Recently, your mother and I were searching for an answer on Google. Halfway through entering the question, Google returned a list of the most popular searches in the world. Perched at the top of the list was “How to keep him interested.”
It startled me. I scanned several of the countless articles about how to be sexy and sexual, when to bring him a beer versus a sandwich, and the ways to make him feel smart and superior.
And I got angry.
Little One, it is not, has never been, and never will be your job to “keep him interested.”
Little One, your only task is to know deeply in your soul—in that unshakeable place that isn’t rattled by rejection and loss and ego—that you are worthy of interest. (If you can remember that everyone else is worthy of interest also, the battle of your life will be mostly won. But that is a letter for another day.)
If you can trust your worth in this way, you will be attractive in the most important sense of the word: you will attract a boy who is both capable of interest and who wants to spend his one life investing all of his interest in you.
Little One, I want to tell you about the boy who doesn’t need to be kept interested, because he knows you are interesting:
I don’t care if he puts his elbows on the dinner table—as long as he puts his eyes on the way your nose scrunches when you smile. And then can’t stop looking.
I don’t care if he can’t play a bit of golf with me—as long as he can play with the children you give him and revel in all the glorious and frustrating ways they are just like you.
I don’t care if he doesn’t follow his wallet—as long as he follows his heart and it always leads him back to you.
I don’t care if he is strong—as long as he gives you the space to exercise the strength that is in your heart.
I couldn’t care less how he votes—as long as he wakes up every morning and daily elects you to a place of honor in your home and a place of reverence in his heart.
I don’t care about the color of his skin—as long as he paints the canvas of your lives with brushstrokes of patience, and sacrifice, and vulnerability, and tenderness.
I don’t care if he was raised in this religion or that religion or no religion—as long as he was raised to value the sacred and to know every moment of life, and every moment of life with you, is deeply sacred.
In the end, Little One, if you stumble across a man like that and he and I have nothing else in common, we will have the most important thing in common:
You.
Because in the end, Little One, the only thing you should have to do to “keep him interested” is to be you.
Realizing you were gone wasn’t a slow process for me. I didn’t miss you each day for different reasons or at different times. It didn’t come and go in degrees of pain. No. Missing you was like a train that barrels across the tracks without you even realizing it was coming. It flashes by and if you’re close enough it knocks you right off of your feet. It frightens you and winds you and reminds you that things happen so suddenly that are out of our control. Realizing you were gone was that train that fly’s by on the tracks once you have crossed them and you believe you are safe on the other side. You aren’t looking at then there it is, so close you can feel the ground shake and the hairs on your arms move. And then it is gone again, quicker than it came, it seems, and it drives off into the distance like it had never been there at all. Things settle back to normal, you pick yourself up and you continue to walk. You turn your back to the tracks and leave, never planning to return. The train may pass by there every day at the same time, but you won’t be there again. You already made that mistake once.
This Isn’t Shopped of the Day: Pope Benedict XVI’s Legacies Remembered in Comic Sans
The Vatican just can’t seem to catch a break these days. Following last week’s departure of Pope Benedict XVI—the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years, the Vatican published a digital photo album dedicated to the now former leader of the Catholic Church using the Comic Sans typeface on every page. The 62-page album can be viewed on the official Vatican website.
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