Last week, I woke up at 3 am two nights in a row with “Being Alive,” Stephen Sondheim’s uniquely shattering homage to marriage from his musical Company, stuck running through my head. This isn’t entirely random. Sondheim passed away last week, at the age of 91, and in the wake of his passing, I was compelled to put on a Spotify playlist of Sondheim’s greatest hits while I was home alone puttering. Despite being a recovering musical theater geek, in my youth I never fully appreciated Sondheim’s musicals, which span the distance between the macabre (Sweeney Todd) and the morose (Assassins). But Sondheim ballads are a Mood and the urge struck.
Even if you’ve never seen Company, you’ve heard “Being Alive” before. Someone in your family has watched a Barbra Streisand or Bernadette Peters PBS special and the melody has wormed its way into your brain. Someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep. Most likely, you encountered “Being Alive” in Marriage Story, wherein Adam Driver’s character delivers a truly heartbreaking post-divorce rendition in a piano bar. I myself have never seen Company. Nevertheless, at some point between my musical theater stage and seeing Marriage Story, I picked up all the words to “Being Alive” and its uniquely Sondheimian melodic twists and turns, because here I am in the middle of the night singing it to myself.
My emotional responses to music aren’t what they used to be, but I can’t get through “Being Alive” without feeling actual Emotion. The song, which reflects Sondheim’s genius by somehow managing to actually embody the sensation of yearning hit me deeply while I was single, and it still hits me deeply, but differently now as I stand on the precipice of marriage. In Company, “Being Alive” is sung by the character Bobby, an unmarried man celebrating his 35th birthday in the company of several pairs of married friends. Watching his friends struggle in marriage, Bobby is scornful and suspicious of having someone with whom you are painfully intimate and intertwined - someone to sit in your chair / and ruin your sleep. But with each looping verse, Bobby’s scorn belies his acknowledgment of the not-uncomplicated refuge of intimacy with that someone - someone you have to let in / someone whose feelings you spare / someone who, like it or not / will want you to share / a little, a lot. As Bobby's friends urge him to make a wish, to want something, Bobby softens and the lyrics shift, suddenly becoming a naked desire for somebody: somebody hold me too close / somebody hurt me too deep / somebody sit in my chair / and ruin my sleep / and make me aware / of being alive.
(If you haven’t listened to the song yet, please go listen.)
Ben and I have been watching Love on the Spectrum, a reality television show about Australian young adults on the autism spectrum and their quest for love and relationship. It is the first reality tv show I have ever convinced Ben to watch with me, and he is willing, probably in part because LOTS bears none of the hallmarks that he associates with my other reality dating show habits, like drama, artifice, or horrible music. Instead, LOTS is earnest, underproduced, and heartfelt—the Great British Baking Show of dating shows. Part of what makes LOTS so refreshing is its compassionate portrayal of the participants and celebration of their vulnerability and their unfiltered expressions of what they want from love. As a refrain, their answers— “someone caring and to do things with”— are often not all that different from what we hear from neurotypical contestants on The Bachelor or Married At First Sight, but they are spoken with a distinctly unguarded and hopeful sincerity. This is not to suggest that they are naive. Each of the participants is aware of the pitfalls of relationships, the struggle to find someone with whom you are compatible, and their own particular needs. But from the outside, looking in, their view of relationships is the opposite of Bobby’s,—they reflect relationships in, perhaps, their purest and most exalted form. Our favorite character, Michael, a self-proclaimed Germanophile, says “I just can’t bear the thought of being single my entire life, because it’s lonely, it’s boring, and it’s also unfulfilling and makes you feel like you lack a purpose.” In the words of Sondheim, “alone is alone, not alive.”
In a conversation that was, in retrospect, an obvious precursor to our relationship’s demise, an ex-boyfriend told me, using an extended metaphor pushed to the brink of usefulness, that he “didn’t want to sleep in the same teepee every night.” Though I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time, that was the moment in which he broke my heart. Deep down, I suddenly realized that what I wanted—his and hers nightstands piled with wobbly stacks of books, a quiet regularity to falling asleep together every night—was not what he wanted. When he broke my heart, I convinced myself that what I wanted was not only too much to ask for, but somehow unhealthy—that sharing a home and a bed would force me to compromise some part of myself, as my ex felt it would. Someone to sit in your chair / and ruin your sleep.
I heartily reject the premise that “alone is alone, not alive,” and that romantic partnership is the one true path to fulfillment. Being single in the wake of that teepee conversation allowed me to find fulfillment and connection in countless ways that I now struggle to make the time for. Someone you have to let in. I was deeply in connection with myself and with friends. But I nevertheless constantly received the message from friends, family, and society, who couldn’t believe that I was truly happily single, that I was wasting my time and might miss my opportunity to meet someone with whom I would experience life on a new level.
I now sleep in the same bed, in the same house, every night with somebody. We have wobbly stacks of books on our nightstands like I always wanted, and we share books and water bottles and secrets. I sleep better than I ever have and I leave the last bite of chocolate for somebody who also leaves the last bite of chocolate for me. It is love and it is deep and it is not going anywhere, which means it requires daily acts of emotional honesty and compromise and discomfort in being witnessed nearly every moment of every day, in being needed. We are trying to figure out how to need each other and let each other in, but also, in the words of the poet Rilke, trying to figure out how to achieve “the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” And it is in the midst of this process that I listened to Being Alive and felt it on a new level.
I can see now that I didn’t appreciate Sondheim when I was younger because Sondheim writes for adults. At ten or fifteen, I could barely even wrap my head around something more than unrequited love, and so my Broadway love songs of choice were “On My Own” and the bouncy crush-song “My Junk” from Spring Awakening. As precocious a teenager as I was, able to get the jokes in “Ladies who Lunch,” I couldn’t understand, let alone appreciate, what “Being Alive” is about. I have newfound appreciation for Sondheim’s audacity to create musical theater that pushed that boundaries of what the genre was thought capable of doing, and the genius behind a song that is as much a heartworm as an earworm, that has caused me to think as well as to feel. I’ll drink to that.