Ask Polly: If I Dump My Needy Girlfriend, I’m Afraid I’ll Ruin Her Life!
Dear Polly,
Sometimes when I’m feeling unaccomplished I like to seek out some new, insightful, unbiased, life’s great mystery deciphering blog or news and culture magazine or twitter account and somehow this morning I wound up at The Awl reading your column. I love it. Your hyper-honest, humorous, practical approach was entertaining and, dare I say, educational.
Here’s my shit:
I am a 27-year-old male, which is probably not your target demographic, but third wave feminism says embrace the contradictions of life so fuck it, right? I graduated from college sometime in the fuzzy prehistory of my adult life and prior to moving to a new city and finding a great job I met a beautiful, charming, intelligent young woman who everyone loves, myself included. We dated as I packed up my life and saved a few grand to make the transition from my boozy college town to a city where I didn’t have pill-head drinking buddies and pot dealers on speed dial.
By the time I finally moved we had grown around each other like two house plants sharing the same window. There were ups and downs like any relationship. I’m a little narcissistic, manic-depressive and stubborn. She’s a little jealous, reactionary and clingy. But overall we had a good thing going and we decided that when she finished school (I’m a few years older) she would join me in said new city. I knuckled though some lean (read “broke”) months on my own and then she arrived — ensue happy urban life.
It’s almost 3 years later and I have been thinking about breaking up semi-constantly for the better part of a year. Adulthood, from a functional standpoint, has been pretty easy. My job turned out to be really stable and lucrative enough for us to pay the bills and rent an adorable little house in a nice neighborhood. I taught her about healthy credit card use. She taught me about working together as a couple to achieve our goals. When she didn’t find a rewarding job in her field we decided to put her back in school on a great career path. Hurrah for great long term decision making!
Here’s my issue as far as I can figure it out. When I first moved down here I was all about embracing a new, fun, cultured lifestyle. I made some friends, at and outside of work, went to lots of independent movies at the art house theatre, spent time reading Cheever short stories in hip cafés and felt well on my way. When she arrived she had some difficulty making friends. I was sympathetic and supported her through several job changes, encouraged her to take classes where she might meet like-minded people, etc. Meanwhile she hated the friends I had made. She felt threatened by the women I worked with, developing a jealous streak I hadn’t yet witnessed. We worked through it. I stopped hanging out with the guys and gals she disliked. Assured her that she was more important to me than any of them. Made new friends. She disliked them. Much of this was centered around her feeling threatened by women in these various social groups. Women with husbands. Women with boyfriends. Single women. Women who fawned over me. Women who had no discernible interest in me. Women to whom I may as well have been the sticky spot the bar back forgot to wipe off your table. She moved her way through them like someone trying on shoes. I love her and we continued to work through it, but for about a year now I have been watching myself turn away from the active lifestyle I craved to a more sedentary, domestic, melancholy bent.
And it isn’t as if I have watched her blossom and bubble with happiness. She has found some friends (of both genders) and seems to lead a confident, empowered lifestyle around them. I encourage her to feed off of this, to flirt back with the boys in her classes and spend time with the girls she seems to enjoy. But around me she has become quite negative and seemingly insecure. She complains about school, about the jobs she occasionally works. She constantly worries about her weight, which I understand isn’t novel or odd. But it’s one of those dammed if you do/if you don’t subjects where my attempts to only buy healthy food are met with initial enthusiasm, followed by cutesy antagonism and eventually disdain and combativeness. We have wildly different schedules and needs. I can’t remember the last time we both wanted to do the same thing. Her idea of a good time is going out to eat for Mexican or TGI Fridays which I find unnecessarily expensive and dull. We attempted to retreat into our tried and true college-learned alcoholism but while we each can go out for drinks and have a good time independently, she has become a bitter, paranoid, even hurtful drunk who claims to remember nothing the next day and sweetly apologizes for it.
Even at home as we attempt to spend “quality time” together, she will suggest watching a movie and within 15 minutes out comes the Facebook or fashion site. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against these things in themselves. Christ, I spent half the morning reading The Awl and trying to guess whether someone was a Wes Anderson movie character or a Jewish mobster. But these gestures are half-assed and she will wind up complaining to me about it as if I was the one who brought the laptop to “quality time.”
Now is the part where I try to take some responsibility.
1. I’m a flirt and I like meeting new people. Some (all?) of her jealousy no doubt stems from this. But my attempts to be sensitive to this have backfired. We recently went out for Halloween and she got mad at me for not being the charming, gregarious man she used to know. The same charming, gregarious man who would send her into a drunken rage when he met a spunky trio at the dartboards, one of whom was a woman. I have watched myself become nervous and reserved. And the next morning following our Halloween night out, all she wanted to talk about was some girl she claimed was “so into me” even though we hardly spoke. I’m no saint. I enjoy the attention of a new acquaintance, regardless of gender. I am probably not the most attentive companion in public. I don’t like PDA or hand-holding, but have no problem with periodic pecks or the occasional territory marking hug. But I’ve never cheated. I’ve never taken or given a phone number. I respect physical boundaries and do not touch or invite the touch of strange women.
2. Being boring is my fault, not hers. I can do whatever I want with my free time. If I want to go out with buddies I can. If I want to read novels in cafés I can. If I want to take yoga classes I can. If I want to learn to play the god-dammed concertina I can. But I always thought relationships were supposed to be platforms to help you become who you wanted, not reasons to hunker down and avoid upsetting your other in the hopes of a better time down the road.
3. Most men (I think) would have cut and run a long time ago. Call me old-fashioned, I always want to give it my all, work through problems, never say die. But I also don’t have a lot of people I can go to for advice and I am wondering whether I’m being naive or unrealistic. Our lives have become so intertwined that I fear cutting ties for the miserable time it would cause her. I fear she would drop out of school or panic and move home to an unhappy life. This isn’t to say she isn’t capable and resilient. But she does not value self-sufficiency like I do and has grown extremely dependent on me. I cringe to think of the money and time she would throw away if I were to give up on us. I care deeply about her and want her to make good decisions and be happy. But at what point is me worrying about her happiness killing my own.
4. We have communicated about many of these things. Nothing has really changed and I have, in many ways, stopped talking about the problems to allow her peace of mind to focus on school. That sounds like a terrible idea but I don’t know what else to do. She suffers emotionally from our problems in ways that I cannot even begin to empathize with. If I’m not ready to cut the cord, I feel like dragging her through my twenty-something existential issues is cruel.
This is way too long and probably unpublishable but you seemed so insightful in a funky postmodern way when I read your responses that I felt I had to reach out. Thanks for any consideration.
Domestic, Sendentary, Melancholy
Dear DSM (Haw!),
Your girlfriend sounds exactly as lame as I was for about a decade of my life, and for that reason I would strongly encourage you to break up with her.
I didn’t understand this back when I was the one wilting around the house, acting jealous and flinty and occasionally drinking too much, but when a relationship makes you clingy and weepy and angry and weird, and you can’t tolerate other women around your guy and you put a ton of time and energy into analyzing all of the women who are out there LITERALLY THROWING THEMSELVES at him, then the world is sending you a great big message. The world is telling you, “YOU ARE NOT READY FOR A SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP. You need to grow up and learn more about the wide world out there, and you’re not going to do those things as long as you’re clinging to this dude.”
It’s funny, though, because I do think you’re making a few understandable but somewhat condescending assumptions about your girlfriend. When you write, for example, “[S]he does not value self-sufficiency like I do and has grown extremely dependent on me.” I don’t doubt that she’s dependent on you at this point. But I wouldn’t assume that she doesn’t value self-sufficiency. I would bet that she values it very much, and really hates that she finds herself turning you away from potential friends and pulling you into a melancholy cocoon of two. She probably doesn’t think this state of affairs is ideal any more than you do, no matter what she happens to be saying about it right now.
We can’t really make any assumptions about the kind of person she’ll become 5 or 10 years, because she’s in a very particular kind of tortured state at the moment: She doesn’t feel secure with your love for her. Maybe she’d be insecure with anyone in the world, because she’s not grown up enough to be in a relationship yet, or maybe you two have different ideas about the world and different tastes in people and it’s tough for her to feel that you truly love her and appreciate her enough. The interesting thing about jealousy is that, many times, it grows out of ambivalence. If you think your boyfriend isn’t really, truly your type, and isn’t capable of appreciating the good things about you, then you’re (somewhat perversely) more likely to cling, and to assume that other women — particularly those who are different from you — might present a real threat to your relationship.
It was often easy for me to imagine someone better for my various boyfriends than me. One of my exes clearly wanted someone who looked down on him intellectually. Another ex obviously would’ve preferred someone dumber and bustier who wore bright red lipstick around the clock. (Poor guy really suffered under my moody, bony, unshowered reign.) And then there was the guy who was perfectly suited for an earth mother — sweet, easy-going and super-awesome (as opposed to bossy, wound up, and obsessed with life’s little indignities, like me).
It’s bizarre how I knew that these guys should be with other girls, but I still didn’t want to give up on “us.” I kept rooting us on, like a crazy person cheering for a pair of filthy, mismatched socks. And even as I remained stubbornly fixated on making things “work” for us, I became less and less self-sufficient. I was working hard for something that didn’t even make sense, and dedicating all of my time to someone who didn’t even see the point in me — the needlessly complicated analyses, the sharp elbows, the incessant whining about the intolerable fuckedness of most people and the wild injustice of living in a neighborhood with NO FUCKING BAGELS AND NO INDIAN FOOD AND JUST ONE THAI DELIVERY PLACE WE ORDER FROM EVERY GODDAMN NIGHT ALREADY.
I wasn’t exactly living my best life with these guys, is all. Your girlfriend isn’t living her best life with you, either. You sound reasonably smart and charming and are apparently attractive to the opposite sex. It may be that she’s worried that she’ll never do any better than you. Or maybe she’s just walked down this long tunnel into codependency, and you walked there with her, and put up with her shit along the way, and now she doesn’t know how to back up and rethink the whole thing. She’s invested in you, that’s all. She wants to MAKE IT WORK.
It’ll be work, alright. You’ll share a life of endless drudgery.
But I would not take her current state of jealous, depressed weirdness as a sign that she’s about to fall apart over you, and screw her whole life over in the process. Not-quite-good-enough relationships between mismatched socks sometimes becomes obsessive BECAUSE it’s not a good match. Your hesitation and doubt may have kept her thinking that she’s into you, but that doesn’t mean she REALLY is. It may be that she hates all of your new friends because she doesn’t really dig you or your taste in people or anything about you as much as she feels she should.
Even as I wept piteously over my first live-in boyfriend, I knew he was wrong for me. And I still remember when he dropped me off at my brand new apartment in the wake of our break up. He looked at me with eyes full of pity and said, “I’m really worried that I’ve ruined your whole life.” Even though I’d been crying, this made me laugh out loud. “MY WHOLE LIFE?” I said. “YOU THINK YOU JUST RUINED MY ENTIRE LIFE?! You think I’m never going to recover FROM THIS?! I’m 22 years old, dude. I’m pretty sure things are going to work out for me just fine.” He looked at me with disbelief. “Really?” he asked. I wanted to punch him in the face. It was much easier to say goodbye and shut the door after that.
I was shocked, though, because I realized that he thought that my emotional response indicated that I couldn’t stand on my own two feet without him. Yes, I was lame, and I was depressed, and I wasn’t ready to deal with the real world yet. I wanted to hide. The real world, real jobs, looked scary and terrible to me. I just wanted to eat ice cream in bed.
But even in my depressed state, I knew I was avoiding something with him. I knew I was trying not to face my life alone. I never for a second thought that I’d never meet anyone else or that I’d sink into an alcoholic haze or lose all of my friends or whatever.
I just didn’t know what the world had to offer yet. I didn’t know who my lifelong friends would be yet, and didn’t have any idea that the world was full of amazing books and incredible music and people who were weird in the same ways as me. I thought that the world was made up of terrible jobs downtown with asshole bosses, and bad bars filled with frat boys, and the alternative was fractionally less awful dudes with plastic Ovation guitars who listened to the same five Dead songs over and over and over again.
I think your girlfriend is hiding from the world, that’s all. You’re not helping her by staying with her. You’re not her savior. You won’t ruin her life. Even if she does move back home, she’ll get back on her feet and go out into the world again eventually. A lot of clingy young women can be wildly melodramatic about break-ups, so melodramatic that you can’t imagine that they’ll survive for a second without you. They’re just afraid of being alone.
The fact is, you’re not THAT important, even if she says that she wants you and only you. And you are, for sure, a little bit of a narcissist. That’s ok. You seem smart and loyal and I’m sure you’ll have lots of great women chasing you around. Fly and be free, pretty bird. Don’t take responsibility for your girlfriend’s life, because she’ll be fine. Don’t show her this column as proof that you’re blameless and she’ll be fine, either. Just be kind about it.
And one other thing? I know your girl was mixed up, but don’t ever, ever help anyone with a diet. I know, you were just stocking up on healthy food; you were just trying to help. Trust me: Just. Don’t. Someone buys me diet food, or tut-tuts when I reach for the cheese? I EAT ALL OF THE CHEESE. I had two kids and got a little round, and thanks to the fact that my husband didn’t make a single fucking peep about my roundness and my vacuuming up the Queso and the chocolate willy nilly for a few years, I independently decided that the roundness was getting old. If he had made it clear that roundness wasn’t his thing, I would’ve turned into Voldemort on the spot. An enormous Queso-vacuuming Voldemort, conflicted and guilty and resentful and rounder and hungrier than ever.
So let the ladies decide about how to manage their bodies on their own. If you no like, move on, but shut the fuck up about it.
Honestly, it does sound like you have a tendency to “help” in ways that are a little controlling. If you really do value self-sufficiency, I’d strongly recommend that you not move in with anyone or pay for their schooling or support them until they’ve demonstrated that they’re grown-ups and can develop passions and interests and friends of their own — and keep them. Sometimes propping your partner up too much, and getting all up in her business too much, and playing supportive, encouraging, boundary-less boyfriend too much just makes a girlfriend feel weaker and less capable than she actually is. You have to give your partner space to make her own decisions. Don’t urge her to pursue a career with the same enthusiasm that you’ve pursued a career, or to flirt with the boys with the same enthusiasm with which way you flirt with the girls. When you need your partner to match you perfectly, and to substantiate all of your habits, good and bad, by mirroring them back to you? That just proves that YOU’RE not grown-up enough to have a mature, healthy relationship, either.
I’m not saying you’re not a great guy. Just watch out for those tendencies moving forward, and I think the world will reward you with some grade-A independent-style, grown-up types of women. If that’s really what you want.
Um. IS that what you want, really? Because if you’re secretly into girls who need you more than anyone else in the whole wide world, who are more than willing to form themselves in your image, I think you’ll find yourself up a similar shit creek absent a paddle much sooner than you realize.
Good luck out there, Tiger!
The moonlight confessions of Stevie Nicks
Amy Kaufman
Stevie Nicks was in her early 30s when her father told her she’d never get married. She had just released her first solo album, 1981’s “Bella Donna,” embarking on a second career that would fill any time she wasn’t spending with Fleetwood Mac.
Her music, Nicks’ dad said, would always consume her.
She considered the possibility. She certainly was not a woman who liked to be told what to do. Still, the words stung: “No man would be happy being Mr. Stevie Nicks for very long.”
Had he doomed her to a life of solitude simply by speaking the thought into existence? “Nobody,” she laughs now, decades later, “dooms me to anything but myself.”
At 72, Nicks has had a few great loves. Some we know about – Lindsey Buckingham, Don Henley, JD Souther – and many we don’t. She did get married once, back in 1983, an ill-fated three-month relationship with the husband of her best friend, who had just died of leukemia.Need a news break? Check out the all new PLAY hub with puzzles, games and more!
She would have considered taking another spouse, had she met the right person – someone who wasn’t jealous of her, who got a kick out of her crazy girlfriends. But ultimately, her father pretty much got it right: She has yet to feel more devoted toward a man than her muse. Which is why, in part, this pandemic has hit her so hard. Two projects due out this month have, she says, offered a vestige of normalcy: “24 Karat Gold: The Concert,” a cinematic version of her 2017 solo show, and a politically minded new single, “Show Them the Way,” which will be accompanied by a Cameron Crowe-directed music video.
She’s also decided that she wants to make another solo album and plans to spend the rest of quarantine turning the poetry from her journals into lyrics. But, with touring on hold, she’s bored and depressed, conditions she’s claimed to never before suffer from.
She’s cripplingly afraid of catching the coronavirus, fearing that going on a ventilator would leave her hoarse and ruin her voice. “I have put a magical shield around me, because I am not going to give up the last eight years – what I call my last youthful years – of doing this,” she vows. “I want to be able to pull up those black velvet platform boots and put on my black chiffon outfit and twirl onto a stage again.” It’s 9 p.m. PDT on a Saturday when Nicks first calls from her home in the Pacific Palisades, where she has been sequestered with a close friend, her assistant and her housekeeper.
She has always been a night owl, but has recently become nocturnal, typically going to bed around 8 a.m. She attributes the change in her sleep pattern to the news, which she says she watches constantly.
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Usually, she likes to open the French doors to her bedroom, but tonight it’s dark outside because of the wildfires – “and not like, foggy, romantic dark. It’s just weird dark.” The smoke and ash in the air triggers her asthma, so she is not even venturing into her backyard. Nicks is speaking from a landline. She has a personal line that she dances around when it rings, wondering “Who could it be? Is this a two-hour call? Is this going to be a tragedy?” and an emergency line to which her assistant attends.
She does not have a computer. She does have an iPhone, but it doesn’t have cellular service and she uses it only as a camera. Despite her distaste for social media, Nicks has gone viral a few times in recent months.
Last week, the internet discovered a video in which a man skateboards while singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” swigging from a container of cran-raspberry juice and generally living his best life. After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nicks paid tribute to the Supreme Court justice, admitting her into the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of Life.” (Nicks is only female to be inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, first with Fleetwood Mac in 1998 and then on her own in 2019.)
The reactions to the RBG post were largely positive, but she saw one comment that ignored her sentiment entirely and instead lambasted her for her band’s interpersonal drama. “They didn’t even care about what I had written about Ruth and went right to the breakup of Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re talking about the death of a great Supreme Court judge, and you are yelling at me about something that happened two-and-a-half years ago? What are you, insane?’ I’m reeling from it. But I’m also like, OK: I can never be on social media.”
Nicks’ troll was referring to the highly publicized 2018 firing of Buckingham, who joined Fleetwood Mac as a lead guitarist and vocalist alongside then-girlfriend Nicks in 1974.
The group’s tumult is the stuff of music legend: After ending her on-off again relationship with Buckingham, in 1977 Nicks had a brief affair with then-married drummer Mick Fleetwood. Singer Christine McVie, meanwhile, was in the midst of her own clandestine relationship with the band’s lighting director, ultimately leading to her divorce from bassist John McVie.
With the exception of a decadelong hiatus to focus on his solo career in the ’90s, however, Buckingham remained with Fleetwood Mac until January 2018, when he claims he was unceremoniously let go. Together, they’d made an indelible mark on music history. Hits like “Dreams,” “Rhiannon,” “Landslide,” “The Chain” and “Gypsy” are now rock canon. 1977’s “Rumours” was No. 1 in the U.S. for 31 weeks, and subsequent tours over the decades showcased not just an incomparable baby-boomer songbook but the scars left from the band’s never-ending soap operas – Buckingham and Nicks frequently shot eye daggers at each other in front of packed stadiums during renditions of breakup anthems like “Go Your Own Way” and “Silver Springs.”
When Buckingham was axed from the group, he sued for lost wages – claiming he would have collected between $12 million and $14 million dollars in two months of touring with Fleetwood Mac. (He was replaced by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Crowded House’s Neil Finn.)
In legal documents, Buckingham says his firing came days after the band’s appearance at the January 2018 MusiCares Person of the Year ceremony. He alleges that he was later told that Nicks thought he’d mocked her on stage at the event while she was delivering a speech; she was apparently so upset that she told the rest of Fleetwood Mac she’d walk if he wasn’t cut from the band.
Nicks is reluctant to discuss the details of that night, though she admits it was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” “I never planned for that to happen,” she says hesitantly. “Any time we reformed to do a tour or a record, I always walked in with hope in my heart. And I just was so disappointed. I felt like all the wind had gone out of my sails.”
There’s melancholy in her voice when she discusses the split, which she describes as a “long time coming.” She was always hopeful that “things would get better” but found herself noticing she was increasingly sad with Fleetwood Mac and more at peace in the “good, creative happy world” with her solo band. “I just felt like a dying flower all the time,” she says. “I stayed with him from 1968 until that night. It’s a long time. And I really could hear my parents – I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really gonna do this for the rest of your life?’ And I could hear my dad saying in his very pragmatic way – because my dad really liked Lindsey – ‘I think it’s time for you and Lindsey to get a divorce.’ It’s a very unfortunate thing. It makes me very, very sad.”
She says she hasn’t spoken to Buckingham in a couple of years, though she did write him a note after his February 2019 heart attack: “You better take care of yourself. You better take it easy and you better do everything they tell you and get your voice back and feel the grace that you have made it through this.”
Nicks has cataloged the ups and downs of her life in journals – she estimates she has roughly one per year of her life – and she plans to leave many of them to her goddaughters, of whom she has 11 or 12; she can’t be certain. She chose most of her goddaughters at birth – asking their parents if she could fulfill the role – and relishes the way they keep her “totally young and up on everything.” She loves to spoil them all with gifts imbued with meaning, like a pair of pink strappy heels she found at a store in Australia and deemed “Cinderella slippers.” Tokens are important to Nicks.
In 1977, she began having gold moon necklaces made to give as gifts to those she felt needed them. Over the years, she’s bestowed them to celebrities (the Haim sisters, Taylor Swift, Tavi Gevinson), soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Make-a-Wish recipients. Members of the coven – her “Sisters of the Moon” – are told the moons are lucky charms and to pass them along to another in need, should the moment arise.
Nicks is wearing the signature necklace in “24 Karat Gold,” the concert special slated to play in theaters for two nights only, Oct. 21 and 25. (A CD version comes out Oct. 30; streaming plans for the film have yet to be determined.)
In May, Nicks flew to Chicago, where Joe Thomas, the film’s director, was finessing a cut of it. The final version features 17 songs, only four of which are Fleetwood Mac hits. The show emphasizes Nicks’ solo career – MTV standards like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Stand Back” and “Edge of Seventeen.”
Performing music from her “dark, gothic trunk of lost songs,” she tells the audience, makes her feel like she’s a 20-year-old embarking on a new career. “This is not the same Stevie Nicks show you’ve seen a million times,” she explains, “because I am different.” “This is the show where you get to meet this girl, finally,” says guitarist Waddy Wachtel, who served as the tour’s musical director and has known Nicks since 1970. “She can relax and work her own rhythm. It’s a joy to see her get into her own songs instead of fighting to get her due in a band where there are three really strong songwriters.”
On the road, Wachtel says, Nicks travels via private plane because she has declared herself too old for tour buses. She loves lavish hotel rooms with pianos, a perk Wachtel thinks she’s earned: “She doesn’t have a husband. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She wants a good room to be able to play her music as loud as she wants.”
Nicks was just as specific when it came to editing the concert film. In the editing suite with Thomas, she insisted that “dorky” over usage of the phrase “like” be excised and was exacting when it came to the way she looked. “He’d show me something and I’m, like, ‘Are you serious? You’re actually thinking about using that horrifically bad shot of me?'” she recalls, describing how she’d proceed to pace around the room, popping breath mints into her mouth. “If you’re a woman and you’re not 30, you want to look as good as you can. You start to realize that men see women completely differently than we see ourselves.”
“She is so particular – and God bless her for that,” says Thomas. “I mean, Stevie has the best skin I’ve ever seen – she should have her own cosmetic line. You sit there and you go, ‘People over 65 would love to look this good.’ And then she gives you a look that could fry your eyeballs.” Nicks cares about her appearance and has been on Weight Watchers since 2005. She’s never considered being a spokeswoman for the brand because she prefers to follow one of the company’s now-defunct plans from 15 years ago.
One of the biggest reasons she wants to stay in shape is because her stage clothes are custom-made, and she says it would be too costly and annoying to have them remade.
She traces the origin of her style – an amalgam of goth hippie, bohemian Californian girl and Victorian priestess – to 1970, when she and Buckingham were still an eponymous duo. Before their show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Nicks saw a woman walk by on the street. She was a vision in mauve and pink, with an edged-out layered skirt, riding jacket and cream-colored platform boots. Her hair was done like a Gibson Girl. And Nicks wanted to be her. “This girl obviously had some money, because this was not a cheap outfit. It was beautiful, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s exactly how I want to look,'” she remembers.
Still, she wore her street clothes on stage for another year until a friend introduced her to a designer who helped her bring her vision to life. On paper, Nicks sketched a stick girl with bell sleeves and a top hat. She has never gone on stage without some version of this uniform since – save for a stint in the early 2000s, when she hurt her hip and was forced to wear tennis shoes. She put on some of these clothes for the first time a few nights ago, filming the music video for her new song inside her home. Without her makeup artist on hand, it took her three hours to put on her face. The eyeliner, she says, was the most difficult part, because she had to redo it “about 50 times.” But the experience made her feel like herself again: “It was like, ‘Oh, I’m still alive.'”
“Show Them the Way,” due Oct. 9, was born out of a dream Nicks had in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. In it, she was invited to perform at a political benefit for icons of history. Martin Luther King Jr. led her by the arm into a ballroom where John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and John Lewis were seated, awaiting her. The dream was so vivid that the instant she awoke, she wrote it down and within days, put it to music. But it was only this year that she decided to record it for release – viewing it as a hopeful balm during this “very strange and dangerous time.”
And though she expresses displeasure with the current political landscape, she stops short of endorsing any candidate. “As we get closer to the election, I probably will state who I am for,” she says. “But not now. Well – I’m not for Trump, so that’s that.”
She says she has been “brokenhearted” since the death of Ginsburg. Nicks believes that people like Ginsburg go to heaven, where they continue to look down on us. After the death of her mother in 2012, Nicks started to believe that the dead send signs to the living. Five months after her mom passed, Nicks contracted a head infection. Her doctor instructed her to drink electrolytes, so she began “pounding” Diet Gatorade. Before long, she was also suffering from acid reflux. “It was burning up my chest and my throat,” she says. “And all of a sudden, I felt this little tap on my shoulder and heard my mom go: ‘It’s the Gatorade.'”
There have been countless other moments like this since.
If she can’t find something – an errant earring, a pack of matches, a book of poetry – she voices the item aloud and her mom helps her find it. “It’s so real and creepy, and I always just go ‘Thank you, Barbara.’ I sometimes feel I have more of a relationship with my mom since she’s been dead than I did before she died.”
Nicks has long felt a connection to the spiritual world. For years, one of her goals has been to make a movie about the mythological Celtic deity Rhiannon. When she wrote the song “Rhiannon” in 1973, she had little knowledge of the folklore behind the name. But five years later, a fan sent her four paperback novels in a Manila envelope – author Evangeline Walton’s adaptation of the ancient British Mabinogion. Nicks was so transfixed by the literature that she eventually bought the rights to Walton’s work in the hopes of bringing the epic to the big screen.
Because of the scope of the story, it was later decided that the movie should be a television miniseries, and earlier this year Nicks says she finally signed a deal with a studio to make it. She has 10 songs that she’s never released, still on cassette tapes in a suitcase, set aside specifically for the project. Despite her 2014 turn on “American Horror Story,” Nicks has no plans to play a major role in the miniseries, though she’s not opposed to the idea of “riding by on a white horse or something.” She won’t dish on her dream cast but says that Harry Styles “is definitely in the running.” “I’m going, ‘Harry, you cannot age one day. You have to stay exactly as you are,'” she says with a laugh. “I’ve already sold him on it.”
Styles is one of the many young artists who counts Nicks as both a mentor and an inspiration. Before he finished his latest record, “Fine Line,” he invited Nicks and five of her friends to his home to listen to it. They sat in his living room and listened to the whole album three times, sharing opinions until sunrise. When the 26-year-old debuted the record at the Forum late last year, he invited Nicks to join him on stage for a rendition of “Landslide” – “a huge thrill, because he made a choice to be a rock ‘n’ roll star and not a pop star,” she says. “That was a risk for a guy from a boy band. That was like Fleetwood Mac doing ‘Tusk’ after ‘Rumours.’ I was very proud of him.”
Asked if an older version of Styles would be her type, Nicks chuckles. “Well, that would be a good thing,” she says. She hasn’t been in love since the early 2000s but has no plans to “sit in a bar with a bunch of my friends and wait for some weirdo guys to come over and buy us drinks” once the pandemic ends. “Now, if I was even, like, 30 or 40 or 50, I would never use a dating app. I find that to be totally desperate,” Nicks says. “I watch all those crime shows. Are you setting yourself up with an ax murderer or something? There’s a big part of her that believes you’ll never find something if you’re looking for it.
But at her core, Nicks is a romantic – a woman who says she’s fallen in love at first sight four times and thinks her next paramour might always be around the next corner. “It’s not ever out of the realm of possibility. It’s just not very probable,” she sighs. For now, love lives on in her music. “I can sit down at the piano and take out a poem that I wrote right in the middle of a really great relationship and make it into a song. Right now, at 72 years old. So when people say, ‘Can you still write romantic songs?’ I absolutely can.”
