and my first paid job as a screenwriter, for Universal. Not long after, in an unaffiliated general meeting my agents sent me on, an executive asked me why an ostensibly smart woman who went to Dartmouth and USC, who was interested in math and science and seemingly had the capacity to write well in different genres, would choose to waste my time on such a historically trivialized genre as the romantic comedy.
“I want to excavate love in all its forms,” I said. “My goal as a writer is to illuminate what it means to love.”
The executive stared at me with a confused look on his face for a moment.
“What does love have to do rom coms?” he asked. He then went on to explain, without a hint of irony, “Rom coms are all about boy wants girl, boy loses girl and faces obstacles, boy gets girl in the end. It’s a very simple formula, and the story ends before love even starts. If love even exists.”
IF LOVE EVEN EXISTS.
The truth is, my favorite rom coms all grapple with the complexities of love.
I have also, perhaps not coincidentally, not yet succeeded in getting any rom com I wanted to write produced and distributed to viewers.
I have a lot of unexpressed thoughts on love.
There was a long period of my life when I wasn’t actually sure what “love” meant. I definitely knew I felt it for some people, but for much of my life, and I think this is true for many of us, I didn’t know where love ended and so many other things began, things that so often get bundled up with love, like sex, romance, loyalty, blood lines, cultural norms, duty, and the weight of obligation that love creates, etc.
It was only after my partner, Jehangeer, died, and I opened myself up to being a medium, that I really felt I better understood, through the loss of this magical person who had modeled healthy love for me in a very beautiful and consistent way. Jehangeer was and continues to be my greatest teacher in love. The most surprising thing to me as a medium is how consistently love, when felt through the lens of the other side, as a medium in messages for others, feels largely the same, regardless of whether it is the love of family, friends, or romantic partners. In the big picture, although sometimes they come up as worth mentioning in evidential readings, sex and romance often have very little to do with the essence of the LOVE that remains, even when I am giving messages from romantic partners who are deceased.
From the other side, authentic love is all sort of the same thing, and I think that is a hopeful thing to remember for those whose romantic love stories have not followed traditional playbooks. There can be a feeling of FOMO if you don’t find “The One” or don’t have a lasting life-long romance, but the truth is, all the love we find in this life kind of leads to the same place. As a writer, I have always hoped to have an opportunity to excavate and illuminate the great richness of having the courage to love.
In Lady Bird, there is a beautiful exchange that gets at what love can be:
“You clearly love Sacramento.”
“I do?”
“You write about Sacramento so affectionately, and with such care.”
“Well, I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love.”
“Sure. I guess I pay attention.”
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. There’s a funny moment in this story when two characters get in a fight over the misuse of the words “vassal” vs “vessel” when talking about love.
Is love a feeling or an action? Is it attention? Is it presence? Is it warmth and fondness, joy and delight in the presence or company of another? Is it attachment? Is it having a sense of safety? Is it familiarity? Is it consistency of presence? Is it overwhelming? Is it a feeling of addiction? Is it willingness to feel anxiety or worry about someone else? Is it a feeling of being tethered to someone else? Is it a desire to grow and heal oneself for the sake of another? Is it giving someone the ever-renewing promise of a clean slate? Is it compassionate? Is it a willingness to be patient? Is it wanting the best for someone? Is it a willingness to speak hard truths that need to be said? Is it all the feelings a new mother has for her child? Is it the desire to be generous? Is it unconditional? Is it having humility? Is it having faith in someone else? Is it the act of giving the gift of radical acceptance? Is love the choice to enjoy someone’s presence despite the risks of having to grieve their absence? Is it a feeling of contentment? Is it persistent? Is it the desire to please another? Is it the willingness to try and make an effort on behalf of someone? Is it just a fantasy? Is it tolerance for the perceived imperfections of others?
When I think about this last one, tolerating the imperfections of others, I think of what Guillermo del Toro once said at a panel where I got to hear him talk. He said, “What if our defects are just virtues badly looked at?” This is an insight I have cherished and thought of often, and it helped me become a better teacher to my students.
I think Jesus put it well (and I think much the power of his name comes from his ability to see this profound truth and state it so simply) when he said, “God is love.”
There’s a great scene in Before Sunrise where Julie Delpy’s character tries to say the same thing in a more nuanced way, “I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
Judd Apatow once said, and I’m paraphrasing what I remember, that when it comes to writing stories, love is really just hope.
Two of my favorite rom coms, You’ve Got Mail and Up in the Air, both deal with very messy situations and characters grappling with the value of love.
The first is about an emotional affair that helps people get out of relationships they are ill-suited for. It is also a story affirming the power finding a strong match in love that fills your life with joy, and it also deals with overcoming mistakes, grappling with guilt after hurting someone who you love, and the power of forgiveness. I love that this movie is about two people who are healing and growing toward each other. The second is a movie about a man whose fundamentally innocent and loyal nature has been badly wounded by something we never fully get to see explained, and maybe that is by design and part of the brilliance of this film that we never fully know why. There are good hints in the relationship dynamics at the wedding that feel real and satisfying enough to see why Ryan Bingham is a man who chooses loneliness over the pressures of obligation and duty that he demonstrably believes are bundled up with love. He’s a character who easily gets swept up in a romantic fantasy and who chooses a life in which he sees only what he wants to see in his current romantic object of desire, a common phenomenon that occurs in many situations in life and love — The Ostrich Effect. The gut punch awakening at the end of this film, when he realizes he’s unwittingly gotten involved with a married woman with kids, is an achingly great and unexpected moment that feels relatable, true, and full of all the messy stuff of life.
Both grapple with one of the biggest enduring hot topics in romance: infidelity.
For a long time, I thought infidelity was the worst thing that could happen to a loving relationship. Now I know that is not true. Infidelity is usually not that big of a deal compared to death, which is obviously a far more insurmountable obstacle.
Grief has the unrivaled capacity to shine a spotlight on all the ways we failed someone we loved while they were here. I would have described myself when I met Jehangeer as someone who struggled with a lot of insecurity in love. Although I know he largely felt loved, I have had to grapple in his absence with the pain of seeing the ways I failed to love him as fully as I could have while he was here. After losing Jehangeer so unexpectedly three and a half years ago, I got thrust into grieving this man who taught me both to love myself more and to love others more generously. I believe the most honest and fullest manifestation of love requires engaging in the balancing act between self-love and generosity with love for others.
One of the biggest things romantic love gets bundled up with is monogamy and fidelity, and it is something I have questioned philosophically since Jehangeer died. While he was alive, I had recurring nightmares, largely unfounded in reality, that Jehangeer was going to leave me for some mysterious “other woman”. It was very confusing and painful to have these dreams, and they created a great fear that ruled too many of my choices in waking life, despite the fact that they had very little to do with his core character or treatment of me. It was something we got past, but the fear and the uncertainty I struggled with that he might leave me one day for someone else was easily the greatest thief of joy at the beginning of our otherwise mostly joyful and happy love story.
The night before he died, I had a particularly vivid nightmare that it had finally happened: he told me he was leaving to go be with a therapist named Lauren (a woman who was in my dream was a very different person than his friend in real life, Lauren, who also happened to be a therapist). Later on, through a grief group on Facebook, I met a film producer who has had similar experiences with communication with his dead wife, Lauren, and he later disclosed to me he was the father of one of Jehangeer’s former patients. Lauren had died very unexpectedly in her sleep in her 50s, similar to how unexpectedly Jehangeer had died, not long before he passed away. Since then, I have sometimes wondered if my own anxiety had added an assumption that this involved some kind of infidelity or romance in my nightmare, when perhaps it had simply been psychic information to help prepare me a tiny bit for the great shock that was coming later that day, that Jehangeer was very abruptly going to go to where this therapist Lauren already was.
Of course, when I had the dream, I couldn’t have know this was the point. It was such a vivid and painful dream that I could barely wake up that morning, and I felt unjustly grumpy at him as I was first waking up. We smoothed it over quickly, but it was hard, in my grief, to know that this was how our last morning together began. I have comforted myself with the knowledge that time is sort of an illusion, and last moments are not more important than any others. Much more important is simply to love and enjoy full moments all along the way.
In retrospect, it was easy to see my insecurity about him leaving me for another woman, which was my greatest fear, was really just the fear of loss generally, imperfectly translated through the filter of my unique conditioning as a person. As someone who grew up inside a community of fundamentalist Christians who held very patriarchal values, I grew up believing one of the worst betrayals that could happen to a woman in love, was infidelity, and that I needed to be constantly hypervigiliant to this potential looming threat to my well-being.
In my life with Jehangeer, particularly in the earlier part of our relationship, although he was a very loyal partner, I had a hard time accepting how many women he maintained platonic, deep, loving connections with, including ex-girlfriends who he kept around in his circle of friends. He told me my feminism was at odds with my discomfort with his friendships, and he was not wrong, but it still got under my skin, and shamefully, this was the core of many of our early conflicts in love. It bothered me partly because I knew I wasn’t getting it quite right, but I also felt like too much of his love and attention, even if it wasn’t romantic love, went to other women, and that not enough of it went to me, and something that got imprinted in my upbringing made me feel this was wrong. Some therapists like Stan Tatkin, who talk about attachment styles, call this topic more generally “problematic thirds.”
Based on what I knew of love when I first met Jehangeer, I wanted desperately to feel that I was his, that I belonged to him, and although he was very generous and faithful in his love, he resisted this idea that love ought to be treated like possession.
Looking back on it now, with the greater perspective I have gained as a medium, there is very little in my past I feel more ashamed of than this fundamentally insecure attitude about love that I had when I had the opportunity to share my life and home with someone with whom I desperately wanted to get it right. At my worst moment, I once unfairly accused Jehangeer of being stingy with his love, treating his love for me as if were a scarce resource he had to carefully ration out to me in limited quantities in case it might run out. The truth of how he loved me was very much the opposite. Now, I see that his love was and is abundant, as all authentic love is. “Manifestation” and “abundance” are trendy terms in the spiritual circles I am often lumped in with. They are terms lumped under an umbrella of “woo woo” that, fairly or not, often makes my skin crawl. I think the real secret to life, and the abundance worth manifesting, is the abundant harvest that comes from being authentic and generous with love.
I didn’t actually want to belong to him. I wanted to belong with him.
I wanted to feel considered and included and like I was part of the fun of his life, like I was cherished, which was in essence much of the same thing he was grappling with by trying to hold onto and tend to everyone in his life who had ever showed him love. After he died, I had this thought many times, that if it had been me gone instead, I so badly would have wanted Jehangeer to have all the love he could find around him. I wouldn’t have begrudged any of it. The times he prioritized caring for me over his own needs or giving love of his social circle to appease my insecurities are moments of my own smallness from the past that I most deeply regret. It wasn’t him, but me, who had been needlessly stingy with love at times.
And yet, I wasn’t wrong to desire his presence and attention and inclusion in his life, either. I wasn’t wrong to desire feeling safety in love. I just didn’t know then what I know now: that the best way to get the first two was not by being possessive but by being generous and light-hearted in giving love instead of looking for evidence of all the ways it was not being given to me. I also didn’t understand that the third thing I was seeking, a sense of safety, could only truly come from inside me.
Security and safety in love cannot be guaranteed by anyone else, no matter how well someone treats you, if you don’t first have your own sense of inner stability and self-confidence needed to cope with uncertainty. One of the first things I heard Jehangeer say to me when I started understanding I could still somehow “hear” him as medium was, “Your love is a gift.” If this is translated a slightly different way, it could also be, “Love is the gift of presence.”
I have thought about this a lot since Jehangeer died in trying to imagine going down the scary path of trying to find love again and also trying to date again, and I think now love can be many things: friendship, pets, family, mentorship, creative collaboration. It might be more balanced to think of romantic love as the dessert in the meal of a full life I create for myself, rather than the building blocks of the main course, as we are so often conditioned to think about finding “The One,” or in the case of many of us starting over, the next one…
One of the hardest parts of having the man I love die is working up the courage to try to date again, even with this more balanced perspective. One of the things I hate most about the current dating culture is the three letters I see so often now on dating profiles: ENM. And it bugs me that I hate it.
Ethically Non-Monogamous sounds so enlightened, doesn’t it?
Yet when I see these three little letters on any profile, admittedly, my skin crawls. My gut instinct says, most people who say this are probably just looking to justify treating their partner poorly. These three letters trigger immediate feelings of judgement, and I know judgement means I’m triggered. Anytime we objectify someone instead of seeing them as human, it’s because we’ve been triggered in some way. Our judgements of others are more about ourselves than anything.
The funniest thing about my great fear that Jehangeer might not be faithful is that I had only ever dated one man who was not faithful, and he had told me from the very start that he wasn’t looking for anything serious because he was recently divorced. But I buried my head in the sand because something unhealed in me needed to romanticize him.
Ironically, the very first guy I tried to date after Jehangeer died was unfaithful and lied about it to me repeatedly. He is now seriously partnered with the woman I unwittingly overlapped with for a few months, and I am not mad about it anymore. I wasn’t ready to meet anyone seriously when this happened, and it was clear when we all had dinner together, they were a much better fit for each other. As Amy Schumer so aptly said in a stand up comedy show of hers I saw after Jehangeer died, “Marriage is finding someone who can f-ing stand you.”
My great fear of being cheated on, when it actually happened, hurt my feelings for a few weeks. My great fear turned out to be relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. There is nothing like grieving the death of someone you love and wanted to spend your whole life with to make most things living people do, even when it isn’t great, seem much easier to cope with.
Something I no longer have an answer to is how to think about monogamy in love. I am still pretty keen on the idea of one romantic partner to love, at least, one at a time. Is monogamy just the vestigial tail of the patriarchal power structures that we no longer need in an era close enough to equal rights, accurate DNA tests to determine paternity, still reasonably good access to birth control, clear inheritance laws, and as of now still good access to healthcare?
Can I even call myself monogamous in a new relationship if I still deeply love Jehangeer? Overall I think I still like and prefer the idea of monogamy as a general goal, but it no longer has so much power over me. I think it’s good to look at situations objectively and be open to seeing the truth, I think good boundaries matter, but I don’t think it makes sense to look at other women with suspicion or waste energy on fear a partner will cheat. Worrying about infidelity definitely doesn’t deserve as much bandwidth as I though.
Still, I do believe that one of the great and unique gifts of being a body, in linear time, is one of the things that makes being alive different than being dead (which I think is more about conscious existence that is out of time vs in linear time). Life now is an opportunity to make choices of where to focus our attention in the present moment. One great gift promised by the ongoing effort to be monogamous in love and have one romantic partner is the ability to focus and give attention. Jehangeer’s reason for choosing to stick with the conventions was fairly pragmatic: “I don’t have enough time and energy to juggle multiple romantic relationships... Getting one relationship right is hard enough.” It annoyed me when he said this, but I have appreciated this sentiment more with time. The one man I dated before Jehangeer, the one who wasn’t monogamous and told me so up front, consciously chose this based on the fact that he travelled for work frequently for months at a time. At the time, it felt like a choice of disrespect to me, and it no longer does. What once hurt my feelings is something I now feel compassion for. It was clear it was more about his desire to live in the present and cope with loneliness inside the reality of his career.
Love is abundant, and I don’t have to stop loving Jehangeer to love someone else, just like I don’t suddenly love my first nephew less because my sister had another baby after him. It has helped me relax to think of monogamy more like a helpful strategy in general to love someone well in a long-term partnership. But as my own mistakes in the past make clear, even living up to the perfectly good ideal of monogamy as a way to prioritize attention can be flawed if rigid adherence to this way of building a life impedes rather than enhances our capacity to fill up our lives with love. Honesty, authentic presence, and generosity in love all matter far more to me personally, and I wish I had prioritized those over fear and broken cultural conditioning about how I can best ascertain my value to my partner in love. A far better question than “Do they respect me enough?” is, “Am I fulfilled and happy enough here?”
And I think perhaps a better question than whether to choose one way of living or another is simply to ask questions and be authentic to personal truth. A question that helps me in many situations is, “what is the most loving choice here?” And if the most loving choice is different for different people in the situation in a way that is in conflict, sometimes I ask, “what is the most loving choice for myself?” And other times, I may ask, “what is the most loving choice for the most vulnerable person in this situation?”
While I have sometimes regretted having poor boundaries and have often struggled to know when love is being bundled up with something else, I have never regretted being generous with love itself.
Your essay emotionally grabbed me; so intimate and vulnerable. And I felt pulled close to you. And I loved that bit of script from Ladybird. I LOVED it!
You touch on profound questions, each which I felt deeply as you raised them. What a comprehensive meditation on the most important topic a human can care about!! As a medium you no doubt spend massive energy grappling with these thoughts. Thank you for sharing your insight and experience in essay form. I can only add to this array of emotions an example of love I heard yesterday. A friend who is a home health care aide described to me a client who has endured Alzheimer’s for 8 years. His wife of 57 years, while leaving to others the physical work of moving him and changing his bed, nevertheless sits with him during waking hours. My friend says the wife “lotions him, holds his hands and sings to him. She cleans him up, his face and brushes his hair…” I seriously question if I would have the patience to exhibit such radically amazing love. The wife said while she was carrying their third child a complication placed her on a strict two-month bedrest, during which her husband cared for her. I have to quote my friend again: “She said he carried her to and from the toilet and he bathed her, washed her hair, even painted her toenails soft pink and he did it all with a smile on his face, like it was his most important job in the world.” Whew. I must conclude those two were “meant” for each other. After hearing about this I felt great comfort in your essay, which is more in line with how I process love and its many ramifications.