How To Be A Better Lover
tips for establishing a delusional grandiosity in your own life
I love to be delighted.
I love to giggle and I love to gasp and I love to be charmed and to be smitten and to be enthralled. These lovely delights have lovely ends, epilogues written with laughter and curiosity.
To become a lover, you must read. And watch movies and TV in abundance. And take in plays and musicals and memoirs and essay collections. Go to the opera or the ballet—you can dress up in a $15 Goodwill gown and long gloves and you can usually get cheap tickets if you’re under thirty. Many things may be boring or arduous, but it’s far better to be bored in feathers and furs than to be bored in the blue light cast by a three-hour doom-scroll. The more ideas you have in your brain—regardless of if they are yours or not—the more ways you have to consider the world, even the tiny things that don’t feel like considering. Listen to Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens and imagine yourself as a seventeen-year-old summer camp councilor somewhere in the Poconos sometime in the 1970s. Take in excellent art and take in trashy mass media but shy away from the mediocre. Go to the jazz bar on Cuban jazz night and order a Manhattan and go to the Jersey Shore and wear an air-brushed t-shirt you bought on the boardwalk. Listen to everything everyone says to you and make them hand-made cards on their birthday.
It is imperatively important to be passionate without being defensive.