Wondering: could phones be a third thing if they weren’t so stubbornly, hyper-optimised for the individual?
\n\n", "content_hash": "sha256:4c35af83a190dbede84da9383f563418d27bba384aa5e3f47dbf1dc26d1cd00b", "media": [], "changelog": [ { "version": 1, "at": "2026-08-21T06:43:53Z", "note": null } ] }What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing. Jane and I had no children of our own; we had our cats and dog to fuss and exclaim over—and later my five grandchildren from an earlier marriage. We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing.