This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

by Tabitha Carvan

If I had months to live, I would use that time to love Benedict Cumberbatch. Not all that time, of course, but as much of it as I wanted. I would even keep looking at pictures of him on the internet. Ridiculous, hey? It is not a good use of my time or mind, and it does not matter, and yet, there you have it. How could I ever justify this—wasting my precious time on something so unimportant? I can’t, not according to the criteria we use for deciding such things, anyway. That yardstick only measures stuff like productivity, objectivity, legitimacy, appropriateness. It doesn’t take into consideration, at all, how my love for something as silly as Benedict Cumberbatch makes me feel, and what that’s worth to me. It’s someone else’s value system, one that sees loving something, and especially loving something too much, as a bad thing, a problem, an embarrassment. It’s a system that doesn’t know how to account for all the ways in which other people might make meaning. On this measure, my love for Benedict Cumberbatch is never going to cut it, no matter how hard I try. And I’m tired of trying. If I had months to live, I would want to use that time to do what I love. After all, what could be more worthy of my time and attention than that?

“I give what I can of my love, time, and support to my family and friends, but reserve the right to have a private, inner life.”

Because when you ask, “What does your husband think about all this?” what you really want to know is: “Have you performed all the necessary psychic labor to make sure your feelings are, you know, okay to share?” Have you done the work?

By buying into the question of what the husbands think, I’m doing something that comes so naturally to me, it feels essential: I am holding myself to account. Something makes me happy, or brings me pleasure, and I ask, how does this make me look? Nice? Thin? Modest? Domestic? Caring? Invested in my relationship? Sexually faithful? Like a good wife? I put everything through a pressure test, to see if it will hold up under public scrutiny, to see if it’s okay. And if the pleasure doesn’t consider the needs of other people, and if it doesn’t attend to what other people require of me—if it’s just for me—then it will fail. No wonder so many women prefer to confine their pleasures to the privacy of their inner life, or to their supportive online communities. It’s the only way to escape the question of what your husband thinks about all this.

My best friend, Beth, tells me her best friend Brené Brown says you should keep a list in your purse of the people whose opinions matter to you. It’s a handy reminder: you needn’t worry about anybody else. My purse, which Nathan bought me, is patterned with a collage of Benedict Cumberbatch faces, so I don’t need such a list. Cashiers who say “I love your purse!” are the only people worth listening to.

Beth taught me this lesson too, years ago, when she developed another important list (she loves lists), this one being her “list of interests.” She came up with this concept after she got tired of people asking her if she was going to renovate her house. She worked out the best way to shut down these conversations was simply to say: “Renovation is not on my list of interests.” It wasn’t figurative. She actually created a list of interests so “home renovation” could, specifically, not be on it.

We “don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say,” Loofbourow writes, so we dismiss them outright, without any real consideration. We only glance at them, and we think that’s enough to get all the info we need: they’re just girl stories.

“Joy is not made to be a crumb.”