No Fault Quotes

“No one knows what goes on in a marriage except the people in it, the truism goes. I have often thought that the sentence could stand to be shortened to: No one knows what goes on in a marriage.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“To be wanted is one thing, and to be left is another. The gravity in either direction is stunning, if you think about it for long enough.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why my life needed to be a story.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“Contemporary marriage has never been pure romance. it remains not just a form of social capital, but a tenet of social insurance. Often it is used as a replacement for all the ways Western countries have failed to take care of their citizens, laid out right in the vows: the answer to the question of who will take care of you in sickness and poverty alike.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“Even more: she thought of her love as something that she gave and expressed on her terms, not as something that she could receive only when offered. She was in love as a feeling, not as a form of belonging.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“Who is to say whether a love relation is real or really something else, a passing fancy or trick someone plays (on herself, on another) in order to sustain a fantasy?' wrote Lauren Berlant in "Desire/Love". 'This is a psychological question about the reliability of emotional knowledge, but it is also a political question about the ways norms produce attachments to living through certain fantasies. What does it mean about love that its expressions tend to be so conventional, so bound up in institutions like marriage and family, property relations, and stock phrases and plots?”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“Who is to say whether a love relation is real or really something else, a passing fancy or trick someone plays (on herself, on another) in order to sustain a fantasy?' wrote Lauren Berlant in "Desire/Love". 'This is a psychological question about the reliability of emotional knowledge, but it is also a political question about the ways norms produce attachments to living through certain fantasies. What does it mean about love that its expressions tend ot be so conventional, so bound up in institutions like marriage and family, property relations, and stock phrases and plots?”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

“Nothing seemed ordinary after my divorce because nothing could be. The institution hadn't defined my feelings, but it had changed the shape of them in a way I couldn't have predicted and probably would never recover from.”
― Haley Mlotek, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce