I ran into an essay today that I’d like to share after Henrik Karlsson was prompted by friends to write about how he found his wife while knowing “nothing” about dating:
Some parts of the essay remind me of the type of communication touched on in our previous feature around redemptive intimacy and this related thought on new intimacies.
Excerpt from the essay:
“When you enter this strange and unstable realm of conversation, you get a lot of information rapidly. I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this. But when I do it with Johanna—especially in the first few years—it was like my entire mental landscape broke apart and all was possibility and flux. As Philip Glass says about his mentor, Nadia Boulanger, “it was like having a brain transplant”.
That open conversational space, which is the heart of our relationship, is not something I can explain; it is not something I knew I was looking for; I’m not even the same person after having been there. It does not look anything like I imagined a relationship would or should look.”