At GQ, novelist Mary H.K. Choi is confronted with the “miserly calculus” of love and the true nature of intimacy when her parents fall ill across the country and her then-distant partner says that her need to see them reveals she’s weak. Choi suggests that there’s a certain generosity in truly seeing someone, recognizing and loving them even when their ugly motivations and petty behaviours are on full display.

In the ninth and final season of Seinfeld, there’s an episode called “The Apology.” It’s the one where Jerry dates a nudist named Melissa and distinctions are made between good naked (brushing hair) and bad naked (opening jars; crouching). The crux is that there’s something decidedly off-putting about the dispensation of effort. Good naked presumes an unguardedness, the rousing tenderness of a perceived vulnerability. It’s happening upon my partner asleep, his hair curling riotously against his brow. The quiet and warmth of small hours, bodies pressed upon each other as an eyelid flutters open.

Sheltering in place is bad naked. It is deeply and intensely unsexy watching your romantic interest cope. The constant exposure to less-than-telegenic micro-expressions. An intolerable aspect of yourself clocked in your spouse. The sweatpants. A cozy but misshapen “housecoat.” What a novel and alarmingly survivalist pathogen does to human aging when you’ve both just turned 40, that moment when everything slackens with an almost audible sigh of defeat.

But confronted by my husband’s unalloyed contempt that day in the park, when he told me I was weak for wanting to see my dying parents, I felt true intimacy for the first time in months. The admission was a tonic. It wasn’t just truthful. It was an advanced truth. It was not just bad naked. It was beyond naked. He’d called me weak because he hated me. And he hated me because he was scared.

Because good naked is a lie. The truth of my own hideousness is disgusting even to me. As unassailably repellent as the smell of an earring back. The ugliest parts of me revel in the craven parts of him. Because so far there are no conditions by which he doesn’t love me, no matter his reluctance.

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