an honest honeymoon

About love and sacrifice and my broken brain

Hi,

This is the second part of my essay series on Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s relationship. You can read the first part here.

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How much of yourself can you give another person? I mean really give, like handing over and letting go with an open fist. How much do you want to?

I’m 25 now and mostly all of my friends are in long-term relationships, which comes with the territory of growing up and loving so many along the way. It feels like a prize, watching people I treasure learn important and beautiful things about themselves and the world through their love. So many weddings have brought some of the best nights of my life, laughing and dancing and crying over these love stories I’ve been lucky enough to watch from front-row seats. At two of my best friends’ weddings, I’ve given speeches about watching my soulmates fall in love with their own soulmates and changing for the better because of it.

I felt like an oracle sharing those speeches because I’d witnessed something divine and had to announce it to the masses. Loving people so deeply makes you an expert on their patterns, and gives you authority and access to their truth by observation, whether you say it out loud or not.

Through the true love I’ve seen and by my own failures, I’ve observed a common landing mark: a point in a romance, past the point of counting the number of dates, where you start to hand pieces of yourself over to one another. I’m not talking about anything physical or a transactional thing, it’s harder to catch than that.

The asking point comes in between the honeymoon shininess of something new and the point where it becomes natural to settle into a life together. You start to let them carry parts of you. Suddenly this person catches glimpses of your routines and your secrets and the way houses from your childhood show up in your dreams.

If the exchange is done right, it looks like holding things together, lightening the load, now everything is easy because of you. This is what I mean by giving yourself to another person, and it always looks so beautiful on my friends, like they come home lighter and more sure of themselves.

But the handover has never been easy on me. On me, it looks like botched surrender, skipping the altruistic or romantic way home and becoming an excuse to fight for control. It begins a self-destructive, optimistic attempt to know everything you want to save for yourself and still keep the shininess. An impossible task for love that requires sacrifice.

In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes calls affliction via desire a “cry of love,” an attempt to define oneself. “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” It’s why we do it all, to reach for the puddled, sometimes better version of yourself you see in someone else’s gaze. But I somehow can’t reach for this understanding and still cling to the things I want. I only have so many hands. I end up skipping past finding meaning through that beautiful compromise and instead, give my time and sanity to decaying bouquets of a feeling that still looks fresh.

Joni felt this conflict of surrender too, trying to figure herself out through a watered-down love in Laurel Canyon. But like I said, loving starts easily! You want the rotting flowers to be real, so you buy a vase for them.

It was a California tipping point, with Hollywood oversaturated and violence overwhelming, and Joni made a blind promise of comfort on the very first night Graham arrived in Los Angeles. “Come to my house and I’ll take care of you.”

This started their sun-soaked life together at Joni’s house at 8217 Lookout Mountain, which she bought in spring of 1968 with the royalties from her debut album Song to a Seagull. It was a sanctuary with wood panels, a fireplace, and a garden in the yard. She kept a collection of glass trinkets and a giant piano in the living room. They lived a dreamy few months there, sharing coffee in the mornings and reading together in the living room at night.

Graham wrote “Our House” after breakfast in town one day, when Joni bought a vase on the way home. When they arrived back at the house, Graham lit a fire while she picked flowers in the yard for the vase. He then sat down to immortalize their life together with the lullaby-like song:

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy 'cause of you.

There’s a lot to say about the domestic bliss that learns to breathe when you’re in love. The sweetness of a warm bed is impossible to overlook, a shared meal can be divine. It’s rose-colored glasses in tandem, creating these cozy nesting patterns and leaving little room for division. Love is a long-form magic trick utilized by generations before us to make these secret worlds where every chore is fun and nothing else matters. It’s why going to the grocery store with your crush is the most fun ever invented, and why you remember how they take their coffee long after they leave. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she asks, do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something? Love by renewal, all these things I’ve done alone can be yours too. But the warmth can disappear in an instant.

Joni began to surrender her reality when the honeymoon reared its sacrificial head, trapped in this canyon paradise with a man who couldn’t wrap his mind around her. She had already been married once and didn’t want to settle down again out of fear it would ruin her creativity. He kept raising the question anyway, and she adored him still, calling him “my old man” and writing a song with that same title about how they didn’t need a marriage certificate to prove their love (so funny and backhanded of her). He felt insecure and jealous, he confessed years later, of her songwriting. They argued over their futures and their music and their time.

A poem I love by Joe Wenderoth goes, “I love you, even if you don’t understand me, even if you burn my attempts to reach you, even if you are no one, nowhere. After all, I warm my hands by the same fires.” I think it’s something like that. Both fueled by a parting domestic dream, she loved him as she pulled away for the reasons he crowded and settled in. It didn’t matter what they set out to share.

In “My Old Man,” Joni also confessed her loneliness as part of why she wanted Graham around, to keep away her blues. But eventually, she ran into herself, finding she’d rather feel alone than weak or stifled or crazy. She shared the beginning of her doubts about their relationship in her song “Willy,” blatantly dedicated to Graham with the title being one of his nicknames:

But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real

Comfort can pull the wool over your eyes with one hand while the other still sits in yours. You wake up one day and find him already at the piano when you wanted to sit down and play. You snap out of your paradise spell of stained glass and two cats in the yard and recall your genius, and the life you dreamed before the half-empty assurance of a shared home. You remember the daughter you didn’t keep and the records you planned to make. You find that you liked being by yourself in that Laurel Canyon house, too. There were nights when you danced in the kitchen alone and didn’t have to explain anything to anyone.

I’m not just speculating about them arguing over space. Graham often joked about how they raced to the piano in the mornings, but I somehow don’t think the fight was ever funny to Joni. He also eventually spoke about another fight they had, which proved the dysfunctional surrender to me the most, because I read the story and recognized myself with a jolt. The years really do soften every blow, but Graham telling this story with a laugh decades later can’t convince me of its humor:

At the close of their relationship, Joni joined Graham on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s European tour. They were arguing constantly. One night, the pair got into it after the band made some brash remarks onstage in Sweden. Things escalated until Joni poured a bowl of cornflakes with milk over Graham’s head. As the story goes, the two stared at each other in silence and disbelief before Graham ordered the hotel maid to leave the room and then “put Joni over his knee and spanked her.”

You read that right! It is so insane and humiliating and weird! And from my perspective, it must have been the nail in the coffin. It’s like she woke up; it’s like he snapped. The relationship ended weeks later, while Joni traveled alone throughout Europe and stopped in Crete. As you know. As the story was set for us.

Maybe the sacrifice required in true, healthy romance comes naturally if it’s right. And maybe sometimes relationships implode because your instinct intervenes. Graham told Joni he loved her and didn’t want to hold her down, but he was just a few arguments out from hitting her. The sunny days in Laurel Canyon couldn’t outshine his temper or her brilliance or the fact that it was her money that bought the house in the first place.

In 2018, Graham sang “Our House” at Joni’s 75th Birthday Celebration at the piano. He kept his introduction brief, saying they wrote it together when she was 26 and he was 27. The crowd sang along loudly and beautifully, creating a new home for the song — one that’s outlived creative jealousy and cereal milk over Graham’s head.

How it ends doesn’t have to be how it’s remembered, meaning time has a tendency to smooth every crease. The sweetness in that Laurel Canyon house is what Joni and Graham both still talk about decades after their end. The memory of togetherness prevails past an irreversibly mean night.

Celine tells Jesse in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise that God exists in the little spaces between two people. “If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

It’s the attempt. The honeymoon that haunts the ending. No matter the things you give or forgive, the promises you go back on, or the harshness you allow. In all my witness to big loves and bad lovers alike, I still think the crashing and burning is worth it for the magic in the space between. The ways we hurt and control and reach to understand ourselves and each other can build a home out of meaning as earned as a happy ending. We move past a fantasy for the sake of something real, whether or not the ending is what we had in mind. In the end, we warm our hands by the same fires.

Joni in her Laurel Canyon home :)

THINGS I’VE CONSUMED LATELY

1. So much goat cheese it’s crazy

2. Patrick Fealey’s crushing article in Esquire

3. I’ve been loving the Transa album

4. Noah and Sean’s friendsgiving name being “A Turkey Brines in Brooklyn” has made me laugh every time I’ve thought about it

5. Before Midnight (2013) no questions at this time please

If you’ve made it this far, THANK YOU for reading! And please send me your Spotify wrapped!

C