(Love) Letter to the Managing Editor

Written by Kat Boskovic

Dear Managing Editor,

I owe you an apology. For the past several weeks, I have used this platform to document the extraordinary hardships of being Editor-in-Chief. The sleepless nights. The mounting responsibilities. The unbearable burden of being a woman with a vision. All the while, you have been doing something considerably less glamorous: your job (and, on occasion, mine). It has recently occurred to me that I may not be the hardest-working person at Your Magazine. This revelation has been difficult to process, and I would appreciate some privacy during this time. 

Rather unoriginally, we began our collaboration with a mutual misunderstanding of the responsibilities involved. I cannot recall when exactly we exchanged vows, nor do I remember consenting to a semester-long commitment of editorial calendars, unanswered emails, and the occasional midnight meltdown over the deletion of our entire Google Drive folder when I may or may not have suggested that it had been an inside job (I have names). Nevertheless, here we are, two months into a marriage that has aged us both considerably. 

I like to think we have established a rather traditional division of domestic labor. I provide the vision, and you provide the necessary conditions for that vision to exist in material reality. I come home after a long day of being a visionary, complain about the state of the household, and retire to my study (a 2B 15th floor single) to write about the difficulties of being such a visionary. You, meanwhile, have been paying the mortgage, keeping the electricity on, and raising our children—several of whom have yet to submit their first drafts. 

Behind every great woman is another woman wondering why she has to do everything herself. The warning signs were there from the beginning. During our five-hour SEAL student leadership training, you diligently familiarized yourself with the administrative responsibilities of running a student organization while I took the opportunity to catch up on homework, confident one of us would retain the information. Five hours of institutional knowledge entered that room, and not a minute of it entered my brain. To this day, I cannot navigate EmConnect without adult supervision. Fortunately, you are the adult. You learned how to run an organization, and I learned that I had married well. 

Of course, as a feminist—my annotated copy of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as evidence—I have always believed in the equitable distribution of domestic labor. However, as a feminist, I have also always believed in delegating. (The bossy allegations date back to 2010). I have considered relieving you of some of your responsibilities, but unfortunately, I am already extremely busy considering it. Also unfortunately, my articles also go six hundred words above the word count and you must handle how to squeeze that into a print publication page number divisible by four. Why by four? Couldn’t tell you. But that’s precisely why you’re in charge of production. 

Evidently, our marriage has not been without its difficulties. Some couples fight over money or infidelity; we fight over whether a photographer has been emailed three times or four. We have survived missed deadlines, editorial emergencies, and the gradual realization that the phrase “I’ll get that to you tonight” has no legally binding meaning. Yet our relationship remains built on trust, mutual respect, and the shared knowledge that neither of us can afford to abandon the other before the issue goes to print. 

I fear I have also been a rather neglectful spouse. While you have been tending to the practical demands of our relationship, I have been pursuing an increasingly public literary career on YourBlog, where I position myself as the ultimate sufferer of editorial mediocrity. While you have been handling extensive correspondence with Flagship over the specific texture of our magazine, I have been clicking “delete thread” in my email. Do I have the login for our Instagram account? Somewhere. I’m not sure where. Do I have the login for the YourMagazine Gmail account? Again, possibly. Naturally, upon recognizing this injustice, my first instinct was to write another blog post. 

But darling, I hope you understand that my negligence should never be mistaken for a lack of affection. I may never know how to cater pizza to issue reviews with Flagship reimbursement—in fact, my understanding of Flagship extends little beyond their generous financing of the astronaut helmet currently gathering dust in our locker, and the most I contribute to the catering endeavor is a complaint that you didn’t order buffalo chicken pizza—but I love you in the way that only two women who have spent an unreasonable number of hours staring at the same Google Doc can love one another. Ours is a romance of extraordinary intimacy. You know my deepest fears, my most closely guarded insecurities, and precisely how many times I have promised to finish something by Sunday. I know your preferred method of crisis management and the exact tone of your messages when you are approximately three emails away from committing a felony. 

Of course, I recognize that there is another woman in your life—a former Head Proofreader, no less. I suppose I should have known that your romantic preferences would extend to women with an intimate knowledge of the Chicago Manual of Style. I bear her no ill will; I would never expect you to lower your standards to a mere visionary who scored a 78% on her copyediting midterm. I can only hope she understands that what you and I share is strictly professional, albeit emotionally codependent and occasionally conducted after midnight. She has your heart, darling, but I have your Google Calendar. 

My current situationship has been similarly understanding of our arrangement, though I suspect he would be less enthusiastic if he knew my lack of emotional availability was due to a covert redistribution to another woman. By the time this letter is published, however, there is no telling whether I will still be in this same situationship. Some people are serial monogamists. I am a serial situationshipper. I shall leave it to the reader to determine which of you is the mistress.

Still, ours is a union that has endured. Not even the threat of other lovers, editorial bankruptcy, or my repeated attempts to introduce new projects into an already overburdened household has succeeded in tearing us apart. You possess ample evidence of my editorial flaws: my exhausting ambition, my tendency toward overcommitment, my delusion that yet another creative project of mine is precisely what this magazine needs. I would promise to correct these grave errors, but we both know the limits of my credibility. Instead, I offer you what I have always offered: grand declarations, questionable time management, and an unwavering optimism that everything will work itself out so long as you are there to work it out. 

But beneath the marital disputes, my increasingly elaborate attempts to dodge emails, and my repeated misunderstanding of how a color palette works, there is something I hope you know. Being Editor-in-Chief can be an awfully lonely business, particularly when everyone expects you to know what you’re doing. You are the person with whom I can admit that, occasionally, I haven’t the slightest idea. Do I know the print deadline without needing to consult your production calendar? Absolutely not, but you make the impossible seem manageable, the catastrophic seem mildly inconvenient, and the prospect of another production meeting almost romantic—even though I arrive with a dead laptop and a dream, always double-parked with two Coke Zeros from the dining hall.

Of course, like all great romances, ours is destined to end in tragedy. Come December, you will graduate, and I will shortly thereafter flee the country for Chile—presumably to escape the emotional and administrative consequences of our separation. I suppose this makes ours something of an arranged marriage organized by SEAL as both matchmaker and divorce attorney. I will be left to navigate the treacherous waters of editorial leadership-at-large without the woman who once navigated EmConnect on my behalf. I have considered asking you to stay, but even I recognize that postponing your graduation to accommodate my inability to submit a reimbursement form is a rather unreasonable request. I must learn to let you go—not because I want to, but because Emerson College has already approved your degree. 

So, my dearest Managing Editor, thank you for being my partner in sickness and in health, in print and in digital, in properly formatted submissions and in documents inexplicably titled “Untitled Document (7).” I would say that I couldn’t do this without you, but I fear you have already demonstrated that you could do this without me. 

With all my love, and several outstanding action items,

Your Editor-in-Chief