Blake Jennelle (The Blog)

If you’re anything like me, Valentine’s Day is not exactly your favorite day of the year. The pressure is on, Romeo. Juliette is watching you like a hawk to see just how much you really care. And your brother, Lonelio, is feeling even worse. After all, he’s going home alone tonight.

I felt the heat when I was a 19 year-old college student. I was dating a wonderful, low-maintenance woman who nonetheless expected a good show from young Blake. And I put on a damn good show, if I do say so myself.

But I sure was reluctant to do it. I wrote all about it in my college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, in an article called “A Reluctant Valentine” (see below). I laughed when I read it again today, and I’d thought I’d share it with all of you reluctant lovers and Valentines out there. Read more…

I’m living through a breakup right now, which means that in my heart and in my head, I’m living through a death and an addiction at the same time.

A death because, suddenly and probably forever, I lost someone and something that meant the world to me. I lost a partner, a friend and somebody who knew all my shit and loved me anyway.

I also lost an idea that meant the world to me. I lost the dream I had for the relationship – the future I had started to imagine, the understanding of my past as I had rewritten it, and the shared world we inhabited together as we each made our way through our own.

It’s an addiction because every habit triggers an urge I have to resist, and so do the moments of emptiness in between. When I have a thought I want to share, I can’t share it with her. When I feel misunderstood, I have to turn to someone else to understand me. Read more…

In your most important relationships, what happens when things go wrong?

Do they spiral out of control? Or do they whirl and spin and shake, only to settle firmly where they belong?

Physicists talk of stable and unstable equilibriums, and relationships obey a similar physics.

A stable equilibrium is like placing a marble in the bottom of a deep bowl. You can jostle the marble and shake the bowl, but no matter what, the marble will eventually return to where it started, as stable as ever.

An unstable equilibrium is what happens when you turn that bowl upside down and place the marble on top. As soon as you touch the marble or nudge the bowl, the marble careens off the side, onto the table and eventually drops onto the floor.

You can put the marble back on top of the bowl, but it’s precarious. The smallest disruption and it’s on the floor again. The equilibrium is always at risk. Read more…

The Internet makes it easy to matter a little bit to a lot of people.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people will send you an e-mail, read your tweets, look at your photos and think of you over the course of a month.

But how many of those people really matter to you? And how much time do you invest in those relationships?

Something I read today stopped me in my tracks because of how it answers those questions. It’s a quote from an entrepreneur named Rajesh Setty in a new ebook called What Matters Now:

If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been even better if they had met you earlier.

You can tell who really matters to you by looking back and asking yourself, who do I wish had been there sooner? Read more…