Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart.
The whole “misery loves company” thing never applies more than when you’re breaking up. The thought that the other person is doing fine is simply too much to bear.
You can’t quantify love, and if you try, you can wind up focusing on misleading factors.
Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall – the blind belief in fate, the whole “things happening for a reason” drill.
I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad.
Sweetened ice tea is one of the things I love about the South, right up there with homemade biscuits and cheese grits.
The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.
I remember that my mother once told me that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.
We are one of those couples i used to watch, thinking to myself that I’d never be on the inside of something so special. I remember reassuring myself that it probably looked nicer than it actually was, I am happy to be wrong about that.
After all, I think, isn’t it always about a boy?
What if two people want to be your partner, then what?
There is no better audience for someone in love than someone in love.
We are in love and meant to be together.
In the final seconds before sleep, I wish I could go back and undo everything, give those little girls another chance.
I still think I love him more. It’s one of those things you never know for certain because there’s no way to enter all the relationship data in a computer and have it spit out a definitive answer. You can’t quantify love, and if you try, you wind up focusing on misleading factors.
There are two kinds of women – those who eat in a crisis and those who lose their appetite in a crisis.
I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Zoe one of the very saddest notions in love and life: sometimes the timing is wrong – and sometimes you realize the heart of the matter way to late in the game.
I will find the good in this loss. I will make something happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It’s amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn’t even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn’t even know had a particular smell. I wonder what will someday bring back Dex and our few months together. Maybe the sound of Dido’s voice. Maybe the scent of the Aveda shampoo I’ve been using all summer.
I nod, thinking of how difficult marriage can be, how much effort is required to sustain a feeling between two people – a feeling that you can’t imagine will ever fade in the beginning when everything comes so easily. I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That is the only real way to grow together, instead of apart.