A fascination with eastern spirituality led New York-based photographer and director Christian Weber to work on Speak and Spell, a series of photographs that examine human gesture. This spurred a collaboration with art directors Marius Zorrilla and Kiku Aromir and writer Toni Segarra on a new short film, Candor, that analyzes the requirements for a successful relationship. Influenced by the early short films of Peter Greenaway as well as Jørgen Leth’s 1967 classic The Perfect Human, the graphic nature of the black-and-white film here accentuates the dramatic texture of skin. “For me it was trying to walk that fine line between creating animations or illustrations of the work, but actually leaving in human gestures and self-conscious moments,” explains Weber, whose clients include Levi’s, Myspace and Bottega Veneta. “Whether it’s the tapping of the fingers, the way you embrace somebody’s hand or the way you cross your finger over somebody else’s—all of those things mean something. That was part of the underlying tone here: that pure human honesty or candor that exists in our relationships, and how we interact with each other.” But what if you just can’t connect with that special someone? NOWNESS asked Canadian writer Sheila Heti—behind one of New Yorker's 2012 books of the year How Should a Person Be?—to philosophize on the problem of coupling.

Please Don’t Break Up

A few years ago, I got hooked on a blog called Please Don’t Break Up. It showed found photographs of couples, and beneath each photograph was a weird, funny, poetic plea, written by the administrator of the site (and comic), David Dineen-Porter. Below a shot of a happy couple in bathing suits, standing in front of the Grand Canyon, arms around each other, he had written: Please don’t go live in separate apartments. That would be the saddest thing. Beneath a dumplingish old couple in powder-blue formal wear, embracing each other in a 70s living room: If your relationship were an animal, it would be the cute baby version of that animal. Go out on a date, again and again. Please don’t break up, Jeth and Faruk. 

I thought about the site daily. Please Don’t Break Up felt like a lost bit of wisdom in our world—so simple. The phrase played itself over and over, like a beautiful song in my head. I was moved by the idea of someone being invested in the fate of another person’s relationship—the relationship of strangers, even. The idea that people should be together simply because they already were together felt hilarious, obvious and profound. I saw it for the first time: Commitment wasn’t merely important to love, it made it love. 

Yet when I was with my boyfriend, I longed to be with my friends, and when I was with my friends, I criticized myself for not being a committed sort of animal who could make love last. I felt there was something wrong with me. Please Don’t Break Up seemed to be the missing ingredient in my life—and the lives of my friends who lived as I lived, traveling from one person to the next. Wouldn’t we be more likely to be cosily ensconced in a long-term relationship if we were a little less dispassionate about the lives of our peers—if our breaking up had some resonant effect on our community? How stupid we were to avoid this investment; to refrain from pleading with our friends, "Please don’t break up!” when a break-up seemed nigh. 

My desire to break up with my boyfriend irritated me. I wanted to cut out this part of myself. I wanted to secure my resolve by setting my friends upon the scales. Why didn’t they care more? Lacking social censure (and other things, too), we eventually broke up. And I felt like myself again. I realized I was happy. And I was happy that no one had told me not to break up. 

All of this was happening around the time of a big natural disaster in the world. I remember reading reports on the internet of people being stuck in airports—they had to remain in Japan, or America, or wherever they were—for weeks. Some could not even cross the city. Many couples who had planned to break up were forced to keep living together—because of the floods, and the strong winds that tore everything down. It was as if Mother Nature herself was pleading, “Please don’t break up!” 

A few months later, I read a story about one of these couples, who’d felt their love was through, and wanted to break up, but because of a fallen palm tree blocking their front door, wound up happily married.

Sometimes, it takes a force from the inside to make love last. And sometimes it comes from without—when it is the winds that whisper through the windows who say, “It is not break-up time today.”