Hideyness - by Gretta Duleba - Letters to Boys

Correspondent: Eliezer. This relationship tech might look strange and cold to a lot of you who are not us. Date: Two and a half years ago, not long after we both moved so we could live closer to each other. I’m like this. If my person gets too far away from me, I feel lonely and sad, but if they get too close to me, I feel suffocated. There’s this very narrow band in the middle that feels good, and it’s kind of hard to hit it just right, because it’s a moving target. I think, my love, you are exactly the same way. (Not everyone is. Or rather, they are, but their purple band is much bigger, and either the red or the blue is small-to-nonexistent.) My model of your hideyness1 is that you’ve wandered into the red zone and need to go cool off to feel okay again. That’s about what it feels like to me. Now that we’re trying to be a couple, and we’ve intertwined our lives and even some of our work, we have a new problem. It’s hard enough for each of us as individuals, trying to stay in the pur

Correspondent: Eliezer. This relationship tech might look strange and cold to a lot of you who are not us. Date: Two and a half years ago, not long after we both moved so we could live closer to each other. I’m like this. If my person gets too far away from me, I feel lonely and sad, but if they get too close to me, I feel suffocated. There’s this very narrow band in the middle that feels good, and it’s kind of hard to hit it just right, because it’s a moving target. I think, my love, you are exactly the same way. (Not everyone is. Or rather, they are, but their purple band is much bigger, and