A partner who plays music

Drafted March 6 2025

I have thought for many years that it is a risky thing to have a partner who is into creating things, lest you be called upon to appreciate those things, and everyone’s preferred narrative about the situation slams head-on into the realistic odds that you especially love their compositions. Especially if you are a kind of curmudgeonly appreciation-prude with an apparent all-round disinclination for having any particular feeling you are meant to have.

Friends share songs with me, and I awkwardly tell them that the songs seem probably good but the jury is really out for me until I have heard them a few times.

It’s worse when a friend has written the song themselves, because then I feel compelled to really listen to it, rather than just having it on in the background. Yet I so quickly tire of it.

Once I have heard a song a few times, I do often like it. Though this feels more like the liking of liking a good pastry, not the liking of liking God dissolving your brain in a vat of transcendence.

Then sometimes there are songs that lap into my soul and pulsatingly undo me, open me onto some other world of being. My body spasms and I gasp for breath. My mouth opens. If you looked at me you’d think I was having a pretty exciting sexual time of it. And perhaps I do feel some exquisite pain of sensibility through the intricacies of my body. Far from every time, but for instance even after hearing it a lot of times, Au Fond du Temple Saint would pull me relieved from hyperventilating panic and control my body back into its breath-halting current of being. I sat half-blinded in the US Embassy for maybe an hour one time and listened to it intently on single repeat until I escaped.

So anyway, I had a bit of a crush on this guy, and that was going decently well—he was messaging me back, though possibly mostly to save me from making life-destroying ergonomic choices; he was probably coming to visit in a month or so, we were talking about our lives.

Then one day he shared a bunch of songs he had written and performed. Shit. I didn’t want to delay too much though, so soon afterward I sat back in bed, prepared to be patiently bored for several minutes and braced for learning the scale of the social difficulty ahead.

The guitar started. It actually felt good somehow. His voice came in. WHAAAATTT. OK what. What??? It was so…. This was one of the good ones. I lay paralyzed. Was it like raw open touching where things usually feel dry and at a distance? I could directly perceive the objective goodness of it; I felt the rightness of every motion in a way I can’t usually know things. I’m guessing now—I will probably never know what it was like really, but at the time it was so clearly a serious way.

The song ended. I sat there.

I couldn’t just listen to it again.

I couldn’t just do something else.

I sat there.

WHAT?

Also, what was I supposed to do now? If someone shows your their song you can’t just say “Holy fucking jesus christ you are my favorite music artist now I’m not even joking” or they’ll think that you have a pretty serious crush and also no self-awareness. But if someone shows you their song and it is in fact incredible, there’s a good chance they know this and you also seem also silly being like ‘yeah cool nice’. Also, if they don’t know, what are you doing not giving them this information?

With no other reasonable options, I sat inert for about ten minutes, then got out of bed to talk to my friend and see if the social world could suck me out of this half-trance.

I went upstairs and explained the situation. My friend laughed at me.

We discussed how of course I wanted to play music with this guy, but how could I invite him? “Like, if Bob Dylan shares his tapes with you, you can’t be like “oh you’re pretty good, want to come to our singalong?”” he laughed.

Normally, I think there are two routes to my heart: the normal one where you be extremely good and smart and reasonable and honest and sincere and think about the world for yourself and direct your attention to important things, and be brave and ambitious and maybe some other stuff; and then the less advertised loophole one where you are a cool musician. And this guy was looking very good on the extremely rare first one, then swooped in from the side and completely nailed the other one too, totally unnecessarily. Like, there was enough material here to have two entirely independent crushes on this guy. WHAT?

But also, ‘cool musician’ type attractive men are usually pretty hard to date, as they tend to be celebrated rock stars. It’s pretty wild to be able to realistically date one of your favorite musicians.

Do I just like his music because I have a crush on him? I don’t think so, because I have been romantically into people who compose music before, but probably it’s helping. Or maybe they are related some other way: I suppose in an ideal music creation scenario, music would be an expression of something in a person, and perhaps I would like the music and the person for the same reason.

Anyway I wrote all this down now when we are hooking up and I still don’t want to tell him this story, but I do in maybe three months, so here it is.

[Editor’s note: yes but actually it was a year and three months]

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