A few years ago, my friend sent me a text saying, more or less, “You’ve broken up with a lot of people! Could you give some advice to another friend who is trying to decide whether to end a serious relationship?” Given that I have indeed broken up with a lot of people, I figured I might as well put that fact to good use, and I agreed to talk to our other friend and see if I could help.
During the conversation, it pretty quickly emerged that the relationship was making this friend very unhappy and she needed to end it. But she was worried: worried that she was too old to try again and would be single forever, and worried that she and her partner had a special connection that she’d never be able to find with anyone else. I told her that her first fear, about being too old, was likely not true (and, probably more importantly, she ultimately decided that she’d rather be single and not unhappy than partnered and miserable, which is a calculus that can seem much more obvious from the outside of a relationship than it does from the inside). But I also told her that, based on my own experience, her second fear was almost definitely true. Whatever connection she and her partner had was special to the two of them and could never be replicated with anyone else. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t find someone else with whom she’d have a different kind of connection and a better relationship in general.
I had a few of my own exes in mind when I said this to her. There was the person with whom I could collaboratively do the Saturday NYT crossword puzzle on Shabbat without writing anything down — we did it in our heads. That was definitely a unique connection I had to give up on ever finding again when I ended that relationship. And David came to mind, too.
In the spring of our freshman year of college, my classmate David and I discovered that we had signed up for different sections of the same writing class. All the sections of this class worked the same way: we were assigned exemplary pieces by writers like John McPhee, Joan Didion, and Adam Gopnik, and we had to produce six of our own essays, each with a built-in revision period, over the course of the semester. It was David’s idea that the two of us swap pieces during the revision stage, and I’m pretty sure he suggested it primarily because he had a crush on me. I didn't yet know David very well. He was a tall, dark, bespectacled trombonist who I had met in the marching band, and he had developed a reputation around our residential college as something of an oddball genius. At the end of fall semester, I'd sort of engineered us to be set up together for the freshman "Screw Your Roommate" dance. I didn't think of it as a romantic set-up; it was more of a wager that if I had to be paired up with someone, David would at least be an unconventional date in a way that I'd find enjoyable. The evening found us making up silly dance moves based on different animals (The Octopus, The Howler Monkey, The Sea Cucumber, etc.) as the sounds of Akon and T-Pain filled the dining hall. Given that my wager had worked out basically exactly as I had hoped, I was willing to take a gamble on some peer editing.
We started sending each other drafts to read, and we scheduled meetings every other week in the basement of our residential college. When I wrote them down in my planner, I referred to these late-night sessions as "Essay Fun Time." David and I would sit together on a giant fake leather couch with our essays pulled up on our laptops. Though we had read each other's pieces in advance, we gave verbal line-by-line feedback, making changes together in real time based on mutually reached conclusions about where that paragraph should go or what would be a better adjective here. In addition to being a thoughtful editor, he was also a clever and compelling writer. He wrote about our beloved and enigmatic college dean (the assignment for that essay was to do a profile), troubles in his relationships with friends (memoir), and a silly ode to Nantucket (humor). I wrote about a fight with my high school boyfriend (memoir), "nerd cool" (cultural critique), and my first kiss (humor). We edited past midnight, past when the late-night snack shop in the basement closed, past when the very last pre-med studying down there finally went to bed. The time we took with each other's writing felt intimate, even tender. Essay Fun Time achieved its dual goals of producing better essays and convincing me to date David.
I don’t think it’s all that surprising that these two outcomes were connected. Classroom teaching may have its erotic aspects, but so does a mutually challenging, ongoing intellectual relationship with a peer, as the ancient rabbis knew well. One of the most well-known Talmudic stories (Bava Metzia 84a) tells the tale of the ex-bandit Resh Lakish and his attraction at first sight to the beautiful Rabbi Yohanan. The two men eventually land in a more conventionally acceptable relationship as study partners, and Rabbi Yohanan sets Resh Lakish up with his sister instead. Yet it is still that initial crush that leads the two men to a lifetime of productive debate, which is surely made all the more delectable by the underlying frisson. As the rabbis also knew well, though, this kind of relationship is intensely precarious. Resh Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan's relationship comes to a tragic end when Rabbi Yohanan hurts his hevruta — who may well still be into him — and loses Resh Lakish and his irreplaceable insight forever. Rabbi Yohanan is so distraught that he dies of grief. Ultimately, the intellectual relationship between the two men fails because the emotional stakes are too high, even if that intimacy is also what made the study partnership work so well. And when the intellectual relationship fails, so does everything else.
Given how complicated this sort of relationship can be, it’s pretty astonishing to me sometimes that despite being married to another Jewish studies academic, Phil and I have had a total of one fight that I can think of about work (he asked for copy edits on something and I told him he should completely rewrite it, AITA?). I am almost as astonished that I now have a fruitful work friendship with my friend Raffi, given our history. Raffi was my first serious adult partner, and back when we were a couple, we once got into such a terrible fight about my comments on his writing that we agreed it would be better for me to never edit any of his pieces again.
But both of those relationships have either left the Rabbi Yohanan/Resh Lakish paradigm or never entered it to begin with. Though these days our peer editing is very successful (in fact, he gave me feedback on this very newsletter!), I'm sure that's in large part because Raffi has become, emotionally speaking, less of an “ex” and more of a friend, or perhaps treasured colleague. And while Phil and I do occasionally ask for feedback on each other's work, we each have our own writing groups that we primarily rely on for that. We don’t shape each other’s research questions or refine each other’s prose; our role vis-a-vis each other’s careers tends to be more sounding board or emotional support. I have more room to discover myself, take risks, and even experience failure this way, and I think so does Phil.
My relationship with David obviously didn't last — at least not as a romantic relationship. Not too long after we got together, I hurt him, and we broke up. Fortunately, David forgave me, and we escaped the fate of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish: nobody died, and we stayed friends. In a further twist on the Talmudic tale, a few years ago I set David up with my beloved grad school roommate, and now they live together. Everything turned out well for everyone in both work and love, as far as I know. But Essay Fun Time was special, and now it is over forever — with David, and as a model for me for building a lasting romantic connection in general. I mourn it sometimes, but I’m not searching for it. It no longer seems like a good idea to me to ask someone to play the dual roles of romantic and intellectual sparring partner. What I have now is different, but for me at least, it’s better.