Everything about this person screams “almost” — you “almost” dated; you “almost” fell in love; you “almost” changed your life to be near them; you “almost” drifted through life without engaging with them at all. Like the mythical unicorn, you can never concretely have this person, you can often only grasp at their essence.
You can’t fart when you’re dating someone. Sometimes the relationship will actually just feel like one long held in fart since that’s all you’ll ever be doing. We spend 95% of our time in relationships with our butt cheeks clenched together, praying to G-O-D that one doesn’t escape.
Don’t ever forget that the relationship you’re in is one you’ve chosen to be in, one that defines part of your life, for a week or a month, ten years, or maybe even forever.
You can apply what you’ve learned from Women’s Studies to any situation — it’s not so much a career choice as it is a life choice; you’re adopting a new perspective that you’ll use in every relationship, every job, and every circumstance.
I want to remember the fear, I want to remember the promise, I want to remember the nights I wanted to curl up in a ball, I want to remember the people I’m not supposed to remember, I want to remember not knowing myself, I want to remember the moment I started to feel safe and like this life I’m leading is really mine.
In a relationship, it is almost guaranteed that you will get fat and happy. You will lie contentedly in her arms on your plush couch among your eclectic throw pillows and reflect on how lucky you are. You will order in and eat out. In a spirit of domestic goddess-osity, you will attempt to cook dinner from scratch, which will of course result in half the kitchen on fire and subsequent takeout from the Chinese bistro down the street.
A new kind of relationship seems to have sprung from online dating and technology, which is The Two Week Relationship. It’s when you date someone from anywhere to two weeks to a month and then decide to drop off the face of the planet.
Look away from The Married Guy. He is either faithful, in which case you should concentrate your energy on trying not to hate his wife for her obscene good fortune, or cheating, in which case you should concentrate your energy on hoping he falls down and breaks his ankle, at a minimum.
Recently realized certain aspects of what he thought was his identity were actually just uncontrollable delusions lacking any concrete behavior as evidence of their truth and significance.
Feel resigned about the fact that sex sometimes doesn’t happen for weeks. Start to feel apathetic about lack of intimacy, orgasm and physical touch. Become overly silly. Hide the fact that you’re not addressing her problems with jokes, funny voices, inappropriately loud talking and tickling.
Such moments become fiercely guarded, protected and cherished memories and subsequently, the recall of such memories is often the precursor to small mental breakdowns, large mental breakdowns, and evolution-of-a-relationship montages in movies, specifically circa 1980 and 1990.
Ladies, we all know men are hard to figure out. They are a constantly shifting puzzle, 10,000 pieces, all sky. Perpetually finding new ways to obfuscate their thoughts and subvert their emotions into complicated interpretive dance–it is left to us to pick up the scraps and rearrange them in a pattern we can understand.
Sex involving two partners shouldn’t have anything to do with Victoria Secret catalogs, Penelope Cruz, or any TV/movie love/romance/sex scene that once impressed you so deeply that it’s actually become a part of your sexual repertoire. Sex doesn’t have to be loud, it doesn’t have to be graceful, and you don’t have to roll your eyes to the back of your head to show your pleasure.
Once you understand that you don’t have to get wasted, sleep with a random, and vomit in a trashcan to have a successful Friday night, you can actually get the good kind of drunk and have the good kind of fun. When people had Walks of Shame in college, they were actually secretly happy about it. Shaming was seen as a good thing.
You know when it’s not working, and it’s not because you don’t want it to work, but because it just won’t? And so you separate, you go on a ‘break’ so you can figure things out, you realize you need to be alone so that you can think, rediscover the self that has been so completely “sunk in this shunt” in all the mess of an intense relationship?
Almost Transparent Blue (1976) was written by Ry? Murakami (b. 1952) while he was a student at Musashino Art University, where he was enrolled in the sculpture program. It was his first novel and was awarded the Akutagawa Prize (Japan’s “most sought after” literary prize; previous winners include Kobo Abe and Kenzaburo Oe) and sold ~1.2 million copies (~1% of Japan’s population at-the-time) in six months.
What’s especially inefficient is when you stop for me on a busy two-lane road and I have to begin walking in front of you, only to realize that I have to wait for a number of cars going the other direction to pass. This situation can not by its nature have a positive outcome.
The ads for True Blood play on this: “Thou shalt not crave they neighbor.” But of course we do crave each other –– for love, sex, money, nurturing, healing, playing. The dictum of the ad is ambivalent, a supersession of the known moral code. Yes, it tells us, there is an ethics. But they are not certain or fixed because human relations are contractual and complicated.