Mania or Feeling Alive
In recent days, I’ve revisited — by way of new relationship energy — the thrilling experience of discovering someone new.
One of the greatest losses experienced by conventional monogamists is the loss of the experience of discovery. A loss of the excitement of the projections, of the ecstatic surprises, as well as of the disappointing ones. Part of what it is to discover someone new, after all, is to be disappointed by them.
The waves one surfs in a new relationship can be big and thrilling. But only a committed monogamist believes those waves to be nothing but fun. Surfing’s a dangerous sport. New relationship energy is thrilling, but dangerous. And the danger is part of the thrill.
What’s more, the danger is essential. New relationship energy isn’t worth its salt if it doesn’t bring its share of disappointment as well as of pleasure and excitement.
I am in the throes of it. Everywhere I look, I’m feeling it. Feeling the good, feeling the bad. Feeling the excitement and the disappointment. Feeling the projection, the idealization, alongside the disappointment and discovery.
I feel so very fortunate to have organized my life in such a way that I get to do this extreme surfing. And I miss it. It’s been too long. Nothing makes me feel more alive.
Header image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, late afternoon, interior light bleeding warm amber through salt-crazed glass: a single surfboard — battered fiberglass, a lurid turquoise that is almost too bright, almost wrong — leans against a weathered coastal changing-room wall, its fins casting hard triangular shadows across salt-bleached wood. In the middle distance, a woman in a dark wetsuit stands with her back to the camera at the open doorway, already half-turned toward the white glare of the beach outside, neither fully in nor fully out, her posture carrying something between exhaustion and readiness. The turquoise is the color that should not be there — too vivid, too saturated against the bleached palette around it — and it pulls the eye before anything else does.