A partner who plays music

Drafted March 6 2025I have thought for many years that it is a risky thing to have a partner who is into creating things, lest you be called upon to appreciate those things, and everyone’s preferred narrative about the situation slams head-on into the realistic odds that you especially love their compositions. Especially if you are a kind of curmudgeonly appreciation-prude with an apparent all-round disinclination for having any particular feeling you are meant to have.Friends share songs with me, and I awkwardly tell them that the songs seem probably good but the jury is really out for me until I have heard them a few times.It’s worse when a friend has written the song themselves, because then I feel compelled to really listen to it, rather than just having it on in the background. Yet I so quickly tire of it.Once I have heard a song a few times, I do often like it. Though this feels more like the liking of liking a good pastry, not the liking of liking God dissolving your brain in a vat of transcendence.Then sometimes there are songs that lap into my soul and pulsatingly undo me, open me onto some other world of being. My body spasms and I gasp for breath. My mouth opens. If you looked at me you’d think I was having a pretty exciting sexual time of it. And perhaps I do feel some exquisite pain of sensibility through the intricacies of my body. Far from every time, but for instance even after hearing it a lot of times, Au Fond du Temple Saint would pull me relieved from hyperventilating panic and control my body back into its breath-halting current of being. I sat half-blinded in the US Embassy for maybe an hour one time and listened to it intently on single repeat until I escaped.So anyway, I had a bit of a crush on this guy, and that was going decently well—he was messaging me back, though possibly mostly to save me from making life-destroying ergonomic choices; he was probably coming to visit in a month or so, we were talking about our lives.Then one day he shar