On Boredom

There comes a point, usually a few months in, where none of this is new any more. The first message has been sent. The first rule has been kept. You know how I write and you know roughly what I will say. And one evening you notice you have not been thinking about it much, and you wonder whether that means it is over.

It does not. But it is worth understanding what is actually happening, because most men misread it badly.

What you had at the beginning was novelty, and novelty does a great deal of work for you without your having to do any. It supplies the urgency. It makes remembering effortless. When it goes, and it always goes, what is left is the thing itself, and the thing itself requires you to show up on purpose. That feels like a loss because it is more work. It is not a loss. It is the point at which you find out whether any of it was real.

Men respond to this in one of three ways. Some escalate, and ask for something more extreme in the belief that a stronger dose will restore the old feeling. It does, briefly, and then they need a stronger one again. Some go looking elsewhere for another first month, and spend years collecting first months. And some sit in the flatness and keep the small rule anyway, on a Tuesday, when they do not feel like it and nobody would ever know.

The third is the only one that goes anywhere, and it is also the least dramatic thing I will ever ask of you.

So when it goes quiet in you, tell me. Not as a confession, and not as a problem for me to solve. I have watched this arrive in a great many men and I am not alarmed by it. It is simply the part where the beginning ends.