You Think It, I'll Say It

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“It’s not that you’re wrong. But when you say stuff like this, it makes life a lot less enjoyable.”

I’d never before been able to tell for certain that someone else was as happy to be in my presence as I was to be in his.

I’m relieved to have aged out of that visceral sense that my primary obligation is to be pretty, relieved to work at a job that allows me to feel useful. Did I used to think being pretty was my primary obligation because I was in some way delusional? Or was it that I’d absorbed the messages I was meant to absorb with the same diligence with which I studied?

I say, “Aren’t open marriages just a stopgap until divorce?”

‘Television is a medium because it’s neither rare nor well-done.’

This is how Casey wins, Kirsten thinks—by not insisting on resolution, which compels Kirsten toward it.

and really, underneath it all, weren’t we just killing time, didn’t none of it matter?

That was what I didn’t understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each other’s lives to mattering.