You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

Welcome to all the new subscribers who found themselves here because of this New York Times article! I’m thrilled to have you.

After someone dies, social media posts often call everyone to “Hold your loved ones close tonight” or “Tell your partner you love them.” 

And yes, I agree, we should!

But these declarations have become, to me, bromides as trite as “thoughts and prayers.” They fall far short of what we should regularly give to our loved ones.

Telling someone you love them is a wonderful, life-enhancing gift; telling someone why you love them is more profound and longer-lasting.

A little over a year ago, I lost a dear friend to cancer at the young age of 52.

Paul La Farge was inventive, imaginative, witty, hilarious, deeply kind, and unsparingly generous. He was also a stunning writer and a master wordsmith. His books are all worth a read (see the list at the bottom of this post)

In the weeks following his death, his friends and I shared his work and remembrances on a group chat. His students emailed me to say how much he meant to them and why.

One asked me, “Do you think he knew what he meant to me?”

The answer is yes, and no.

Without being told, we assume; we make things up. We tell stories about ourselves to ourselves on behalf of other people, and often believe they’re true, because they feel true.

Never telling anyone what they mean to you will haunt you when that person isn’t there anymore.

A relationship expands when we nourish it and collapses when we deprive it. We take “I love you” for granted, often expecting it to do the work we’re not doing.

What (I love you) is valuable; of course, it is. But why holds the what of love aloft, enriching and deepening one's experience of oneself in relationship to another.

Not once do we get to experience ourselves in the third person.

We’ll never know what we look like walking toward a loved one; we can’t know the energy others absorb being around us. We can guess. We can assume.

But being told by someone we love why we’re lovable helps prop up and fill out our identity, adding dimension to our lived experience of being a self.

Being a human is often a lonely business.

The world around us filters through one lens; we rely on a single mind our entire lives; we look out from behind the same half-inch wide windows; we are stuck inside one body; our gestures always mediated through the same intrinsic set of idiosyncrasies, and no matter how much we long to look or act or talk or sing or be like someone else, we will never be anyone but ourselves.

What enriches our monologic experience of being a single human being is learning how we impact others and hearing how our humanity sings itself into another’s.

When we tell our friends and loved ones how they impact us and why, we open up portals inside them that they never realized existed, stretching our worlds.

Let’s begin telling those we love what they mean to us, how they’ve enriched our lives, what they’ve taught us, and how the experience of being in friendship with them makes our lives immeasurably better.

While we're here, let’s take the time to hurdle over enshrined social expectations and behave toward our loved ones as we would in a world of our own making.

Because we already live in a world of our own making.

Thank you for your readership. Your consistent support gives me a sense of meaning and purpose.

Your emails, worries, concerns, questions, and ideas engage me intellectually and emotionally, and I feel like I’m in a community of people struggling with the same life questions I am.

You’re good company.

Until next week, I remain,

Books by Paul La Farge: Haussman, or the Distinction; The Artist of the Missing; Luminous Airplanes; The Night Ocean; The Facts of Winter

P.S. Thank you for reading! This newsletter is my passion and livelihood; it thrives because of readers like you. If you've found solace, wisdom or insight here, please consider upgrading, and if you think a friend or family member could benefit, please feel free to share. Every bit helps, and I’m deeply grateful for your support. 💙

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