What I’m Reading: The Marriage Portrait

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me think about relationships in a completely different way. Right now that book is The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell.

It’s historical fiction set in Renaissance Italy, and it follows a young duchess named Lucrezia who is married off as a teenager into a powerful ruling family.

The book is lush and atmospheric — but what keeps pulling me in is the portrait of a young woman trying to understand the emotional world she has been placed inside.

Lucrezia is observant. She studies the people around her closely, trying to read their moods, their silences, their expectations. In a court where power is subtle and often dangerous, attention becomes a survival skill.

Reading it, I keep thinking about how much of relationship life is shaped by power, interpretation, and unspoken rules.

Who gets to want what they want?

Who has to guess?

Who is allowed to speak directly?

In Somatica we often work toward something radically different from the world Lucrezia inhabits. Instead of guessing and performing, we practice making desires visible. Instead of navigating power through silence, we explore what it feels like to speak honestly about what we want, what we don’t want, and what we’re curious about.

It’s a very different relational landscape.

But The Marriage Portrait reminds me how recent these shifts are. For most of history, relationships were not built around mutual exploration or shared desire. They were shaped by duty, survival, and hierarchy.

That context makes the work of building conscious, consensual, pleasure-centered relationships feel even more meaningful.

As someone who works with neurodivergent people, another thread stands out to me — the experience of trying to decode a social environment that isn’t clearly explained. Lucrezia is constantly scanning for meaning in gestures, tone, and subtle cues.

Many neurodivergent people know that feeling intimately.

What would it be like if relationships required less guessing?

What would it feel like if curiosity and directness were welcomed instead of punished?

These are some of the questions that keep showing up for me as I read.

And that’s one of the things I love about fiction. Sometimes a story set hundreds of years ago can make our modern relational possibilities feel even more vivid.

Series: What I’m Reading

In this series, I share books that are shaping how I think about relationships, communication, embodiment, and power. I’m especially interested in ideas that support neurodivergent people in building relationships that feel good in their actual nervous systems.