Show Don't Tell

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“It’s because you need to be hungry to be a great writer, and beautiful women aren’t hungry. Go ahead and contradict me.”

Or perhaps it’s a story about how precious it is to deeply adore two people in the world, even if neither of them is your spouse, and to share part of every day with them? Isn’t this, after all, two more people than anyone is guaranteed?

Not for the first time, it occurs to her that perhaps, rather than exploring the customs of married heterosexual socializing, she is inadvertently demonstrating the isolation of modern life.

Not everyone who knows me needs to agree with my choices.

But I’d failed to anticipate how calamitous the standard erosion of affection over time could be when you started with a modicum as opposed to an abundance.

After hesitating for only a split second—Daphne has been in therapy, but Rob never has, and this feels like a moment where that discrepancy is manifesting itself in an annoying manner—Rob