Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Woman

I don’t know if a lot of people know what it feels like to be loved in spite of your brain, but I do.

I’m not complaining. All love is nice. But there’s something about knowing you’re loved FOR your mind, not despite it, that feels like nothing else.

So a few years ago when I learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of her husband Marty that he was “the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain,” I got misty. I wondered, what must it feel like to be partnered for most of your adult life with someone who loves the way you think?

This is one of the memories that surfaced when I learned that Ginsburg died on Friday, Rosh Hashanah. How she chose someone whose brand of love allowed her own full self to come through. We all benefitted.

Why?

Just days before Ginsburg passed, I was gobsmacked by something I heard on Pete Buttigieg’s new podcast and in retrospect it is helping me understand. His guest was author and thought leader Glennon Doyle and one of the highlight clips from the interview was this from her:

… I figured out in the last few months that there’s just some kind of deal with the devil that white women make early on. And it’s not conscious. It’s just, somewhere along the line we learn that, OK, we will accept our proximity to power and all the comfort…