come on, skinny love

"Come on skinny love, what happened here?"

The lyrics of Bon Iver's Skinny Love strike a chord that resonates in all relationships -- that fail. Of course, when you’re in your late twenties where some of your closer friends have found “the one” and you’re attending more weddings than late nights out, you start to wonder, What happened here??

There are several interpretations to the song but I agree more with the interpretation that the “skinny love” is something that must be developed. “Skinny” describes new kind of love at the beginning of a new relationship. Not the butterflies-in-your-stomach-kind-of -love but the type of love you must find & form when you get into your Nth fight, long after the “honeymoon" stage has passed and logistics of co-existing in a relationship surface. It's a love that needs to be nourished. Without nourishment, skinny love doesn't stand a chance.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past that “skinny” stage. She’ll accuse him of all their problems, as she’ll “be holding all the tickets”. And he’ll be “owing all of the fines”. If you can’t get past skinny, then he writes ”pour a little salt, we were never here”. He urges her to “cut all the ropes” and to let him fall.

Not to be overly cynical in a happy blog - I find the most powerful lines of the lyrics to be the chorus because it offers up hope. And hope is powerful in our always evolving concept of how love is defined as we get older in relationships.

"and I told you to be patient
and I told you to be fine
and I told you to be balanced
and I told you to be kind"

Someone once told me; “we are the sum of all the people we have ever met”. With any relationship, you learn a lot about yourself and you always walk away with something.




There are several covers of Bon Iver's Skinny Love on Youtube but I really like Bella Ferraro's raw and nervous 1st audition (check the microphone shake @2:40).