🗞️ TSAR: The widow maker

Are you taking over / or are you taking orders? The Clash, "White Riot"

Good morning guys ⛅

Welcome to the first edition of The Sunday Andrew Review ("TSAR"), our new Sunday newsletter. They come out on, well, Sundays. What's the point? Choose one topic and go a bit deeper. I hope you like it. And if you don't, that's ok - tell your friends it's bad. But still send them a link to Andrew's Apples. All press is good press in the deranged attention economy of 2022. But it'd be a lot cooler if you liked it and told me why.

I will continue to spend Monday-Friday delivering holistic health news alongside my hot takes which will surely land me in jail one day. (Maybe soon. Maybe today. Maybe I'm writing this right now from inside a jail cell decorated with Pride paraphernalia, MAGA bucket hats, and Ron Paul throw pillows.) Send help.

I hesitate to call TSAR a longform writing experiment because I still want to keep it tight. Just a few morning minutes on the L train or on the can is all you need. Consider it a quick wheatgrass shot that doesn't taste like a dried weed. Ok, enough preamble. It's showtime.

The widow maker

In financial markets, a widow maker is an investment that results in catastrophic losses. Hmm, feels familiar ha ha ha! You're dead and thus a widow is made. Clock cleaned. Don't let the door spank you on your way out. But, to me, that is just one way to die, accelerated by leverage, greed (in all of its ugly forms), and a ridiculous risk appetite. What I'd like to talk about is the Slow Death. Maybe you dub it Death of 1,000 Cuts, but I don't think that quite captures the essence. The Slow Death, rather, is tiny boring habits repeated over and again without any detectable measure of pain; in fact, they probably feel good.

You can make your wife (gf/partner/friend/sibling) a widow over time by doing the following things that I did and learned the hard way from. But I warn that "over time" could means years or mere months. Habits compound like plaque in the mouth of a bum. Which is to say: fast. And this isn't just about relationships with others - more fundamentally, it's about your relationship to the person you see in the mirror in the morning. Next to food and shelter, this IMO is the foundation of a whole and holy human. Now, where did I wet the bed?

• Not treating her like a princess. As a straight dude in my twenties, I found myself spending the first few weeks or months of a relationship really putting in the effort. Effort to be sweet, funny, a buoy of positivity, light, providing, proactively booking tickets to a cool concert, being good in bed. Then, complacency kicked in and her needs were often backseated, then trunked - and I did not even know it was happening. Too wrapped up my own shit, I forgot how to see her. This led to breakups brokered by either side. Queue the ice cream pints and whining unpoetically to friends over the telephone. By not treating her like a princess, I too was not treating myself like a prince: instead I became a knife with no edge, which got the job done most of the time. Yet devoid of any grace. This applies to any relationship, not just romantic.

  • Now? My yoga teacher Samara always says, Treat everyone like royalty. That includes yourself. I turn 30 in a few weeks and I can say I treat myself today way more like royalty than I did in my twenties, and it radiated outward to those I most admired. Real friends (or lovers) are the ones who you can be weird with, the ones who know and what makes you different. Without removing the plastic mask, you're holed up in the apartment of your own head. Suffocating. My closest relationships know, doubtless, that I am a kind, silly, and petty lunatic. That is one step toward exiting the business of widow-making.

• Remember the You on the first date. You were funny, nervous, charming, a little clumsy, firm yet open-minded, dressed not in sweats, hair coiffed, nails clipped, smelled like the woods, you paid for everything. None of these are ironclad, but you get the point. You were money that night! MONEY!

  • Now? It's hard to maintain over time, but I like to remind myself that the best moments in any relationship of mine have been when I was locked in, engaged to the tits. Money.

• Use the sex organ between your ears, not your legs. I'm paraphrasing a Spike Lee joint right there, and it's true. Especially as a dude. (Don't worry, I'll get Peaches back in here to discuss the female end of this topic!) Statistically, you're not good at sex lol. So work on that. But ultimately what is going to seal the deal is your brain. Watch old Humphrey Bogart/Cary Grant movies and you'll see what I mean, gang. Same goes for women re: Audrey Hepburn/Lauren Bacall movies. It was called the Golden Age for a reason. You'll learn more from them than you will from Machine Gun Kelly and Cardi B (smh lmfao).

  • Now? Hit pause and ask: which organ am I using right now? Ah, haha, got it.

The End. Hard truth is that "widows" will still be made, as it is the contract of human life. Hearts shattered and hardened, laughs silenced, thumbs twiddled, and cries magnified. People dropping into your life for the briefest minute, then suddenly disappearing, always with fewer explanations than your mind wanted. They become, hopefully, with the healing power of time, less a widow and more an ornament on your everlasting holiday tree. Beautiful and, yes, inert.

Your friend,

Andrew 🍎

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