Lazily rolling past midnight over bevvies in cut crystal, I didn’t realize it was turning to Valentine’s day as we spoke of love. In retrospect it makes sense: Love was in the ether. On our minds, in our hearts. Valentines of the collective unconscious skewed our convo.
We all agreed the bar/lounge was surprisingly packed for a February late Monday eve. We also agreed we were getting old when we collectively decided to move to the restaurant portion of the club so we could actually converse.
My Soho House hosts was two young, dashingly handsome, uber-successful, coastal, cosmopolitan men. (Lucky me.) What they told me about love, and more specifically, marriage, delightfully surprised me enough to share it with you here.
Two female friends of theirs sat in the lounge when we arrived. They left earlier than we, draped in Gucci fur coats over cocktail dresses (on a Monday, even) ears dripping with diamond studs the size of dimes. Women who looked like their life was a soap opera. If this is what these women wore on a Monday, I couldn’t even fathom what a Saturday night would look like. The Soho House can gather an eclectic bunch on any given eve, but these ladies were of the haute couture set. I tell you this to give you a framework: that milieu is their homebase.
Finding (or rather, deciding on) a gorgeous, smart, tasteful woman is a given for my friends. But with me, they shared their tests.
As we dove into love, examining needs, relationships, failings, dreams, they revealed what they really wanted in a woman. The guys did not speak of the importance of pulling off an impossibly tight Herve Leger dress, the need for a phenomenal skill set in between 600 thread count sheets or how great a gal was in the kitchen. They wanted a woman who was sane, calm in crisis. Emotional, but sans drama.
One, one of the oldest friends in my life, said very simply:
“See how she acts at Yom Kippur… “
(Prolly the most important holy day in Judaism, or so I am told…)
He continued, “It doesn’t matter how she acts at Rosh Hashanah, because Rosh Hashanah is all celebration and fun and everything. Yom Kippur is a bitch because you have to fast and everyone gets all irritable. Then you can see what someone is really like.”
They both agreed musts before marriage were:
- Taking a two-week vacation together. Because two weeks in one small hotel room with someone will really bring out every aspect of him or her.
And
- Witnessing each other sick at least once: how you react + how they react to you being sick; how good of a caregiver he/she can be.
I admire these men already of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be spending time with them, but this was not what I expected to hear.
I often speak about how the measure of our state of consciousness is not what reaction we have to a situation (anger, irritability, fear, sadness) but how quickly we rebound from that emotion. Simply, the faster you can process your emotion, the more enlightened you are.
My teachers were saying at one time that once a person suffers less than 30 minutes to any perceived emotional slight or hurt… to anything that– well, would make one suffer—then that is a measure of being awakened. Let’s say, capital A: Awakened.
I’m not interested in getting bogged down in measurements, but imagine how much more love in our life we would have if we suffered less. This is why we cheerlead for self-inquiry and spiritual heartstuffs, because in taking responsibility for our own b.s., we let everyone else off the hook. When we don’t take things personally, life flows through us, love + compassion naturally flourish.
I know you + I (both ladies + gents) can have fun with the high heels, bright lipstick, small + sparkly dresses and trendy social clubs… But none of it, none of it matters at all if the quality doesn’t come from within first. I know ya know. This is just the loving reminder. ‘Cause guys at the Soho House? They weren’t looking for leggy. They were looking for real.
Look in. See all your grittiness and love yourself anyway. That’s how the calm comes. Everything else follows. Apparently, even fantastic men.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.
