currently reading: Modern Love: The Best of the New York Times 'Modern Love' Columni received this book as a present in the mail from my friend valerie who said "the moment i heard about this book, i thought it would be perfect for you and had to get it!" it's a compilation of articles from the 'modern love' column in the new york times...and i am known around my friends for sending out tons of articles from the new york times, and sending out tons of articles relating to issues of love, etc etc. just because i find them both fascinating. to be honest, it's been so long since i read this book that i forget my thoughts on it, except that i liked it and found it interesting, insightful, and honest. the quotations i have below may make the book (or myself) seem a bit depressing. but many of the stories were quite funny, for example - a story of an entire relationship that began, progressed, and ended via text messaging. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “When the movie ended, we shuffled outside with the rest of the Saturday night date crowd: handsome boys and coltish girls dressed in shorts and T-shirts. They wandered outside, laughing and smiling, blissfully unaware of the dangers they courted. Would they still be happy and smiling in a year’s time, knowing as we did that to love is to risk great unhappiness?” pg 50 “Since my divorce, I have probably e-mailed hundreds of men and spoken with dozens of them. I’ve had drinks and/or dinner with a handful and a coffee date with a very sweet plumber who is also an aspiring poet. He sees plumbing as indoor art, an intriguing idea that we discussed through several phone conversations. The danger of personal ads, I realize, is that you become seduced by the ease a telephone situation can provide. But you can’t know if the chemistry is there until you meet..” pg 60 “And so it goes for all of us: for me, Ron, the poet plumber, and the professor, who place ourselves within the confines of a personal ad hoping someone out there will connect with our fifty words and nervous voices on a recorded message. If we were really honest, our ads would read: ‘My heard has been shattered, and I’m scared….” Pg 64 “It’s okay to fall deeply for one loser after another…It’s okay to have too much to drink and call your ex twenty times and then to be mortally embarrassed when you realize your number must have shown up on his caller ID….It’s okay because I believe that all of these grand gestures and heroic attempts….are not really about this guy or that guy. Making a fool of yourself for love is ultimately about you, about how much you have to give and the distances you will travel to keep your heart wide open when everything around you makes you feel like slamming it shut and soldering it closed.” Pg 68 “No one ever told me that a really great marriage can make up for two decades of horrible dating. I’m happy now that I dated the DJ, the doctor, the candlestick maker. When I look back at those relationships, I can see that in the midst of all the drama I managed to have a goodly amount of fun. What would have happened if any of those relationships had lasted, bumbling along in all their glaring wrongness? Instead of just being dumped and consoling myself with pints of Chunky Monkey and viewings of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I could have been facing any of these men in divorce court, or being forced to see them every Saturday afternoon, when we met to swap custody of our children or our cocker spaniel.” Pg 72 “CSM was becoming a version of the fill-in boyfriend, which many women in long-distance relationships have. The fill-in boyfriend takes you to the movies or to dinner, or sets up your DVD player.” Pg 83
On being the third wheel: “Their needs were fulfilled by each other; my needs were fulfilled in tandem, by them.” Pg 90 “Listening to this took me back to the night when, ten years before, I’d dug in my heels and told someone, ‘Well, if you’re going to be so busy, let’s just stop seeing each other.’ He was the great love of my life, and I never told him that. Instead I’d struck back, eager to punish him for hurting my feelings. I was young and thought he would be easily replaced. But I had learned through some very miserable years that there is something worse than rejection, and that is not risking rejection, even certain rejection, to tell the truth. I had lived with a bluff and my supposed pride and more regret than I can express.” Pg 117 “The decision came from my desire to be fully in my life as a writer rather than to raise a child. Having a child was not how I wanted to make meaning of my life, not how I wanted to give back to the world. And the reason for this was my sense that I would love too fiercely, to desperately at the cost of my self. I knew my children would always come first and my art second, and I sensed the resentment I would feel about that. So I made a choice and said no to the idea of a child” Pg 176 “I have been in many mothers’ groups – mommy and me, Gymboree, second-time moms – and each time, within three minutes, the conversation invariably comes around to the topic of how often mommy feels compelled to put out. Everyone wants to be reassured that no one else is having sex, either. These are the women who, for the most part, are comfortable with their bodies, consider themselves sexual beings. These are women who love their husbands or partners. Still, almost none of them is having any sex….except that is, for me.” pg 198 “..the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife’s passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardor on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the center of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun in whose orbit she revolves….What’s wrong with me? Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make?” pg 198 “I love my children. But I am not in love with them. I am in love with their father. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.” Pg 200 “I don’t think the other mothers at Mommy and me feel this way. I know they would be absolutely devastated if they found themselves widowed. But any one of them would sacrifice anything, including their husbands, for their children.” Pg 201 “And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother? I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.” pg 203 “The women I grew up with, like most women today, have tangible, marketable skills…Inside or outside a marriage, they can support themselves. I, too, am a well-educated woman with a decent work history, who actually made more money than my husband when we married. I prided myself on being self-sufficient. But we both wanted someone to be home with the kids, and we decided it would be me, so I stopped working and let him support us. And now I’ve ended up in the same vulnerable position I once thought was the fate only of women who married straight out of high school, with no job experience beyond summer gigs at the Dairy Queen.” Pg 251 “When I took off my wedding rings, my fingers had atrophied underneath in a manner that seems excessively symbolic. I protect this white band with my thumb like a wound. When I wore my rings, I was a different person, emboldened in the way one can be in a Halloween costume. I could laugh as loudly as I wanted and go out with dirty hair and sweatpants. I was married. Someone loved me and it showed. I could refer to a husband in conversations with a new friend or a store clerk. They didn’t care if I was married or not, but I did. My ring said, You can’t touch me. It’s like base in a game of tag. You’re safe.” Pg 254 “These young mothers are often torn between wanting to be home with their children and the statistical possibility of future calamity, aware that one of the most poverty-stricken groups in today’s society are divorced older women.” Pg 295 From someone who was getting divorced from an arranged marriage: “Yet I honestly don’t think I was more brainwashed than any young bride who, starry-eyed, says yes to the man of her choosing. The one she met at work, or in a coffee shop, or on a blind date, or in art class. Marriage under any circumstances requires a leap of faith no matter who you are or how your paths may have crossed. My husband and I ate our ice cream, took a chance, and leapt.” Pg 301 | 
