“Ignorance is bliss, they say. There are snapping turtles at every wedding, under the tables and on the dance floor, snapping warnings about the uncertainties of the future, the impermanence of our bodies, the fickleness of love. But the best things, the eating and drinking and dancing and kissing, happen only when we ignore them.”
“We, as women, go our whole lives believing this lie that all we have to do is to stop being too fat and too flat-chested and too bitchy and too uptight, and then the perfect dude will finally love us forever. But chasing that stupid phantom doesn’t make us necessary—it makes us disposable. It makes us powerless. Because we’re not people anymore, we’re holes.”
“What scares you the most though is how you let these potential lovers slip through your fingertips. They’re right there waiting for you and you’re too lazy/crazy to pursue anything. They’ll wait for only so long. You don’t want to wake up one day and find that every good one has left because you were too busy being frozen.”
“Reflexively calling women “crazy” is a habit young men need to learn to break. As a term, “crazy” is entirely of a piece with the long and nasty tradition of pathologizing female emotion (and particularly sexuality). Hysteria comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus, after all: “crazy” has been a gendered trait in Western culture for thousands of years.”
“Friends with benefits whom people are not particularly interested in will become de facto boyfriends or girlfriends because, well, we need a date to a wedding. We will exist in a nebulous state of “sort-of dating” our “half-boyfriends” for years on end because it’s better than being single. And of course, if you ask these couples if they would ever consider settling down with said significant other, most would give you a resounding “no.” They would even justify with a “I don’t need to see a serious future with someone I’m dating, it’s just to have fun.” But could anything be more selfish, more unfair, more an insult to the both of you?”
“All the public drumrolling about deciding not to get married, or to live alone, or to have a baby on one’s own, is in direct proportion to the resistance single people still feel from the culture, the curiously old-fashioned outsider status they seem to enjoy. It is testimony to how much truth still holds in Helen Gurley Brown’s statement that the single woman’s “whole existence seems to be an apology for not being married.” Why, one might wonder, should single women still be apologizing to anyone, explaining, elaborating, elucidating, as though they are stuck between the pages of an Austen or Trollope novel?”
”Attempt to see the beauty and purpose in the non-happily-ever-afters.”
Amen to that.
