to be specific in our affections

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about specificity. There’s this clause that’s bound itself to my brain like a barnacle, and I notice it whenever I get into the elevator or turn on the shower:

to be specific in our affections

It’s been stuck there since this phone call I had in December. At some point, I said something nice. My friend paused and said, “You are very good at giving compliments.” 

You have two immediate options when you get a compliment: shiver it off or accept it. The latter is better. Then you can do what I do and spend your commute thinking about whether it’s really true, and why or why not, and what it really says about you. When people compliment you on giving compliments, it might be because you’ve noticed some small subtle something in them or in the way they move, and named it.

So maybe what I’ve been thinking about isn’t just specificity, but specificity in love. In friendships and in romance, I lean into love that feels specific. It’s easy to forget how actively we can design our affections for every recipient: I don’t want words that could be meant for anyone else; I don’t want to vaguepost. I want a love that’s conscious of my quirks. And when you have a love that exists specifically between two individuals, this creole of affection starts to emerge. The love gets wonderfully weird, and then it becomes durable. It develops resilience. How can two people constantly designing their love to welcome the weirdness and specificity of the other do anything but last?

There's this poem I think about a lot but can never find, which I think I encountered in an anthology when I was in high school. The poet writes about his wife's elbows, how they matter to him — it’s a comment on how we write about loving the neck and the lips and the eyes but what about the elbows? So much hinges on them, literally.

Don’t bother looking for it. None of the poetry that surfaces on search for love and elbows is worth reading. It's all too ambitious, too corny. I liked that one poem because I think the author understood that his job was simple, was to show you something small.