Dear Level
How to Lose Gracefully to Your Partner
Ways to cope when your romance starts to feel like a rivalry
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
So, I’m on a date with this guy. We’re walking to the train. I notice that it looks like it’s going to rain, but I tell him we should have plenty of time before it starts.
“It’s about to rain now,” he insists.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I can just tell. I come from a long line of diviners.”
“A long line of what?”
This guy looks at me as if he’s puzzled. “You don’t know the word diviner?” he asks. “It means someone who can feel when something is coming.”
And then it started raining.
Within a few weeks, this guy was throwing out words I’d either never heard a day in my life (mulligan!), knew but had just never used (magnanimous), or were so old that they don’t even appear in modern dictionaries (diswont).
And every time he hit me with a new word, I wanted to punch him in the face. I’d silently swoon — that brain was too sexy not to — but I still wanted to punch him.
