Welcome to can’t relate, a newsletter from me, Maria Del Russo, that I write biweekly on Fridays. If you like what you’ve read, consider subscribing so you’ll be notified whenever I publish. If you want to submit a question for my upcoming agony aunt column, (coming end-of-year) you can do that here.
xxMDR
For the past couple of weeks, I have been trying to, as I told my friends via group chat, “reclaim the hotness.” I’ve been playing around with my hair to see if I can finally look like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I’ve been trying to pay attention to my legs during my yoga practice to appreciate how strong they are. And I’ve been trying to do my skincare routine completely naked to force myself to look at my body and how it moves.
(Yes, mom. It’s one of those newsletters. You have permission to stop reading now.)
The hotness I’m attempting to recapture isn’t the performative, outward hotness, like “these jeans make my ass look amazing” hot. (Although I did get *respectfully* checked out on the street for the first time post-breakup this week and let me tell you, that felt like Christmas morning.) The hotness I am trying to recapture is for my benefit only. It’s the one I feel most acutely between relationships, the special sauce of my confidence if you will, that seems to always falter whenever I find myself partnered up.
In short, my relationships in the past have made me feel unsexy. That’s not true, actually. *I* tend to embody a less sexual pose when I’m partnered up, regardless of my partner’s expectations, and I don’t think I realized that until I was out of this last relationship. And so I’ve been trying to uncover why.
I was never someone who felt completely secure as a sexual being until I, surprisingly, started writing about sex. The ability to parse it in public did something to me. Instead of feeling shy and timid about sex, I felt securely seated within my sexuality. The more I wrote, the more I uncovered about myself, and the more liberated, sexy, and powerful I felt.
But there was always a sense of shame that seemed to run parallel to these feelings. I was raised to believe that sex wasn’t something that you discussed openly. And while my family was always incredibly supportive of my job, I always knew that they would have always preferred to say “Maria writes about beauty” rather than “Maria writes about sex.” (I truly don’t think any other group of people grapples with the Madonna/whore complex more than my fellow Italian-Americans.) I was taught that overly sexual women were the ones men had fun with, but they never wanted to marry.
So although I felt powerful in this sexual pose, whenever I met someone who I was interested in dating, I’d turn off Mae West and I’d pull up Audrey Hepburn, because I thought it would the exact thing that turned men off. I felt like my past relationships, my work around sex — and even the thirst traps I posted on Instagram before we were together — were things I had to manage, to explain away, in order to be worthy of a relationship. This increased the shame around it, to the point where I felt completely disconnected from the sexuality I’d worked so hard to inhabit outside of relationships.
Sex became, well, incredibly unsexy. In turn, I found myself being less satisfied by it. This sensation only intensified when I hit my 30s, which, thanks to literally ~all of popular culture~, signified a stark decrease in hotness in my mind. So I exited my last relationship feeling like an old, gross, deeply unsexy woman, which made staring down the barrel of single life really daunting.
Returning to the hotness feels difficult. It can also feel totally frivolous, especially with so much other terrible shit going on in the world. Looking inward and building yourself up can seem small and silly, and focusing on your outward appearance can seem trite and vain.
But I actually think it’s a truly important task — one that my friend Katie called “totally cosmic.” So I’m starting small and figuring out the small ways to build myself up, and seeing the result. They’ve been, unsurprisingly, positive. Taking the time to look at my naked body instead of just rushing to throw my clothes on is a lesson in appreciation. Telling myself that I am beautiful feels like a lesson in blind faith. All of these things add up to me building back a part of myself that I lost, a part of myself I know I can pull from when I need to feel strong.
It’s not just about sex, or getting checked out, or thinking my boobs look good in a specific top. It’s reframing my sexuality as something for me, not for other people. The sexy is also not something I need to manipulate in order to get people to like me, which is the complete opposite lesson from the one we’ve been told our whole lives. I own it, and I will choose to share it with someone (or many someones) in the future. It won’t be something I give or lose or need to hide. It is mine and mine alone.
My hope is that all of this will eventually solidify so that I no longer feel the need to blunt it if and when the next relationship comes along. I think I’m finally starting to catch on to the fact that the right person won’t make me feel like I need to squirrel this part of myself away. They won’t be ashamed of it. They’ll appreciate it and be attracted to it instead of scared off by it. That is at least the story I am telling myself.
And until then, I will continue to tell myself that I am hot. I will appreciate my long legs, and the softness of my belly, and the curve of my hips, and the width of my smile. I’ll continue to talk to myself naked, and wear tiny, silky slips to bed to make myself feel special, and put on red lipstick, even if I’m putting a mask on over it. I will keep telling myself that I am beautiful because I don’t need anyone else to tell me that. And you don’t either.
This week’s trio
I shared this essay from Stefanie OConnell Rodriguez on my Instagram, but I also wanted to share it here. It’s a beautiful piece that reminds us all that marriage and babies aren’t the only milestones worth celebrating. (I feel this very acutely, especially as someone who spent thousands of dollars on weddings as a broke writer but won’t have a fully-furnished home for months after a difficult breakup because “I’m single and broke and living alone” registries don’t exist!)
Those sexy little slips and sweet nightgowns that I’ve been sleeping in? I’ve gotten a bunch from Easy Seda, and I plan to build out my pajama wardrobe from this shop.
I have a playlist that I’ve been adding to that is literally just songs that make me feel like a hot piece of ass. No regrets! No apologies! You can listen here, but also leave me some song suggestions either here on Instagram. I’m always looking to add.
xx MDR