love
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Artist Eero Saarinen’s list of his wife’s good qualities, ca. 1954, from the Lists, to-dos and illustrated inventories of great artists.
You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.
Debbie Millman reads the philosophical moral of the wonderful Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, and what it teaches us about love and control in human relationships.
You cannot know everything about the creature that you love, and you also can’t control that relationship. And maybe that’s okay — because we can’t control relationships. In fact, if we did control them to the degree that we want, it would probably provide us with nothing. Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences.
Love and Art – wisdom from creative duo Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton.
Mouse dung, applied as a liniment, was a favorite anti-aphrodisiac. So was rue boiled with rose oil and aloes. Drinking wine in which a mullet fish had drowned and sipping male urine in which a lizard had expired both had their loyal adherents.
It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found what I saw it in your hands, in your month and in your breasts. I have the taste of almonds from your lips in my mouth. Our worlds have never gone outside. Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.
Frida Kahlo’s remarkable love letters to Diego Rivera
Diego:
Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mirror of the night. the violent flash of lightning. the dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. my fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.
Frida Kahlo’s passionate handwritten love letters to Diego Rivera.
Do you make a point of building up other women, even those you dislike, in discussing them with a man?
This is sound practice. But don’t put it on so think that it sounds like a line.
How attractive are you to the opposite sex? In 1949, Esquire set out to help ladies and bachelors woo each other more effectively with two questionnaires on the do’s and don’ts of courtship.
We live in a society where romantic love is idealized: if we search long enough, we will find “the one,” the soulmate who is perfect for us, who will grow and change at the exact same rate we do, who loves us exactly as we are and never expects us to change, who always wants us sexually, never has bad breath or gets grouchy, and is perfectly desirable in every way. We expect our partner to fully meet us on an intellectual, physical, sexual, and spiritual basis; to be our lover, best friend, a companion, confidante, confessor, therapist, and family, all rolled into one. This sets up monumental expectations which all of us invariably fall short of.
Complement with Elizabeth Gilbert on what a soulmate is and isn’t.
You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.
Lost Cat – a heartwarming illustrated meditation on love, loss, and what it means to be human.
Amy Webb, author of the fascinating Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, talks to Debbie Millman about how the very design of online dating profile questionnaires sabotages your odds of finding your soulmate.
Listen to the full interview here and subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more stimulating conversations with designers, artists, and writers.
An ABZ of Love – a quirky vintage Danish illustrated guide to sexuality, which Kurt Vonnegut sent his wife.
