Labor of Love Quotes

“There is no better life than a life spent laboring at love—exerting effort not because we have to, but because we believe that what we are bringing into being is valuable and we want it to exist. Yet because our culture tends to misunderstand the nature of labor and of love, we undervalue both.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“I like David Foster Wallace. But if you type David Foster Wallace into OkCupid, it’s a shitshow.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“Walking through the West Village one night, he had a eureka moment: He would make a gay bar, but for straight people. It was a brilliant idea. Soon after, he opened the first T.G.I. Friday's on the Upper East Side.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“Love requires openness. The point is to be changed by, and to witness change in, one another. Slowly, this back-and-forth transforms the shared reality we call the world. Love is less noun than verb: not a thing to get, but a process to set in motion.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“If marriage is the long-term contract that many daters still hope to land, dating itself often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship. You”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“How many times have you heard a man explain why he left a woman by saying that, in some way, she demanded too much emotional labor of him? How many female exes became unbearable because they were “too much work,” “not worth the effort,” “difficult,” “oversensitive,” “intense,” or “tiresome”? Still more criticisms imply that women fail to manage their own emotions properly; they are “hysterical,” “illogical,” “shrill,” “unreasonable,” “overwhelmed,” “all over the place,” “confused.” At some point every woman seems to become “crazy.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“Meanwhile, the most cunning men have gotten wise to the ruses of the Rules Girl. They see that beneath her cool exterior, she is highly vulnerable. If you have been conditioned to believe that your life derives value only from male attention and affection, you will presumably go to great lengths to get it. If you are used to thinking that the only way you can pursue your desires is by making yourself into an object of desire for someone else, being ignored can quickly make you feel desperate.”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“free love and the feminist movement had not really changed the fundamentals of what women were. Women”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating

“In 1994, Bill Clinton was forced by Republicans to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, for saying—at a UN conference on AIDS—that perhaps schools should teach young students to masturbate. But two years later, her replacement, Audrey F. Manley, went on television to talk about “outercourse”—all the sexually pleasurable activities that one could enjoy without exchanging bodily fluids. And”
― Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating