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June 26 - June 27, 2024
“All human beings are a work in progress, and we don’t all change at the same pace. Who knows how many people have gotten divorced simply because they failed to recognize that what they thought were insurmountable problems were actually just temporary phases?”
“Whatcha knockin’ down?” “Patriarchal power structures.” He blinked. “A wall.”
Yan smacked the back of his head. “That’s grand-gesture shit, man! You can’t do that yet.”
“Good. First rule of book club?” They finished in unison. “You don’t talk about book club.”
“Men are idiots. We complain that women are so mysterious and shit, and we never know what they want. We fuck up our relationships because we convince ourselves that it’s too hard to figure them out. But the real problem is with us. We think we’re not supposed to feel things and cry and express ourselves. We expect women to do all the emotional labor in a relationship and then act confused when they give up on us.”
“It is, actually,” Malcolm said. “Modern romance novelists use the patriarchal society of old British aristocracy to explore the gender-based limitations placed on women today in both the professional and personal spheres. That shit is feminist as fuck.”
Back then, she would never have believed that the man who could barely stand to go a single day without tearing her clothes off would morph into a man who was almost apologetic when he reached for her at night. Who began to reach for her less and less. Who didn’t even pay enough attention to her needs to notice that she was left frustrated time and again.
“Flirting is about confidence, man. That’s all it is.” “I don’t have a lot of that right now.” “Not your confidence, dipshit. Hers. You want to make her feel like she’s the only woman in the room. It’s about putting a smile on her face, a spring in her step, a little blush in her cheeks. Say things that she’ll replay over and over again when she’s in bed.”
When had a woman ever calmed down because a man told her to do so?
“I don’t even know where to start.” “We do,” Del said. Then the guys all spoke at once. “Backstory.” “What the fuck is backstory?” “Everything, man,” Mack said. “Backstory is everything.” “It means that whatever happened to your wife before she met you plays a role in who she is today,” Malcolm said. “We are all the sum total of our experiences at any given time, and our reactions to things are shaped by them. Just like in romance novels. Whatever a character went through before the start of the book will eventually determine how they react to things that happen in the book.”
“That’s why fiction resonates with people. It speaks to universal truths.”
“Romance novels might be the manuals, but Pinterest is where they post the pictures.”
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Irena. The moment I set eyes upon you, I lost all ability to speak.”
Thea had never felt more like herself than she had when she was in school.
“We shouldn’t assume that women and girls don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy. We don’t fear that men who read murder mysteries and thrillers are going to have a hard time not becoming serial killers, so why should we assume that a girl won’t know that she doesn’t have to change from a mermaid to human in order to find love just because of a movie?” “Because that’s the only message girls get sometimes,” Mack argued. “It’s not one movie. It’s, like, every fucking movie.”
“You need to stop focusing all your attention on the fact that she faked it and start asking yourself why the fuck you didn’t notice.”
“My lord, you have asked me repeatedly to trust you. Yet time and again you refuse to trust me. Until you do, there can be no starting over with us.”
From the moment I first saw you, I have been half a man because the other half belongs to you.
“Liv, I love you, but you seem to have a really low opinion of my ability to decide for myself what is best for me.” “Your track record isn’t great.” Alexis spoke quietly. “Liv, I say this as one of your best friends. You are not being very fair to your sister right now. Things get complicated in relationships. Things can change when you least expect it. Can’t you support her during this?”
Did people actually do that shit back then? Of course, we did, Lord Jelly Finger responded. Do you really think white, Western civilization invented cunnilingus in the twentieth century?
“I can hear you thinking.”
She laughed, and it became a shriek when he whipped the comforter over both their heads, hiding them in a dark cocoon.
“You’ve spent your entire life believing one version of the truth, that your father was the victim. Have you ever looked at things from your mother’s point of view? Have you ever considered that she was the one who ended up trapped that day?”
A lonely marriage is the worst kind of lonely there is.
“Grand gesture time?” “Oh, yeah.” Gavin turned back to the flight attendant and conjured his sternest game face. “Let me off this plane. I have to go marry my wife.”
