The Hard Truth(s) About Marriage

Objective reality has no place in intimate relationships, like marriages. Just ask the experts. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [And White People Win Again!]( Do You Want to Be Right—Or Do You Want to Be Happy? It was at the bedside of a dying friend that I faced the absurdity of my overwhelming need to be right. I’d met Marylou when I was an eager, insecure teenager of recently divorced parents. The epitome of downtown intellectual chic, she lived on Rivington Street, waited tables at Dojo, wore combat boots to ward off the junkies sleeping in her doorway, and—a few years before Melanie Griffith in Something Wild—sported a Lulu haircut. She was part of my father’s crowd. I lived with my mother, who worked full time, but on weekend visits to my father I met a stream of intriguing characters, and among these Marylou was my favorite. She recognized my curiosity and yearning; in time, she became an older sister, auntie, mentor, and guide. She’d take me to old Buster Keaton movies. She’d take me shopping in the Village for vintage clothes. She encouraged therapy and even introduced me to my first therapist. Eventually, she went back to school and became a therapist herself. Even in her final months, after she was diagnosed with cancer at age 50, she continued to meet with her shrink. “Just because you’re dying,” she said, “doesn’t mean you get to stop doing the work.” One afternoon during a summer heatwave, I sat by Marylou’s bed in her comfortable, air-conditioned hospice room, chatting about nothing in particular. Somehow, we got onto music, to Aretha Franklin, and the song “Respect,” which came out when Mary Lou was eighteen and I had yet to be born. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [What It Was Like to Spend a Summer With JFK Jr.]( Five Fits With: Celebrity Stylist and Creative Director Taylor Okata Taylor Okata grew up in Oahu and cut his teeth styling all around the fashion industry. “I thought leaving the islands, I had to pursue a very definable career, but I've always been interested in fashion since I can remember,” he explains. His past client list includes giants like Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Reebok, and Puma. Currently, though, he’s focusing on his role as the creative director of personal care and grooming brand Hawthorne. He still works with the occasional client—fellow Hawaii kid Evan Mock is a notable example—but to make room for the day job, “I've been styling less and taking a step back from it,” he says. [Read the Full Story]( [Mourning the Trans Boyhood I Never Got]( Three Days on a Boat with Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio Just after the twentieth season of Top Chef ended, with the crowning of Buddha Lo as winner and the surprise announcement of the departure of Padma Lakshmi, Tom Colicchio, the show’s head judge, needed to get out of town. The chef was tired of seeing his face drive by on buses and shouts from passersby to pack his knives and go. “I’ve never said that on the show,” he tartly noted. Plus, he had just bought a new boat, a 31-foot Regulator, and he needed to get it from Edenton, North Carolina, where it was built, to Shinnecock Canal Marina, near where he lives on the North Fork of Long Island. The easiest, most fun and adventurous way to get there was to pilot it up the coast, taking off shore jags to fish along the way. The journey would take three days, leaving Manteo, North Carolina on the first day; mooring in Virginia Beach, VA, the second; Ocean City Maryland, the third; and returning to Long Island that evening if the weather held. [Read the Full Story]( [I'm Ready For The Idol to End. (For Good.)]( Why Is No One Having Sex Right Now? Our waitress crouched down to eye level and said, “Hey, bitches,” then, earnestly, perhaps less joyfully than she might have earlier in her shift: “Are you thirsty bitches?” She said it with a sense of duty. We were at a restaurant called Bacon Bitch, and this is what is done there. Bacon Bitch had come up in a Google search for “brunch nearby” on a Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach, and when I’m presented with an option that sounds like a waking nightmare, I am powerless to pass it up. So we went and ordered the Bloody Marys with the hash brown and the fried egg on top, because we were both thirsty and curious bitches. [Read the Full Story]( [How One Man Stole $2 Billion Worth of Art]( The Year of the Slim Volume "Read this,” the viral tweet begins. “DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it's only like four hours. do it right now i'm very extremely serious.” Bigolas dickolas wolfwood, the viral tweet’s author, was indeed very extremely serious: in early May, this tweet amassed 145,000 likes and over 20,000 retweets, driving enough sales to send its subject—This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohar and Max Gladstone—to #3 on the Amazon sales chart and to #9 on the New York Times bestseller list. “I do not understand what is happening but I am incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas,” El-Mohtar tweeted in response. [Read the Full Story]( [Paul Wesley Brings Captain Kirk Down to Earth]( Paul Wesley Brings Captain Kirk Down to Earth Captain Kirk is wearing a black hoodie and jeans. In the third episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Two, James T. Kirk trades his gold Starfleet uniform for some 21st-century threads (thanks to some time travel shenanigans), and, in doing so, becomes an everyman. As played by Paul Wesley, this version of Kirk isn’t a larger-than-life hero; instead, he feels like someone you know. Or, better yet, someone you might aspire to be like. “He’s a classic,” Wesley tells Esquire. “I feel like Kirk would like classic clothing. He’s like jeans, leather jackets, boots, hoodies, white t-shirts, black t-shirts, boom, done. I never want to wear things that will go out of style.” Although the idea of James Kirk might conjure up images of William Shatner fighting a rubber lizard in slow-motion, or, perhaps the wise-cracking Chris Pine, the character of Kirk is far more relatable and real than his reputation suggests. “If you actually watch The Original Series, yes, there’s some exaggerated stuff there, but for the most part, Kirk is pretty down-to-earth,” Wesley explains. “He’s not like the caricature people think of, or as big as people have made him out to be in their heads over the years.” [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019