Hello, dear readers!
That sounds a little too much like “dear leader,” doesn’t it? Loyal readers? Beloved readers? My precious readers? Okay now I’m just imitating Gollum. What’s taters precious? Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew.
I’m not high, I swear. I’m just exhausted. It’s been a busy week! On top of the three articles I had published this week (linked below), I have at least two which I wrote but are not live yet. I wrote a third, but whether it sees the light of day is to be determined. Long story. Anyway, be on the lookout for those next week.
This is, of course, in addition to my duties at 100 Days in Appalachia, which I’m assuming more and more of. It’s exciting! But, busy. I’m not complaining though; love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Someone famous said that. I can’t be bothered to Google who.
I can be bothered to ask you for money, though. If you want to help me make a buck or a quid, depending on your currency, you can become a Patron for as little as $3 a month, make a one-time donation using PayPal, or buy me a book to help with my research. All contributions are greatly appreciated, no matter how big or how small. None are expected, though. This newsletter is and will remain free.
With all that out of the way, let’s talk cuffing.
On cuffing season…
Ah autumn. The season basic white gays like me look forward to all year. Pumpkin spice, crisp leaves, apple picking, cozy sweaters… this is a time truly made for Taylor Swift, David S. Pumpkin, and me. But there is something else autumn, or “fall” as we call it in the United States, is known for. Something more… I don’t know, serious? Except not serious, because it’s just going to end in April anyway? But serious-adjacent?
Of course I’m talking about cuffing season. According to The Guardian, “cuffing season” was first defined on Urban Dictionary in 2010. Apparently, is the time of year when you handcuff yourself to someone else – metaphorically speaking, I presume, though if both parties are consenting, bang on with it I guess. Takes all sorts.
Either way, you are only cuffed until spring. Then you either split or commit. Whatever your decision, cuffing season ends in April.
Coincidentally, the fall of 2010 saw me “cuff” myself to a boy who would dump me on Valentine’s Day 2011, which is also four days before my birthday. So if cuffing season was born in 2010, it was a very traumatic birth for me and might explain why I’ve never wanted to cuff again.
Except, I kind of do. “Most of the time I'm 100% okay being single, but the fourth quarter always makes me want a husband,” I tweeted last week. “It's the weather and the holidays, innit?”
So is cuffing season real? According to one poll, at least 56 percent of people think it is. When I tweeted about wanting a husband, I got some varied responses. One friend told me reassuringly to “hang in there” and that “it’ll happen.” Another follower offered her sympathies, saying she was “sorry I was feeling gloomy.” But most of the responses were people saying they felt the same way. They, too, want a boo – at least in the colder months.
The holiday season – which for my purposes I am going to define as October (Halloween) through February (Valentine’s Day) with a climax in December (Christmas and New Year’s Eve) – is hard for a lot of people. That is not a new revelation. Every year we are reminded that Christmas can be the loneliest time of year for folks. And we know that many people wish that they could bring a partner to their family holiday celebration, if only to have some backup. The struggle is real.
Maybe, then, this desire to find a mate – to “cuff” – is nothing more than a product of the weather and the impending holidays. After all, nothing makes you want support like extended family in a confined space for hours or even days on end, forcing themselves to feel merry.
But it’s more than just wanting a buffer between you and nosy Aunt Violet or creepy Uncle Stuart. Cuffing season is about wanting someone to spend those long, dark winter nights with. It’s about romance, or at least companionship.
And it does seem hard to avoid the topic of love this time of year. It’s all around us, but nowhere is it more pronounced than social media. Seeing friends post couples’ Halloween costumes on Instagram. Watching lovers holding hands and getting cozy as they walk through the autumn chill. Hearing folks talk about the gifts they are buying for and hoping to receive from their significant other. And the proposals. Oh, the proposals. The Christmas morning proposals. The New Year’s Eve proposals. So many proposals. So many rings.
Did you know that in Japan, Christmas is treated like Valentine’s Day? It’s true. The Japanese have no real tradition of Christmas – it isn’t a Christian country, after all – but they have picked up on our Christmas season through film and pop culture.
Some have said this started back in 1982, when a song entitled “My Lover is Santa Clause” topped the Japanese charts. (You think I’m kidding, but I couldn’t make this shit up.) In Japan, “…Christmas Eve is the most romantic day of the year,” Taryn Siegel wrote last year for Time Out. I can’t really blame them. With the warm lights of the tree, the jaunty and classic tunes, and especially the mistletoe, Christmas is custom-made for lovers. Sleigh rides in the snow, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, silver bells and golden tinsel – it all practically demands romance.
The Japanese are not the only ones who have turned the holiday season into an extended date night, though. We are inundated with romance this time of year. Look at the proliferation of Christmas films on the Hallmark Channel, nearly all of them hokey, formulaic love stories.
Christmas advertising capitalizes on our sentimental side (“every kiss begins with Kay”). All Mariah Carey wants for Christmas is her beau. Britney Spears let Santa know that a boyfriend is her only wish, though in recent years I imagine she had more pressing wishes. Regardless, Justin Bieber still wants to meet his girl under the mistletoe. And though I couldn’t possibly say, I presume Lady Gaga’s Christmas tree is still delicious.
My point, and I promise I have one, is that Christmas at least is romantic because we as a culture have made it so. Therefore, it isn’t so unreasonable that people would be thinking about boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives during the festive season. But if cuffing season starts in October and runs through April, why is autumn so romantic? What is it about this time of year that makes us want to couple up?
Here’s my guess – and this isn’t backed up by any research, so take it with a pinch of salt. As the days grow shorter, the skies grow darker, and the temperatures grow colder, our moods invariably grow more melancholy and more nostalgic for sunnier days. Being shut in our houses drives home the fact that we are alone. We are less on-the-go, meaning we have more time to think. About life. About love. About how we are alone in the former and woefully without the latter.
Perhaps that is why they’ve started calling this “sad girl autumn.” Leaving aside the gendered term and all the connotations it is weighted with, there is some truth to the fact that this time of year is a time when ballads proliferate. I remember Gareth Gates releasing “Say it Isn’t So” in 2003, saying that December is the perfect time for that kind of sentimental ballad. He hoped to have the Christmas Number One – a big deal in the UK – but he didn’t. Still a good song though.
That was 18 years ago. Now we’ve got Adele and Taylor Swift leading the vanguard of “sad girl autumn.” Adele herself – and I can’t remember where I saw this, but I swear I did – said that this time of year is perfect for a song like “Easy On Me.”
Having just blasted it through town as I drove to the coffeehouse, I must agree. It’s hard to imagine listening to a song like that on repeat in, say, July. But in October or November, with the leaves turning red and yellow and the skies bleak and gray? Go easy on me baby.
Which brings me back to my original question, the thing that prompted me to write about cuffing season in the first place. Do I really want a boyfriend, or is this just me responding to a sociological/cultural trend? Having thought about it, I think the answer is a little bit of both.
I established above that this time of year is culturally designed to make us lonely, even if that was not the intention. It underscores our lack of a bae and reminds us that we are woefully single. It is only natural, then, that I – and you, perhaps – would long to be in a relationship. Not with each other, of course. Or maybe with each other. If so, feel free to e-mail me. But you get what I’m saying.
Cuffing season, innit?
But for me, there is more to this. Let me get very real with you here. I have put off dating for the better part of a decade. There are several reasons for this. One is the immense pain that I felt after that breakup ten years ago. Those of you who are close personal friends will know that my heart never fully recovered from that relationship. I carry those scars to this day.
There are other reasons, though, reasons I have not talked about publicly before but which I think are not only entirely rational (as opposed to the irrational matters of the heart discussed above) but incredibly mature. I did not date because I did not feel that I was ready to date. I was not in place in my life where I felt dating was a priority.
When I lived in Chicago, I saw a therapist weekly. I would talk to her about how I wanted to get married, raise a family, and have this sort of ideal traditional life. “A house in Wilmette with a dog and a picket fence and a country club membership,” is how I would describe it to her. (Wilmette is a tony suburb of Chicago.) However, I felt that I could not in good conscience date someone when I myself felt so unsettled.
Let me explain. Until very recently, I was not happy with the circumstances of my own life. I wanted to be a writer, but I was working full-time in mortgages. I knew in my heart, I think, that Chicago was not my forever home. I certainly knew that Jacksonville, North Carolina was not my forever home.
I did not feel that I could date until I had at the very least figured out my professional life and felt I was living somewhere I wanted to spend the rest of my life. Until I was at a point in my career where I felt professional satisfaction, I did not think it was fair to date a man who I might marry only to come to resent the fact that I settled. For him. For a life as a mortgage processor. For mediocrity.
My therapist thought this was bullshit. She wanted to know why I couldn’t pursue my professional dreams while dating. Shouldn’t I find a man who was supportive of me?
This is probably a fair point. But I know me. I pride myself on being acutely self-aware, and the truth is that until I was happy with myself and my own life, I could never truly be happy with another. So, I didn’t even try. It wasn’t fair to me and it sure as hell was not fair to him, whoever he may be, if I dated him knowing he was never going to be enough.
That has been the truth since 2011, when that boy dumped me on Valentine’s Day. I put all my energies into building a life I wanted, on making myself happy, on being enough.
And you know what? I fucking did it.
I am a full-time writer. It took ten years, buckets of blood and sweat and tears, but I made it. Have all my dreams come true? No. But I am at a place in my life where I feel professionally fulfilled, and this is the first time I can ever really say that.
I fucking did it.
I realize how incredibly lucky I am to be doing what I love and making a living at it, probably in a way I would not have understood and appreciated had success come to me earlier. Every morning I wake up breathing rarified air. There are so many people who would kill to be doing what I do. And no, I’m not famous or rich or anything like that. But it was never about fame or fortune for me. It was about happiness.
And I’m so happy… professionally, that is.
I feel very optimistic about my future. While I am still finding my feet with some new ventures, I am excited about what is to come and eager to learn and grow in these new roles. There are some exciting things coming up in my career, and I am savoring every moment.
Personally? Well, it’s complicated. Sometime over the past couple years, I came to accept that I might never get married. I may never have children. I may not even want children. I determined I would have to learn to be happy without a family of my own.
So, I focused on the things I do have. I have wonderful friends and a fantastic family, which for the most part are supportive and encouraging. I have a roof over my head. Food in my belly. A warm bed at night. Coffee in the morning. That is more than many have.
Yet cuffing season has made me realize actually, I want more. I do want a husband. I do want children. I do want a marriage and a home and a picket fence and a dog and all of that. I want to have it all.
Living with my grandparents has really driven home just how much I want the kind of love, companionship, and security that comes with a spouse of your own. Not only have I seen how they still make one another smile after 60 years of marriage, but I have come to the realization that when they die, I will well and truly be on my own.
My grandparents are still in good health. There is no reason to think they won’t live many more years. But the reality is they are my grandparents. They will, in all likelihood, die before me. Who will be my anchor then? My emotional support? The safety net I know I can fall into? Who will love me unconditionally?
This is why people really get married, isn’t it? Because they want the security that comes with knowing someone is by your side. I admit it’s probably not the healthiest reason to rush into a relationship, but I think we all want that peace of mind. We all want to be loved and to have someone there to catch us when we fall.
It is more than that, though. I think you know the thing you want most in life because it is the last thing you think about at night. Your heart’s truest desire is the fantasy you lull yourself to sleep with. For me, that is a husband.
I have a boyfriend pillow – yes, the creepy kind that Kurt Hummel had on Glee – that I snuggle up to every night. Kurt called his Bruce. Mine was called Armie both because it is basically just an arm and because I had a crush on Armie Hammer. Now that we know Armie Hammer is a cannibal, I’ve changed his name to Harry – Prince or Styles, depending on the night.
I put my dating life on hold until I was happy with myself. I’m happy with myself. Now, I want to be happy with someone else.
It’s time to start dating again… right?
That thought terrifies me, mostly because I don’t know how to date in your thirties. In college it was relatively straightforward. Meet a guy at a party. Exchange knowing glances throughout the night. “Accidentally” meet by the keg. Let him fill up your cup. Give him your number. Go home, wait for the call. Invite him over. Warn your roommates.
But at 35, how do you meet a man? I’ve done a bit of online dating, but the guys I’ve talked to are either creeps or babies. I don’t want to date a 22-year-old, but all the men my age are either married or perverts – or sometimes both, which… their poor spouses.
My desire has always been to fall in love with someone I meet organically, by which I mean not a blind date and not online. We’d meet at a party, or a coffeehouse, or a bookshop. There would be no artifice, no pressure. We’d both act on a mutual attraction which would grow and deepen as we got to know one another.
Perhaps that is asking too much. Maybe in 2021 meet-cutes like that are best left to Candace Cameron Bure in whatever Hallmark Christmas film she’s staring in this week. It might not be that easy. I may need to work for it.
That’s such a terrifying thought.
This is the season of frights, though. Halloween is about facing your fears, about staring the things that terrify you directly in the eyes, about not jumping when the ghost says “boo.” So, maybe it’s time to grow up and face my fears. Maybe it is time to start dating again.
Or, maybe it is just cuffing season.
On Michele Fiore…
Las Vegas councilwoman Michelle Fiore released what I think is the most memorable political ad since Joni Ernst castrated hogs on an Iowa farm. She drove a cool pickup truck. She wore a skin-tight red dress and a crop-top leather jacket. Her hear was platinum blonde. She had swagger, strutting across the desert and talking defiantly about negative press coverage. She shot a gun, blowing up Budweiser beer marked with CRT and other Republican boogeyman.
Liberals freaked out, seeing the worst of Trump’s America come to life. I, on the other hand, saw so many women I know and love. Fiore’s ad was, in a word, relatable. Democrats could take a lesson from her.
Obviously one ad is not enough to make me betray every principle I hold and endorse Fiore. Not only are her politics diametrically opposed to my own, but she is embroiled in controversy. She’s accused of making racist remarks, she allegedly broke a fellow councilwoman’s finger, and she’s under FBI investigation over her campaign finances. So, there’s a lot of reasons why this woman should not be dogcatcher, let alone governor of a US state.
But this isn’t about Fiore. It’s about the optics of her ad – and the guttural reaction to it of the left. They saw white trash, a caricature of the ugly American: ignorant, violent, rude, and chauvinistic.
To me, she looked a lot like my friend on a night out, with her bleach-blonde hair and skintight dress. She talked like my mom. She drank beer like my aunt. Her pickup truck is a dead-ringer for the one I want.
Though she’s from Las Vegas (which is not exactly rural), she embodied a certain sort of brash, in-your-face, Gretchen Wilson-style woman that every country boy knows and loves. She was familiar. It didn’t feel like she sneered at our culture, our aesthetic, our values. She spoke like us, looked like us, and acted like us. She could have been reading the Communist Manifesto and I reckon folks down here would have listened.
I knew Donald Trump would find truck with a lot of Americans because a lot of Americans are a lot like Trump: kitschy, gauche, outspoken, uncensored. Those things are not necessarily bad on their own, though they are certainly considered as much by many of the metropolitan liberals and the suburban middle class. Looking at Michelle Fiore’s ad, they see their worst nightmare made manifest. I see… a relatively unremarkable American woman – and by unremarkable, I mean simply that there are a lot of people just like her.
The horror with which liberals reacted to that ad showed me that they have a frankly classist stereotype about not only Trump voters but rural folks in general. They don’t know the first thing about what people in Tennessee or Nevada are like. They see someone like Fiore and assume the worst.
To be fair, in her case it’s true. But not in the case of my friend who dresses like her. Or my grandfather, who has never voted Republican in his life but is also a card-carrying member of the NRA. Or of me, who is a socialist and also loves a pickup truck because they’re good for hauling things (and they look cool).
The left was confronted with someone who epitomizes a certain kind of working-class woman in the heartland, their first reaction was sheer horror. That is not good.
Country life is a lot different than city life, and a lot of Americans (even in urban areas like Las Vegas) like that aesthetic and life. We wear cowboy boots and push-up bras. We like leather. We bleach our hair blonde and drive trucks and yes, we shoot guns.
These things are not political statements so much as they are cultural statements. Reading politics into them is a fool’s errand. It is also why Democrats aren’t doing better in rural America. They can’t believe people actually live and act like this.
But they do. Democrats need to get out of their comfort zone. Women like Fiore are the women they need to court and keep if they ever hope to win nationally. Focusing on the optics, not the politics, of her ad can be instructive for Democrats who desperately need to reconnect with middle-America and the working class.
What I’ve been up to…
For The Independent, I wrote about Madison Cawthorn’s call on parents to raise their children to be monsters. “Cawthorn’s monsters… represent the end-goal of the Trumpian movement, one where straight white men are returned to what Cawthorn and his ilk view as their rightful place as the exclusive wielders of cultural, economic, and political power.” It is telling that he used the word “monster,” and I discuss why in the piece, which is peppered liberally with Halloween and horror story references befitting the season. Don’t get confused, though; this topic is deadly serious. Toxic masculinity has dire consequences for our society, which I discuss.
For 100 Days in Appalachia, I wrote about the legacy of Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service in my hometown of Hyden, Kentucky. In doing so, she revolutionized rural healthcare as well as the healthcare of mothers and babies. “Not only did she bring healthcare to the mountains, but she transformed the medical profession and set a model that could be replicated across the nation. It all started when she identified a need and decided to meet it.” We have a need in Appalachia today – our hospitals are closing, our people are hurting – but we have no Mary Breckinridge to meet it.
On Medium, I blogged about the sorry state of British politics following the assassination of Sir David Amess MP. “There will no doubt be much hang-wringing and finger-pointing over the coming days. Some will blame the divisive issues of our time, chiefly Brexit. Others will blame social media and the proliferation of misinformation and the radicalization of so many. I blame us. You. Me. All of us, really. I blame us.” This is essentially me building on a theme I first explored in last week’s newsletter, but I hope you’ll read this too. And take it to heart. We truly do have more in common.
What I’ve been reading…
A Communist At Large published part six in his “China in the age of American decrepitude” series. I cannot recommend this blog and this series enough. James Robb is the author’s name, and he has an excellent command of Marxism and the state of the global economy. This blog really zeroes in on imperialism in the 21st century and “the parasitic nature of US capital,” as Robb describes it.
This piece by Finn Mackay in the Guardian is one of the best pieces of feminist writing I have read in a long time. They (Finn prefers they/them pronouns) make a compelling case for the success of and continued need for radical feminism. It is so nice to see this from someone like Finn, who I think could play an important role in bridging the divide between so-called “trans rights activists” and so-called “TERFs,” who I think on the whole have more in common than either wants to admit. (I’m anticipating the angry e-mails responding to this now, haha.)
This story about a bartender epically quitting their job after their boss was so unreasonable it borders on psychotic is just amazing. I’m so heartened by the number of workers who are telling unreasonable bosses and companies where they can shove their exploitation and abuse. Workers of the world, unite! All you have to lose is your chains!
What I’ve been listening to…
Honestly, it’s still just Adele. But since I mentioned it earlier, here’s that old Gareth Gates song which is low-key one of my favorite songs of all time.
A picture of the puppy…