i didn't come here to be your girlfriend, i came here to be america's next top model.

what puts us in the same room can make us either compatible or competitive.

Q.

Dear Olivia Gatwood,

First of all, I'm so excited to be writing to you! I'm a huge fan of your poetry, your pod with Melissa, and I loved your new book (even though I normally hate robots). This advice column sounds like a lot of fun. 

I'm writing this email instead of working on job applications, which brings me to my question / concern. My boyfriend and I both graduated college in May. We met because we were undecided students who decided to major in writing at the end of freshman year. We both volunteered as peer mentors for other undecided students, and then we both worked as tutors in the writing center. We were friends throughout most of this, and only started dating senior year. All of this is to say that we have a lot in common, which is why we both have been applying to the SAME JOBS without realizing it. 

While it hasn't really been causing conflict in our relationship, it's been internally disheartening to me. We're already interested in such a competitive field (editing / publishing), that knowing I'm competing with my very talented boyfriend is making me feel down about my own ability to land a job. Usually what happens is that one of us comes to the other feeling accomplished ("I applied to so and so today!") and the other makes the connection that they, too, have applied to that role. For a while, I created a rule that we were not allowed to talk about where we've applied, but that doesn't seem like a long term solution. What's also hard is that he has gotten more interviews than me (and sometimes I wonder if that is because of gender, since we have similar experience), and I can't help but compare. 

I don't want to feel jealous, but sometimes I do. I don't blame him, of course. It's just a hard job market right now, and we're both doing the best we can. 

So, do you have advice about competition within relationships? Have you ever felt like you had to out write/art/girlboss your significant other? I will say, I don't think our relationship has been majorly suffering from this--we haven't been arguing or anything like that--but it has been on my mind. And since we are both writers, I wonder if this inclination to compare would continue should either one of us pursue writing seriously or get published. 

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your advice.

Best,

Sara

art by John Pusateri

A.

Dear Sara,

In my late teens and early twenties, my favorite thing to do on any given night was go to a poetry slam. Usually, they were in bars where I used my fake ID to order something heinous like a spiked milkshake, then have the audacity to wonder why I had severe digestive issues with curdled dairy in my lower intestine. I loved poetry slams more than most places in the world. I loved the bellowing hosts who taught the audience how to heckle. I loved the nerves in my belly as I sat fidgeting in the back of the room waiting for my name to be called. I loved winning and I loved losing and I loved knowing that next week, it would happen all over again. But what I loved most, by far, was gradually becoming familiar with the other regulars until eventually, I knew everyone. There are few things more comforting than walking into a room where all of your friends are hanging out. We grew to know each other’s poems by heart, we anticipated our favorites like we were waiting for a song to come on the radio. We brought birthday cakes for each other and mourned each other’s losses. We dated, we broke-up. A number of us even married each other. People who I watched meet across a candle-lit booth in the beer soaked back room of a dive bar, would later greet each other at the altar where they exchanged vows that could be published in an anthology of love poems by contemporary writers. But not every poetry slam was a meet-cute or a birthday party. As you can imagine, the practice of sharing your deepest traumas on stage to then be scored numerically by strangers in the audience, might cause relationships to wear thin. Poetry slam in and of itself was competitive, but that competition didn’t end in the bar. As the stakes grew—by way of national competitions, advertising placements, publishing deals—the competition went from friendly to dire. For a number of us, poetry slam became a full-time job. Which meant the people in that room were our co-workers. And our competition. And our best friends. And our partners. And our exes. And, and, and. In short, we desperately needed an HR department but all we had was an open tab and a few too many vodka sodas down the chute.

The gist is this: what puts us in a room together can make us both compatible and competitive.

Sara, you’re not entirely paranoid that there is a scarcity model at play here—there is a limited number of jobs and the jobs that are open are highly competitive. But the lie of the scarcity model is the notion that there is only room for one. And unless we are talking about a role like Miss United States or The Great British Bake Off Champion, there is certainly a very imaginable world in which both you and your boyfriend are able to lock down jobs in the industry you love. In fact, once you are able to do that, you might find that your individuality within this field becomes much clearer. Right now, because you’re casting a wide net and just looking for a-fucking-job, you are unable to focus on the varying qualities you separately embody. But what’s likely is that when you do find these jobs, you will also very quickly recognize that what you offer to this field is different and, in the same vein, probably not feel much envy for the position of the other person.

In 2014, I attended the Women of the World Poetry Slam, an international poetry competition for…..Women of the World. Throughout the week, I kept hearing this name. Melissa Lozada-Oliva. People asked me if we were related. You aren't? Well you must know each other. You don’t? Well you have to meet. You’re so similar! When we finally met, competing against one another in a preliminary competition (she beat me), I understood immediately why she’d been so frequently recommended. We occupied the same role: Girl in Her Mid-Twenties with Gapped Teeth and Curly Hair. Melissa and I became fast friends; it turned out the people were right, we were similar. And we continued on to have somewhat similar careers, too—moving from spoken word to publishing our first poetry books, then transitioning to fiction and screenwriting, hosting a podcast together, and embracing the art of the curly bang (Melissa did it first). Throughout this journey, we faced our fair share of the scarcity mindset. If any industry is going to make you think there is only room for one, it’s the industry where you’re asked for your Instagram handle more often than a resume. This can feel especially true in the beginning, when everything feels like an audition, when you’re just begging for One Single Shot, even if it’s as a background actor in a commercial for Papa John’s hoping someone will see you and go, wow that girl looks like a great writer, we should give her a book deal! But what I found was that the longer Melissa and I worked, and the more integrated we became with the work we wanted to be making, the clearer our individuality became. Our audiences are different, our voices are different, our dreams are different, our idols are different, our lives are different. We ask different questions, we offer different answers. What happens then is that everything you do share (which is still a lot) just ends up feeling like a gift. It feels like empathy. It feels like collaboration and partnership. We share a knowledge of the field, which means we get to commiserate about it. In fact, Melissa is the only person I call when I need to complain about something very specific in our jobs and know I won’t be misunderstood or judged for being ungrateful. Of course, we celebrate each other’s wins, but truthfully, it’s far rarer to find someone who intimately understands your grievances. So unless someone crowns Melissa as The Best and Most Beautiful Curly Haired Girl With A Gapped Tooth in North America, I won’t be sabotaging her career any time soon. And even then, maybe I’d just let her have it.

There’s this saying that I keep hearing. Resentment is cancer for a relationship. Although, in the ethos of Ocean Vuong, who says that war is not a metaphor because nothing is like war, only war is like war, perhaps cancer is not a metaphor either. So instead, let’s look at how resentment travels. It grows quietly, it wears on the body of a relationship until that relationship can hardly carry a small conflict, it poisons everything in its path. We can recognize that resentment is bolstered by silence and thus, the antidote to resentment is communication.

I don’t mean to imply that your relationship is currently being debilitated by resentment. In fact, it sounds like you and your boyfriend have been transparent with each other and have generally maintained upbeat attitudes about the whole thing. What I do mean to imply is that resentment is scary, and I want your relationship to remain mostly free of it. This requires maintaining open dialogue about your feelings during the application process. You don’t have to have answers, or even an immediate ability to provide solace to one another, but just saying a feeling out loud can go a long way. You can certainly continue to draw boundaries around what you do or don’t share (this is probably healthy!), but as you suggested, this is only one part of a larger solution. But I guess what I’m getting at is that a larger solution is to just…keep going. With kindness, vulnerability, and curiosity. For the most part, Communication + Time = The Dilution of Negative Feelings.

But let’s do a little thought exercise and reframing just for safe measure. Let’s say your boyfriend gets a job before you. This could easily be thought of as a loss on your end. But isn’t it also kind of a relief? Your boyfriend has reached the Job In Publishing Finish Line first, and now you’re no longer sprinting right next to someone. Instead, you’re on a leisurely solo jog, where you can go at your own pace, enjoy the scenery, and not be constantly reminded that this is a race. Think of the opportunities! You can re-examine your CV outside the context of competition and really hone in on the things you care about instead of the things that make you “better”. You can feel safe knowing that whatever job you’re applying for is not in his eyeline because he already has one. You can turn the heater on in your house to eighty-one degrees because he isn’t home to tell you that you’re wasting energy. You can eat a meal without protein. That finish line will still be there. It doesn’t simply disappear because he crossed it first.

My current partner is a teacher and the only reason I am grateful he’s not in my field is that I don’t want someone else in the house while I write. That, and if he can deal with kids all day, he can probably deal with me. But when I look back on my romantic relationships with other writers and interrogate our competitiveness and resentment toward one another, my reflection is not, I shouldn’t have dated another writer (even though I may have stated this once or twice throughout my life.) My reflection is, I should have been more open about my feelings and asked the same of my partner.

It is not impossible, or even controversial, for two writers to date. In fact, it’s quite common. But based on my liminal research into the great and non-toxic literary couples throughout history, it seems that what makes or breaks a partnership between two people in the same field, is whether or not they are able to release their egos and insead embrace the privileges of shared ground. When we look at couples like Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne, Stephen King & Tabitha King, Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, or Zadie Smith & Nick Laird, the pattern that becomes clear is the fact that they often serve as each other’s first readers. To me, this is a beautiful effort in dissolving competition and taking advantage of the fact that you share a bed with a fellow expert. So my suggestion is this: as you maintain boundaries around where the competition really is (the publishing jobs), you allow yourself to become more vulnerable where it isn’t yet competitive (the writing). Hiding your work can make you feel like you have something to hide, so instead, let’s step into it. Follow in the footsteps of the literary couples we admire and utilize your partner as a first reader, an editor, a consultant, a cheerleader. We should always have boundaries of some kind; some couples make a vow not to explicitly collaborate, which I think can be a really smart choice. And it will take a little bit of time to shape this element of your relationship—we all receive feedback differently, for instance, so this process will require communication on how you can best serve each other. But in the event you are able to harness a dynamic that feels mutually boosting, I think you will see quickly how rewarding it can be to step into what scares us rather than away from it.

In Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, she quotes a poem by her husband, Nick Laird, “Time is how you spend your love.” So, how do you want to spend your love?

xx,

Olivia in my small house