“Apparently everyone is talking about Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah, in case you want the latest salacious things,” he tells me.
I involuntarily grin. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I love pop culture. I think it’s because I used to be a researcher. And I was pretty artsy fartsy as a young person. I studied the classics. Have traveled abroad. Spent quite a long time being a capital A artist.
So I don’t fit their profile of someone who likes lowbrow stuff.
But I do. I really do. The truth is I have varied tastes. And an all-abiding morbid curiosity. In a lot of relationships, this has been begrudgingly tolerated. For example, my ex-husband knew that I loved trash, but he was very firm that I was never to subject him to it — either by watching it or talking about it. (He was the kind of person that liked capital A art and looked down on the rest.)
We broke up for other reasons. I’d go on to remarry someone who was a lot better for me. Justin is like me this way a bit. He’s __scientific and artsy. He’s not as into lowbrow pop culture as I am, but he has his own guilty pleasures. And among a variety of other great qualities, he’s considerably more supportive of my penchant for trash. He’s a good sport in general. And he seems to find this quality of mine endearing.
So not only does he not have a problem with my enjoying trash around him (the other day he binge watched an entire season of a silly MTV dating show with me), he’ll go a bit further at times: He’ll draw my attention to stuff he thinks I’d like that I might not hear of otherwise. “Here’s your kind of trash.”
And I have to say that this act feels like its own little love language, one I’d call Curation. Bringing someone’s attention to something they’d like (even if you don’t like it yourself). Making recommendations specifically for them (and not for just for a general audience or yourself).
It really does make me feel loved.