What happens when people who love each other want different things? When you want what you want and your partner doesn't? I'm not talking about kinky sex. I'm talking about things like...being able to travel once in awhile, or take your kids snowboarding, or go to the spa, or have an expensive dinner...Things that seem like luxuries but also make you feel alive. Things that take you away from your daily reality for a minute or a week, and that make life tolerable.
What if your partner wants to live without all these things?
Then you have to do them yourself.
What scares me is that declaring my financial independence, which means my absolute right to do these things for myself and pay for them myself, feels like I am rejecting the man that I have protected and supported for half of my life. I have defended his stoic stance against materialism while spoiling him by paying for everything he considered luxury. So...to stop paying for him now is to leave him to his more austere lifestyle. Which I respect very much, but which doesn't have room for my spendthrift frivolity - from which, whether or not he admits it, he has greatly benefited.
I look around this gorgeous studio flooded with winter light. Which I found and for which I negotiated a long term lease so he'd have a place to paint that wasn't a windowless office in the Tenderloin (which is what he said he wanted.) The high thread-count sheets and duvet on the down comforter, the bamboo flooring which I insisted upon. My grandmother's dusty rose china which he would have chucked 10 moves ago.
Joe's aesthetic became more and more austere over the years. When we met he was a collage artist, cutting up magazines, gluing with spray mount, making big messes, staying up all night with friends, giving away his art in the morning. I wanted him to get more serious, to make work that was more lasting, to put his ideas to bigger tests. So I put him through art school. I believed in him as an artist, and still do.
Now Joe paints on aluminum, layer upon layer of pigment in a medium using a technique that produces the most luminous color fields, and that are guaranteed to last a minimum of 500 years. A series of black paintings that come to life only after staring at them for a long time. Squares of color so rich you want to disappear into them. He's extremely neat. He is extremely committed to his routines. He doesn't do drugs except on special occassion and never when making art.
The problem is that as his aesthetic gets more and more minimalistic, he wants less and less clutter in his life. While I respect that, and enjoy its effects on our living space, it is not me. I'm a storyteller, and stories are not so neat. They meander and go off on tangents and pick up people and things along the way that give life color and keep me feeling alive. Joe wants me to be predictable, to fit into his controlled environment so he can focus on the interaction of color and light on the surface of his paintings.
I am not predictable. I don't want to be predictable.
This is why I need my own studio.
What if your partner wants to live without all these things?
Then you have to do them yourself.
What scares me is that declaring my financial independence, which means my absolute right to do these things for myself and pay for them myself, feels like I am rejecting the man that I have protected and supported for half of my life. I have defended his stoic stance against materialism while spoiling him by paying for everything he considered luxury. So...to stop paying for him now is to leave him to his more austere lifestyle. Which I respect very much, but which doesn't have room for my spendthrift frivolity - from which, whether or not he admits it, he has greatly benefited.
I look around this gorgeous studio flooded with winter light. Which I found and for which I negotiated a long term lease so he'd have a place to paint that wasn't a windowless office in the Tenderloin (which is what he said he wanted.) The high thread-count sheets and duvet on the down comforter, the bamboo flooring which I insisted upon. My grandmother's dusty rose china which he would have chucked 10 moves ago.
Joe's aesthetic became more and more austere over the years. When we met he was a collage artist, cutting up magazines, gluing with spray mount, making big messes, staying up all night with friends, giving away his art in the morning. I wanted him to get more serious, to make work that was more lasting, to put his ideas to bigger tests. So I put him through art school. I believed in him as an artist, and still do.
Now Joe paints on aluminum, layer upon layer of pigment in a medium using a technique that produces the most luminous color fields, and that are guaranteed to last a minimum of 500 years. A series of black paintings that come to life only after staring at them for a long time. Squares of color so rich you want to disappear into them. He's extremely neat. He is extremely committed to his routines. He doesn't do drugs except on special occassion and never when making art.
The problem is that as his aesthetic gets more and more minimalistic, he wants less and less clutter in his life. While I respect that, and enjoy its effects on our living space, it is not me. I'm a storyteller, and stories are not so neat. They meander and go off on tangents and pick up people and things along the way that give life color and keep me feeling alive. Joe wants me to be predictable, to fit into his controlled environment so he can focus on the interaction of color and light on the surface of his paintings.
I am not predictable. I don't want to be predictable.
This is why I need my own studio.
You could never be "predictable" Kimmie,
ReplyDeleteThat said you deserve your own studio and all the other "extras" your heart desires.
just love,
Patrice