The Intimacy of Handwriting, Courtship Conventions and the Taboo on Tenderness
Happy almost Valentine's Day! I propose the question: fellas, is it gay to be sweet? Listen to the voice over to read along with me!
I think a majority of the ways in which we connect with people have changed, and new ways have spawned in their place. A lot of that may come from a changing dynamic of sociability and new uses for technology. Specifically in dating, the romantic gestures that may seem archaic have undergone a modern sublimation. That is to say, the ‘tricks’ for courting have changed in form but not in essence. The recipe is the same, but the ingredients are different.
I’ve been thinking about the tests for connection, old-fashioned courting, modern dating, and love gestures.
I recently watched a Bronx Tale (1993), starring and directed by Robert De Niro. I was told it is a story about two teenagers in the 1960s, a Black girl and a white Italian boy, falling in love in the Bronx against all odds. That is what the movie is about...for like a total of 15 minutes..... The other two hours are that of a typical New York gangster movie. But in the movie, there’s a test, that must be conducted to determine if the girl is “a keeper”. The test goes as follows: the man chivalrously puts the key in the car door, unlocks and opens the passenger side door for the girl to get in the car, then he closes the door for her. He is then required to walk around the back of the car to the driver’s side. Here’s where the test comes in, he will look through the back window to see if she lifts the car door lock so the driver’s door is unlocked by the time he gets around to the front. If she doesn't do this then she’s selfish and an untrustworthy bitch or whatever they say in the movie.
This test is unlikely to be possible today unless you’re dating someone with a car from the 90s or earlier. & If you’re dating in a metropolitan city like Paris or New York you’re unlikely to even be in a vehicle with the person you’re dating. This test from a Bronx Tale is a part of the variety of cultural courting tests that have been developed in Modern America. Another “old-school” test is when the guy makes sure he’s oriented on the side of traffic when walking on the sidewalk with a woman. That one is nice, but only when it’s done smoothly. I once had a date physically shifting me around so he could get on the outer side of the street. I didn’t notice the attempt at a chivalrous gesture and I was like “Why the fuck do you keep moving around?”
But what these “tests”, and others like them did culturally, was provide a guide map for men on courting women. But since it’s not 1960 anymore, it’s important to note that “courtship conventions may impede women's equal status in romantic relationships.”1As much as I like to think we’re moving away from the gender binary, “most adults continue to believe that men and women are innately different with complementary or conflicting needs and desires, especially in heterosexual romantic relationships”. (I think online trends highlighting “girlhood” as makeup, ribbon bows, and tights — a consumer-driven experience, is keeping us in that binary, but whatever.) I don’t think there is a difference in desires, I think we all want the same things, but it’s who gets to openly act on their desires that keeps us divided by binary gender norms.
Is a “hard” and or “soft launch” on social media a modern-day gesture? People get so serious about that one though. I think that has a lot to do with trust issues, but I do not want to get into social media relationship launches because I think it’s so fucking stupid.
What do we expect now of our partners, in this era full of technology, hyper-individualism, and the proscription of tenderness? Do we expect the same, more, less, or something brand new? Whether they’re old-fashioned or not, these tests are opportunities to show your care and consideration for the person you’re courting. Kind and loving gestures or any altruistic action in dating (whether the recipient recognizes them in the moment or not) are all ingredients for falling in love. But what is it that “a class of [modern-day] would-be lovers want, need, and seek”?2 When dating, courting, or falling in love, there are ingredients that “go into fulfilling romantic relations in contemporary Western culture.”3 How do we adjust when the cultural maps that could guide us have been muddled, blurred, or thrown out the window altogether? How do you create your own map and bring your personhood, yourself, to the chaos that is dating?
Another lost gesture, or ingredient, I want to dive deeper into is handwritten letters, and more broadly just writing by hand alone.
Why has seeing someone’s handwriting turned into a shockingly intimate experience?
Okay, so seeing someone’s handwriting is just as intimate as sex. Got it. I wonder what seeing your name written in someone’s handwriting counts as? A marriage proposal?
My friend Casey and I had been friends for months before we saw each other’s handwriting. I remember the first time she saw mine, the moment was burned into my memory with her “gasp”. If I write something down quickly and someone sees it, I more often than not get the comment “You’re a lefty?” I respond, “Yes but I only write with my left hand, I do everything else with my right” I’m not a complete anomaly.
“Handwriting analysis became a cultural craze from the 1930s to the 1950s, with newspaper advice columns promising to disclose readers' character and personality through writing samples and graphologists setting up booths in Atlantic City and elsewhere to capitalize on its commercial appeal (Thornton 119, 120).”4
Once we pass the astrology cultural craze do you think we’ll go back to handwriting analysis? Will palm reading sessions be accompanied by a handwriting reading for an extra $20 bucks?
Since it has become so rare to see someone’s handwriting, does its rarity contribute to the newfound status of “intimate”? And if so, maybe it’s because our handwriting is a part of us, a part of our identity. Handwriting is a “site for the display of identity.”5 I found someone more interested in the topic than me: ARISTIDES, the pen name for the editor of the magazine The American Scholar from 1975-1997.
A person's handwriting is one of the distinctive things about him, and no two handwritings, like no two sets of fingerprints, are the same. There is something about handwriting that seems to cry out for the expression of idiosyncrasy. Circles for dotting i's, Gothic touches on capitals, swooping flourishes at a word's end - there is no graphic stunt people won't try in the effort to be elegant and individual. Handwriting is tied up with what people nowadays are pleased to call their ‘identity.’ It is a most intimate matter, and richly complex.”6
In his magazine article from 1982 “Life and Letters: Penology,” Aristides goes on:
“I secretly thought that my poor handwriting was a sign of poor character. Had I been a girl, I should have been in serious trouble. Some boys did have nice handwriting, but boys were not really expected to have nice handwriting. Girls, though, were under an obligation to write beautifully….A girl with poor handwriting seemed nearly a slut.” 7
Aristides is still true on some accounts, however, I don’t think my poor handwriting makes me “nearly a slut”, but I don’t know, you’d have to ask around.
If handwritten letters are the most personal and “hence the most sincere form of communication” then maybe that’s why it warms people’s hearts so fully upon receiving a handwritten note or letter from a friend or loved one. Handwriting is a thing to be noticed.
Today, a love letter is far beyond ordinary. They’re growing more and more out of fashion. At one point I didn't even have a blank piece of paper in my home. What will come of us, culturally and socially, when we lose these gestures that connect person to person and reveal so much about us in such a small way? What are we losing? I don’t think we’ll be able to fully answer that until the art of letter-writing is fully erased.
If you feel so inclined— so moved —to write a love letter, that may be your “love gesture”. I’ve received a love letter from a man written in a card you probably could only get from the literal Hallmark store. This was the first time I saw his handwriting, I ran my hand over the letters on the card as if they were tactile. It was a near mixture of capitalized letters and non-capitalized letters in a sort of type-writer-esque script. The letter was sweet, and I came to recognize his love gestures. I thought it was silly when he would text me at 11:11 almost every day to “make a wish”. I thought it was silly because omg who can keep up with that? But I began to look forward to all the wishes I got to make because of his alerts. This was his way of bringing his particular style of romance, to meet mine. His ability to be sweet and tender, with a panache that I hadn’t experienced in a while, allowed me to feel rightfully just in being equally as sweet. I had to break the idea that you have to be tactfully reticent when dating. I think when two people can love each other for the distinctive properties of their personhood and the love gestures they bring to a relationship you’ve found a great mate.
This brings me to a question I constantly ask myself: What’s the deal with modern men’s fear of tenderness and saccharine romance?
I’m not saying the nice gestures are all gone or that all romance has turned from sweet to sour, I just explained some “sweet” I’ve personally experienced. But lately, I’ve been suspicious of the intention behind the gesture. Is it from the goodwill of the heart and the true desire to be tender and saccharine? Or is love bombing8 just the best way to a guaranteed fuck? From what I’ve witnessed....it’s the latter. (and from what I’ve been told to my face. I had a guy who was attempting to be sweet tell me I was “different” because before me he would typically “fuck ‘em and dump ‘em” ((that was my description of his actions)), in response, he said, “Aw come, on don’t say it like that,” pleading with me because, how dare I pull back the vail?)
Gavin Miller’s 2007 essay “A Wall of Ideas: The ‘Taboo on Tenderness’ in Theory and Culture” speaks to what I’m getting at. He derives the concept of a “taboo on tenderness” from the writings of psychiatrist Ian Suttie (1889-1935). Miller notes philosophers who echo Suttie “in arguing that, ‘soppy’ emotions are generally subject to taboo”.9
Miller quotes philosopher Robert C. Solomon: "For too many people, . . . overt sentiment is excessive. Such emotions are themselves embarrassing”.10 I feel like I’m hearing this more and more, that to be in love is “embarrassing”. I wouldn’t call that an objective truth but it can be true. I see on the interweb that “to be in love is cringe” (I can’t wait for that idea to die off). But when it’s with the right person, is it embarrassing? And if it is, isn’t being in love worth the embarrassment?
Recommended listening: “Softness as a Weapon” by Kindness
Miller poses the question, “Is there a gendered dimension to the taboo on tenderness?”11 I’m gonna say yes.....
Miller asks another question: “Did our contemporary, and perhaps masculine, obsession with sex arise because tenderness is still permissible in contexts of sexual intimacy?” I’m gonna say yes AGAIN. There is an obsession (maybe “obsession” is too harsh) —there has been a pattern of satisfying one’s appetite for intimacy and tenderness through casual sex. Suttie remarks on suspicions he has that reiterate what I’ve been observing; "I would say," he comments, "that men have substituted sex for intimacy…We excuse tenderness or sentimentality...on the grounds of its sexual intention and tendencies.”12
They were saying it back in 1935 and I’m saying it again now, 89 years later. Intimacy has been substituted for casual sex! This is how (most) sexually active men get their monthly, weekly, (or daily if you’re a psychopath) dose of intimacy and “indulge in their tabooed tender feelings.”13 But it doesn’t have to be taboo! Hegemonic masculinity pushes the idea that men need to be hard and stoic when that is not the case. I don't even think being hard and stoic makes you a human being, honestly! Humans are soft, malleable, and full of emotions & to shut those off, I think, makes you insane.
Take this
Looks like the writings of an insane person right? Well, this was me trying to occupy my hands to keep myself from responding to a text message from a man I said I was going no contact with. There’s only a handful of times where I genuinely thought I should be institutionalized and this was one of them. I was going insane denying my emotions. Then a day later I saw this tweet:
I didn’t know I was acting on insane asylum levels of repression but seeing this brought me back to the center.
Push past the fear of thinking you’re being “too much”, if the connection is there then you’ll never be too much.
While in a loving long-term relationship for our first Christmas, along with my gift, he wrote me a handwritten letter, recounting some of our special moments together in a Dr. Seus-like rhyme. Accompanying the letter was a clipping of the essay we read in our first class together. I had no idea what the clipping was when I opened the letter, (oops) but knowing it was sentimental to him made it sentimental to me. To my point, bringing your own version of tenderness and sincerity to a relationship is important.
To ensure legibility, I can only use specific types of pens (my current favorite is the uni-ball Vision Elite BLX Infusion Rollerball Pen Bold Point, 0.8mm). As a lefty, I tend to smudge the words as my hand sweeps across the page. I need something inky that flows, but not too inky like a fountain pen, something that glides along the paper to connect my loose cursive. Like ARISTIDES, I believe, “A better writing instrument will make for a better handwriting”. Your pen is your partner in this whole thing; the vehicle that transcribes your sincerity towards a loved one and the projector that displays your identity. So maybe it’s cheesy, but aren’t we all looking for the perfect pen & the perfect partner? (Wow, I just realized I’m creating an amazing ad campaign for “Papermate” right now.)
“As for pens, the search goes on...some people wish to live surrounded by art, others require high-powered and finely mechanized automobiles. All I ask for is a pen.”
ARISTIDES. “Life and Letters: Penography.”
When you find the partner that impassions you to write a love letter, may you find the perfect pen to write that letter with; a partner with whom tenderness and romance come with ease; a partner that creates a magic that keeps your hand from tiring when writing love letter after love letter.
LAMONT, ELLEN. “NEGOTIATING COURTSHIP: Reconciling Egalitarian Ideals with Traditional Gender Norms.” Gender and Society 28, no. 2 (2014): 189–211. Page191 http://www.jstor.org/stable/43669872.
Delaney, Neil. “Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal.” American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1996): page 339. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009874.
Neil, page 339
Wardi, Anissa Janine. “A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of ‘Love.’” MELUS 30, no. 3 (2005): 201–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029779. PAGE 211
Wardi, page
ARISTIDES. “Life and Letters: Penography.” The American Scholar 51, no. 4 (1982): pg. 455–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41210866.
ARISTIDES. “Life and Letters: Penography.” The American Scholar 51, no. 4 (1982): pg. 456. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41210866.
love bombing (noun): the action or practice of lavishing someone with attention or affection, especially in order to influence or manipulate them.
Miller, Gavin. “A Wall of Ideas: The ‘Taboo on Tenderness’ in Theory and Culture.” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 667–81. Page 675 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20058033.
Miller 675
Miller 667
Miller 677
Miller 677