Friendship breakups with OLD ENOUGH author Haley Jakobson
Plus, writing sex scenes, the ethics of coworker crushes, and Haley's best advice for aspiring writers.
Hey everyone,
How the hell are we! How’s everyone’s summer going? I’m grappling with an unsettling phenomenon right now which is that…I recognize that we’re fully in the thick of summer, maybe even at the end of it, but it still hasn’t quite hit me that summer has even begun? Does anyone else feel this way?
I wonder if this is a new expression of my fear of time and the way it passes. Is it because accepting that it’s this summer forces me to acknowledge that it’s been one year since last summer? And if I do that, I’ll also have to face everything that’s happened and didn’t happen and my own failed or unrealistic or misguided expectations for who I’d be in twelve months time? For who I actually am?
Maybe this is the moment for me to realize that the version I am now is actually the best version. She’s the only one I’ve got and I trust her with the timing of my life.
This whole “revelation” is a half-baked idea that I think is worthy of more cooking (maybe I will explore this in my writing for us soon), but for now, it’s time to reverse the curse!! No more avoiding the fact that it’s SUMMER!!! How many more summer’s do I have left? Hopefully at least sixty. But I don’t want to waste even one. My promise to myself is to fully bask in summer at home for the next four weeks before traveling for a Labor Day wedding in Colorado.
Tell me in the comments: What are some small ways that you’ve been indulging in the summerness of it all, from home, while working?
But as for the real meat of today’s letter!!!!
I’m SO excited to share with you some written highlights from my recent Hello Hayes conversation with writer and fellow internet advice giver, Haley Jakobson.
When I teased this episode on insta stories a couple of weeks ago, saying “the guest wrote a book on friendship breakups,” dozens of you guessed it would be Haley, and alas, you were right!!! Haley is the author of OLD ENOUGH, a novel that explores, yes, friendship breakups, but also queerness and bisexuality and being a survivor and growing up and away from who we in the Hello Hayes universe call an OG bestie. As I shared with Haley in our 1hr+ conversation, her depiction of friendship explosions were so vivid and familiar that I felt physically uncomfortable while reading. The novel can be heavy but in the safe and skilled hands of a writer like Haley, I felt held the entire time. OLD ENOUGH has the full weight of a Hello Hayes book recommendation!
Our conversation covers what we’ve learned about ourselves as writers, why friendship break-ups are so painful, a Hello Hayes (and Haley) question about having a crush on a coworker while you’re in a relationship, and so much more. I cry at one point, obviously (32:00).
I pulled some of Haley’s most thought-provoking and fun nuggets for you to read below. You can listen to the whole episode wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube!
Without further adieu, gems from Haley:
On whether it’s OK to have a crush to have a coworker when you’re in a relationship:
This is tremendously normal. I call this the “crush of convenience,” which is simply a crush that is just enough out of reach. There’s nothing better than a crush. Fantasy is a beautiful, creative part of the mind. Something I practice with my exposure therapy is, “my thoughts are none of my business.” A thought is a thought, a thought is not an action. It's so obvious that this person1 is not interested in acting on their crush. I'm not sure why we have to let it go if it's not hindering our ability to work, if it's not taking away from our relationship and our connection, if the guilt isn't so supreme that it's eating at us.
If you're very grounded in the value that you love your partner, you want to stay with your partner (at least for right now — this could change, but for right now you feel this way), then so what? What a fun little crush of convenience. How is this any different than a celebrity that you have a fantasy about? Your partner does not ever have to have access to all parts of your brain because that's private! We deserve privacy in our relationships. I also can see a world where you talk about this with him. If he's the great guy you say he is, I think there's a lot of potential that he might admit he has similar coping mechanisms. (53:00)
On friendship break-ups:
My last big friendship breakup was when I was 25 and it broke me so profoundly that I took a vow of celibacy from best friendship. I said to myself, I cannot continue this pattern. Something is going wrong here, and I don't know what it is, but I really need to look at this in myself. Old Enough is a 300-page exploration of what was going wrong and what goes wrong.
When I started talking about friendship breakups online, I was flooded with messages from people who said: I am so ashamed. Why can't I keep a friend? What is wrong with me? Why can't I get over this heartbreak? Am I always going to feel this loss, this deeply? It was all questions. Seldom did I hear from anyone who had had a relatively healed journey. That really led me to want to investigate why we are so poorly set up to navigate conflict and rupture in close friendships. I feel like an expert on it now because I've dedicated so much of my life to exploring this. I feel both like an expert, and also, I still have many, many things that I need to continue to practice as I strengthen the muscle to maintain longevity in my relationships. (19:00)
On the problem with having one person be your “other half”:
The media has prescribed to us that we are lacking something if we don't find our perfect match in friendship, someone who finishes our sentences and knows us better than we know ourselves. It’s this glorification of sameness that is a death sentence for friendship. It’s a constant affirmation that we are not whole, and that we are dependent on another person to make us whole, but that will all come to a screeching halt because all we do in this life is grow and change. Change is the only constant. If the foundation of the relationship is built on sameness, then what does it mean if we feel differently about each other or if we disagree or one person is growing in a different direction? If the foundation of your relationship is “you are my other half” — you're fucked.
On the problem with “what’s your writing process?”:
Aspiring writers always want to ask about the writing process, which, to me, is such a boring question. It’s the thing that's so romanticized. I think it’s my least favorite question because I don't know the answer. Of course I have my fun and quirky answers that people want to hear, like I write on the subway. I do. I write on the subway all the time, but is that the totality of my writing process? No, it's ever changing, and that sucks, and no one wants to hear that because people want something prescriptive. But one of the worst things you can do is listen to someone else's writing process and then self-flagellate because you can't mimic it, right?
Instead, I tell my students that whenever you hear a writing tip, think of it as a prompt. Don't think of it as an absolute. Give it a try, see if it works. Ask, what did I learn from that? That's what I always start my writing classes with: What did you learn about yourself as a writer this past week? I try to strip them of the black and white and the binary, because it's just funny to try to assign that to something that is a deeply curious exploration. That is what writing is. You don't know what the end is. (41:45)
On creative foreplay and the fallacy of writing as spontaneous desire:
The issue I find with most early writers is that they think writing is spontaneous desire. They think it's always the lightning bolt, always the surge of inspiration. And yeah, like, when you journal that might be the case, but there's a profound difference between writing for fun and writing as a career. And very often it starts with twiddling thumbs and boredom and potentially fear and panic. But the panic and the fear — that sucks the creative energy away. You are up to something, that is some electricity running through the body when you’re fearful, but it’s really draining. It's very hard then to ask ourselves to get creative because we just spend time being scared. Instead of waiting for spontaneous desire, it’s what you do to lubricate the creative process that will get you to a place where you can actually create. (45:00)
On writing incredible sex scenes in Old Enough2:
I think that's probably all from my permission to be earnest. I always heard that thing of like, “the sex scenes are the hardest thing to write.” I hate when anyone tells me what's going to be hard for me. I don't like to be told what to do. I hate, I hate authority. I also grew up writing erotica, just for fun and to turn myself on. So I have some practice. I was too scared to watch porn with my parents in the house so I would go on literotica dot com and read some really bad sexy stuff and some really good sexy stuff. Sometimes the bad stuff is where you find something really messy and raw and gross, and it ends up being a turn on. And then in the good stuff, you find the really yummy prose. So, I don't know. Writing is a bodily practice. It's so hard not to talk about sex. (49:23)
On our shared love for the acknowledgments section of a book:
I love earnestness. Like I'm such a slut for people being earnest. It's such an underrated quality. I find the acknowledgements to be a place where most people — I mean, not every author. Some authors keep them really short and sweet and that's fine. I'm never going to be that cool. I think acknowledgments is a place where you get a holistic sense of someone's life and all of the things that make it so that they can pursue their passion. You learn about their community. It's so honest. It took me three hours to write my acknowledgments and I sobbed through all of them. I had to cut a lot. I think that you can't write acknowledgements without reflecting on how you came to be where you are, and in that reflection, you just find so many parts of your humanity that are the best. (13:23)
This was in response to the Hello Hayes advice letter we answered together at 53:00!
As you’ll hear in the episode, I was nervous to tell Haley she wrote such great sex scenes! I’m so glad I did.