I thought about the Rules, and how I had felt they didn’t apply to me. All that time, when I had been telling myself that I wasn’t dependent on other people, hadn’t I been holding on to the contradictory conviction that someday I would—in the very phrase, heavy with significance, used by my mother and aunts—“meet someone”: someone as different from the tedious guy who wanted to marry you, as from the tedious guy who didn’t want to marry you?
