Lakshmi said that dating and romance were fun when you were young, but that freedom of choice in love was an illusion, and caused only pain. Sartre had explained this: to choose was to be never secure, to be always in flux—to be, for a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir had shown, in a kind of nonexistence. Maybe Sartre had been happy, but Simone de Beauvoir hadn’t.
