Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, and the difference between pleading and serving

Leonard Cohen was 53 when he released I’m Your Man in 1988, the title song of the album that remade his career. He produced it himself, all low voice and drum machine, and it remains one of the great love songs of its decade: a man going through every role a woman might want from him and offering to fill each one.

Listen closely, though, and it is a plea rather than a promise. Even Cohen concedes, in one of its verses, that no woman was ever won back that way. Pitchfork’s Dorian Lynskey noticed that the song fades with him still asking, and no sign that she is listening.

That is the line a female-led marriage draws. Devotion is not a man dissolving into whatever she might like. It is a whole man who asks what she actually wants, hears the answer, and then does it, day after day, without being asked twice. Play it once for that voice, and once for the lesson.