BETWEEN US
julian
I was not a man looking for a woman. I thought my life was full. There was no available real estate in it for anybody else, and I hadn’t been pretending otherwise.
I had been planning to die that man. The shape of my life got decided when I was nineteen, and I’d lived inside that shape ever since.
The first time I saw Alyssa was not on that football field. It was over a year before that, at my nephew’s birthday party in New Jersey. If you’ve been with our family since the beginning, you might remember that party. You didn’t know that you’d watched me meet my wife.
Here’s the thing about not looking. If you’ve built a life that doesn’t require anyone, if you’ve made your peace with that, it may find you anyway.
It doesn’t care about your certainty, or the life you were planning to die inside of.
It comes when it comes. The question is whether, when it does, you have the discipline to stand still long enough to know what you’re looking at.
I was not that man at that birthday party. It took me a while to become him.
I’ve always been a provider. My father raised us knowing that a man who carries weight is a critical thing. A man who shows up, protects, keeps the lights on, and fixes the broken thing before anybody asks. That’s part of what a man is supposed to be.
Falling in love did not make me a different man. I’m still the one who shows up. Still the CEO. Still the brother who answers the phone at three in the morning, the man at the grill cooking for everybody. None of that changed. None of it is going to.
What changed is that I learned that showing up was not the entirety of me.
I had built my entire understanding of myself around what I did for the people I loved. I was the one who handled it. That was my identity. I was a man with a function. Take care of them.
I was good at that function. I grew a company on it, got celebrated for it. I never noticed that a function is not a person.
The function was the wall I built around the man I was afraid to be. I was afraid of becoming my father, and I decided I would not be. So I built a function-shaped life, so that no matter what happened to me, no matter who I lost, my function would keep running.
A person can be broken. A function cannot.
Then a woman stormed across a football field at me, and she did not see my function. She saw the man.
I’m grateful for it.
So. You’re allowed to be a provider. Stay one. Provide for your family until the day you die. Don’t let anybody shame you out of the urge to handle things, because that urge is good.
But do not be only that. Because if you are only that, then one day you are going to meet a woman who loves you, and she is going to want to give you something, and you won’t know how to take it.
She might keep trying. But then one day she’ll stop, and you’ll be sitting without her, wondering what happened.
You might think she stopped loving you. She didn’t. She got tired of trying to love a function.
If you are someone who keeps giving and giving and giving, never once letting anybody give back to you, that is not love yet. It’s something else. It looks like love and might taste like love, but love goes both ways. It’s just generosity you’re hiding inside of.
I had to learn that from a woman who would not let me hide inside my own generosity.
One more thing, before I hand the rest to my Gorgeous:
Loving a woman who has been through a lot is not the same as loving a woman who hasn’t.
It’s harder. It asks more of you. You have to be careful in the places you least feel like being careful.
It asks you to be patient with a body that has been trained, by everything that came before you, to expect the worst from a man.
You don’t get to be loved by that woman until you’ve been steady for a long time, maybe even with nobody thanking you for it.
I’m telling you that because nobody told me.
I thought the work was the providing, and that the rest would take care of itself.
It doesn’t. Providing is the easy part. The harder part is being received, and being received by a woman who has been hurt is the hardest version of that, because she has been trained to brace against exactly what you’re offering.
She’s not going to come down off that brace just because you told her to. She’s going to come down off it slowly, over a long time, because you kept not giving her a reason to stay up on it.
So be the man who doesn’t give her a reason. For a long time. With no audience.
That is the work.
And the woman on the other side of that work may turn out to be the best thing that will ever happen to you.
— Julian
alyssa
My mother raised five kids by herself. She’s been working since she was sixteen. She did all of it without help, without complaint, and without ever once asking anybody for anything.
That was the lesson, and it came at me from every direction, not just from her.
Handle it. Carry it. Don’t fall apart, don’t ask, don’t wait around for anybody to come save you, because nobody’s coming.
There’s an old Zora Neale Hurston line that says Black women are the mules of the world, and long before I understood what it meant, I was already living it.
I learned that I was the one who was supposed to carry the weight.
So I stopped needing things. It was easier than being disappointed.
Nobody had to teach me to be strong. The world taught me.
Almost every woman I knew was carrying something too heavy with a straight back and a closed mouth.
My mother was a hero, everybody said so, and I was a hero in training.
The women before us had it worse and never complained, so who was I to be tired?
Who was I to want somebody to help me hold it?
By the time I was grown I didn’t know how to be overwhelmed out loud.
I didn’t know how to say this is too much.
I didn’t expect things to change, or to have the fairytale, because fairytales were what happened to other kinds of women, in other kinds of stories.
I was raised to be the one who handles it, and I was so good at it that I forgot it was even a role. I thought it was just me.
I believed that for all of my adult life.
Some of it is true. My mother is a hero. Being able to stand on your own has saved my life more than once, and I’m not giving that up, and I’m not going to apologize for it. Being strong was never my problem.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to let anybody do a single thing for me.
You know about my first marriage. You read what he did. I was married to a man who did not see me. He’d been looking at other women for years, and I’d been standing next to him performing wife, and I did it so long I forgot what it even felt like to have a man actually look at me.
When he was killed, I grieved a lot of things. The family I thought we had. The life I thought I was living. But I didn’t grieve being seen by him, because he hadn’t been seeing me. You can’t miss a thing you weren’t getting.
By the time Julian came around, it had been years since a man had really looked at me. And then Julian looked at me. That’s the only way I know how to explain it.
The first time we met I was a stranger carrying wings off the grill at a party, and he looked at me. The next time I was yelling at him on a football field, and he looked at me. Every time that man got near me he was looking, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Here’s what I want to say to the women living life like I was.
Being strong is not your problem. You built that strength because you needed it, and you might need it again.
But it was never supposed to be the only thing you got.
Somewhere along the way you learned that needing help makes you weak, that letting someone carry something for you means you’ll end up holding the bag when they drop it.
Somebody taught you that. It might even be true about some of the people you’ve known.
It is not true about all of them.
There are people who won’t make you earn their love by handling everything first. Who won’t treat you needing something as a problem. Who will look at you being strong and never expect you to be strong for them.
I have one of those now. And I’ll be honest with you: letting him care about me has been harder than anything else in my life.
Because I know what to do with a hard thing I have to handle myself.
I have no idea what to do with a man trying to hand me something I don’t have to earn or pay him back for.
My whole body panics. I go looking for the catch.
I try to give it right back. I put up a wall.
If you’ve been doing everything by yourself for so long that you forgot there was another way, I want you to hear one thing:
You’re allowed to be cared for. When you’re falling apart, yes, but also when you’re fine. So if it’s being offered to you, take it. Even when it makes your hands shake and your throat go tight, because nobody ever told you that you were allowed.
You’re allowed.
Set one thing down today. Just one. The smallest thing you’re carrying. Let somebody else pick it up.
And see how it feels to have your load lightened for once.
That’s where it started for me.
— Alyssa