Hi !  Welcome back. When people show you who they are, listen. This week I am thinking (and writing) about judging others, living authentically, open relationships, male friends, seductive women and ..just for laughs…Meghan Markle . - Eve D.❣️

Week in review…

🌍️ I’ve worked it out. The world is going mad. We thought it might be, in the past, but now I know for sure that it is. Little sense in crying about it. My friends and I have discussed this, and we realise: best we can do is take a deep breath, and look after our tiny village, and ourselves. Even that is not easy, but it is what it is. Gratitude helps.

😡 If you want to know what kind of week it was, know this: On Monday Laura and I were bitching about general stuff, by Wednesday, we were exploring the idea of escaping to a 4-month-long hike through New Zealand, away from everything and everyone, and by Thursday we were exchanging TikToks on how we were going to make impromptu pillows while camping during the hike.

❤️ I’m grateful for my friends. I have great friends, near and far. In times of strife, they listen to me, and they give me a clear perspective and support.  I leaned on them heavily this week, and they delivered. Muchos gracias.

🔢 I’m helping a friend’s son with his maths, and I am loving it. I have tutored friends’ kids and my own family members in the past, and it is truly one of the most enjoyable things ever. (I don’t charge anyone, I do it for fun). I have a good understanding of maths (at least at the high school level) and I enjoy helping kids who are “terrible at maths” realise they are actually more than capable of excelling. On the down side, I am in slight horror at how maths is (not) taught in schools these days.

✏️ I am writing. A lot. I resurrected my “work” blog! I say “resurrected”, but what I actually mean is I erased everything that was there, and started from scratch. And I say “work”, but it’s really just stuff I want to write that doesn’t quite fit into this Sneakers and Heels vibe. And I resurrected my actual other-work newsletter too. I put it on hiatus a while back, but now I have it figured out and this week it’s going out to 10,000 people. I’m excited. And I wrote more of my book. The more I write, the more I know myself. I love it. (And yes, I know it seems like a silly time to write more, with AI taking over everything etc, but I will go down kicking and screaming).

👩‍🍳 There’s a new Kenwood Chef mixer in the family, so to speak, and I am now super inspired to cook/bake. Or maybe just inspired to page through cooking books. My mother was an avid (and excellent) cook, and she had hundreds of cook books. (She rarely used them, though. Cooked mostly impromptu). I spent the week going through Little Kitchen Paris, which is a beautiful collection of accessible French food. Here is a quick recipe I want to try: take a potato, slice it thinly (1.5mm); on a baking sheet, arrange slices into a small square and sprinkle with diced up pear and blue cheese. Put in oven, roast until potatoes are crispy at edges and cheese has melted. Makes one portion. I’d never think of mixing potato, pear and blue cheese but it’s worth a shot!

Free Therapy…

Judge and jury…and kindness

I am always amazed at how quick we are to try and convince the world that we “do not judge”.

It’s a ridiculous statement, that we somehow turned into a virtuous lie. We all judge, all the time, and there is nothing wrong with this. “Judging” simply means we have opinions and values, and we compare other people’s actions / behaviour to how we would behave. Sometimes (often times?), the judgment is favourable: “I love how she stood up for herself”. But of course, at other times, we can be less kind. Either way, it’s fine. Our act of judging is simply us trying to contextualise ourselves within our surroundings. We have baselines and boundries, and applying judgment is how we make the choices that become our life.

What is less ok, I guess, is imposing our judgment/verdict on those who did not ask for our opinion. If someone acts in a way you don’t approve, and it doesn’t affect you directly, there is little reason to voice your opinion out loud to them. Let people be. We are all just trying to survive. (Remember, it’s already a mad world out there). And there is never any excuse for being cruel, rude or disrespectful.

By all means judge. It’s how you learn more about yourself. But also build tolerance, and hone kindness. Then we’ll all be all right.

With love, Meghan…

I’m definitely judging Meghan Markle, but I am going to try and be kind about it 😆 . She has a new show on Netflix, and it’s not just a show…it’s a shitshow. I will admit that I have not watched it, but I have seen enough clips on social media of various scenes to make me curl my toes with cringe. It’s so, so inauthentic, forced, pointless, stupid and out of touch with the lifestyle of “real working women”.

I have no real opinion of Meghan (I know she is very polarising, with people either loving or hating her), but this show was a huge misstep. And the reason that it doesn’t work is because she is trying to pretend to be someone she is not (a Martha Stewart-inspired hostess guru). She’s an actress, so she probably thought she could pull it off, but acting a role is very different from trying to permanently be someone you are not. And all it does is make us wonder who she really is beneath that fakery.

It’s sad, and I feel very sorry for her. She is getting so much flack on social media, literally being ripped apart. And no matter the execution, the truth is that this was a project that must have been important to her, and I will give her benefit of doubt here and suggest that her intention was good. We have all tried to redefine ourselves at one point or another, but the difference for you and me is that we can do it quietly, privately and adjust what does and does not work for us. It’s different for celebrities, especially if being celebrities is really the only thing they know how to do. I guess being publicly judged is a price they are willingly pay, in the hope that the judgment is favourable. Unfortunately, this was a miss for Meghan.

Open relationships? Yuck

As much slack as social media gets, the one thing I love about Instagram specifically is that it gives me insight into the lives of people I would otherwise never cross paths with. For example, I follow: Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman; Suebelle, a glamed and botoxed queen of Palm Beach who looks 95yrs old but acts 25; a dad who is giving all us father-less women advice. I also follow a sex worker (who counts her money on screen and it’s like $2k+ a night!), thrifters, nomads, personal chefs, and more. None of these people would probably be my close friends, and yet I still learn so much from them, and appreciate the insight they give me into their little worlds.

But despite the above list, and me trying to be more open and curious and accepting of all kinds of lifestyles, there is one Instagrammer I just cannot stomach - and I have tried. She’s Danielle, her profile name is OpenlyCommitted, she has 39k followers and she shocks me.

Danielle is a married woman, with two kids, who has an open relationship with her husband. Which is another way of saying: she has a marriage and she has a boyfriend(s). Her husband has a girlfriend. She talks about this lifestyle openly on IG, and much as I try to understand it, there is just no way I can. This is my limit.

(I should also say she is quite attractive, but also super annoying to me. It’s like she tries to be cutesey and fun, but it falls flat. Kind of like Meghan Markle, see above).

openlycommitted

39K followers

View more on Instagram

Now, I am well aware that Danielle’s lifestyle choices do not affect me in any way, and should just let it go, unfollow, and carry on living my life. And I might do this, but I am curious as to why this woman bothers me so much. The quick answer is “we don’t share the same values”, but you could argue the same for me and the sex worker, or me and the Orthodox Jew. There’s something else going on here….and I think I kind of worked it out. See below.

Men + women = friendship?

I have male friends that I am very close to. As in, we chat at least once a week, sometimes twice, and the conversations are deep. I was friends with all of them before I met my current boyfriend, and they have stayed on in my life during this new relationship. I appreciate them greatly.

I am very comfortable with having male friends while also having a boyfriend, because I know myself, and I know my friends, and I know there’s literally zero chance, while I am in this relationship, that any of these friendships would turn into something more than just platonic. (Also, these friends are either married, in relationships or dating). It’s not even that “we know the rules”. There are no rules, because there are no issues. My friends might as well be gay. I’ve never cheated on a partner, or suddenly left a partner for someone else, and I am pretty sure that record is not going to change.

I can’t say G is thrilled that these men are in my life, but he’s also accepting and understanding of it. But that does not apply to my female friends. My female friends are all in mild shock that I have close male friends while I am in a relationship. I don’t understand this, and I defend myself strongly. Am I supposed to dump my male friends, some of whom I have known for 30 years, just because I have a boyfriend? What if I am ever single again? Do I grovel back to my friends then? To me, this whole thing is nonsensical. My female friends stand firm, though. Most of them are in awe that G and I can make this work.

As part of their argument, they come at me with the inevitable “What if G had female friends he hung out with regularly? You’d hate that”. And my response is one of surprise. I would not hate that. I would strongly encourage it. I want G to have female friends. Why not? But no!! This is where my female friends draw the line. Apparently, G having female friends is completely, utterly, 100% unacceptable.

I defend G strongly. I trust him to be respectful of our relationship, which is all that’s required. My female friends just laugh. And laugh. Because, apparently, it’s not G who is the problem. It’s his potential female friends who are. Apparently, as I have now been told, women can be vile. They will stick their claws into a man without him even realising it’s happening, will use and abuse him, and move on. They will destroy relationships without blinking twice.

I balk at this. I am a woman, I do not do this. My friends are women, they do not do this. Surely, G is smart enough to make grown up choices and understand their consequence? But when I ask my female friends this, their stories come out. My one female friend, (in her past, now abandoned life), did have an affair, with a married man while married herself. She says she was not “young and stupid”. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she knew exactly how to do it. And, she says, the ease with which she made it happen caused her great insecurities in her current (and very happy) relationship. She knows what “those” women can do, because she was one of them in a past life. Another friend tells me she confronted face to face a woman her husband worked with, because the husband was oblivious to this woman’s intentions, but my friend was not. (The other woman didn’t deny it!). And so the stories go on and on. Everyone has one. And there is a common theme, and every woman has said this to me: men are stupid and clueless when it comes to this stuff.

This surprises me. I consider men to be the seducers. Also, I am one of those female friends that men have, and I am certainly not out seducing them. Apparently, I am the exception to the rule. At the end of the day, my female friends who are in relationships do not have friends of the opposite sex, and neither do their partners. No exceptions.

I take this a bit further, though. My attitude to relationships has always been that I cannot stand in the way of someone being with their true person. So if G met someone who was more his real person than I am, as much pain as that would give me, I would also be happy for him (eventually). My female friends hit me over the head at this point. This isn’t about real persons, they say. This is about flings. And flings are cruel and destructive, and pointless. And all temptation, according to my friends, should be removed.

I don’t know. None of this makes me happy. I think the price we pay (either way) is massive. But it also explains why I have such as visceral reaction to Danielle and her open marriage (see above). She and her husband move outside their marriage to have “flings”, relationships even, and it vexes me. I want people to be stronger than that. To be more committed. But as the philosophers and psychologists say: our anger at others is a reflection of our own fears.

All this makes me sad.

I’ve been reading…

Nothing! I’ve been reading nothing. The plan was to always be in the middle of some fiction book, but I am just not in the mood. I guess my reading habits go through seasons.

I’ve been listening…

I was reminded of George Michael this past week. As a teenager, I was obsessed with Wham!, and his later work also resonated with me as I grew up. One of my few regrets in life is that I never saw him in concert. Anyway, this week I opened up Youtube Music, and streamed his music all day. Brilliant stuff. Father Figure is one of my favourites.

I’ve been watching…

Nik (one of my male friends, see above 😆! )and I watched Seven (my choice). I had seen it before, but I was surprised that scenes I was expecting to see because I remembered them from when I first watched the movie, actually did not exist. This is another reminder how our memories are completely unreliable. Much as I try to deny this, I see evidence of it often.

Anyway, Seven is a good movie. It’s got Silence of the Lambs vibe, but it also has Brad Pitt. So a double win. (I also (in a way) misunderstood the ending until Nik explained it to me, and it makes much more sense now. Good script.)

Next week we are watching The Last Stop in Yuma County. Never heard of it.

I also watched a lot of crap movies this week, on my own. I was moody and wanted to lose myself in mindless crap. I watched Mamma Mia 2 (not recommended), Paris Proposal (not recommended) and The Internship (not recommended). On the other hand, sometimes watching crappy, not-recommended movies is exactly what is required!

Thanks for reading!

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PS