The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

“I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart once wrote in a letter to her husband. “Women must try to do things as men have tried.”

I sort of hoped that once you’d made a declaration of commitment to someone you truly loved you would stop feeling sodden with lust for relative strangers. But also, I sort of thought, Who cares? Who cares if sometimes you bring out your seduction skill set—briefly!—for a person other than your spouse and you have a little adventure with your body? Why did that have to be at your spouse’s expense? Couldn’t you promise your deepest love, your first allegiance, to your favorite person without locking yourself in a chastity belt and presenting her with the key?

Sometimes I watch children laughing and playing and think: I’m so glad I don’t have any.

One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.

You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun.

I RESERVED AN UGLY JEALOUSY for friends and acquaintances who came from rich families and never worried about their financial fate, for whom money was ultimately symbolic: They had careers and were glad to get paid, but what they were really living off was a pond of money that had been filling up for decades, in some cases generations. Their jobs were to some extent a matter of principle—one has to do something. Some of my female friends of this variety felt compelled to do something only until they had children. (“That is doing something!” Yes, of course it is. But it’s something that a person can only do exclusively for a short period of time unless someone else is paying all the bills.)

Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.

there. I heard myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don’t know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I’m fat.”

HAD RECEIVED A beautiful email from the baby’s father when I was still in Mongolia. Nature is wasteful, he had said. That’s why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish. At first, he wanted to try again. But then he didn’t. And then my downfall was complete.

Thank God for the cats, I thought, when they had the compassion to sleep next to me on the couch, or looked on curious but unfazed as I bawled. They were good companions to have in this strange new world of grief: nonverbal, affectionate, no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.

I told her—many times—“I feel insane.” And she never said, “You’re not crazy. You’re right.”

Finding yourself single when you’re used to being married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone.

A girl at a bar in the East Village asked us, “Which one of you came up with the personality?” when we were jabbering at her one night soon after we moved to New York City. We loved that.

asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.”