[Bruinrab]

I've gotten into the habit of reading the Modern Love column in the New York Times. It's reader-written and appears every week. Some times the articles are wonderfully thoughtful, moving, or evocative. Other times, they are total crap.

Ultimately, though, we all just want to be loved.

Anyway, just thought I would share. I'll update weekly, and I may go back and add in some of my recent favorites along the way. Right now, they're doing a set from college students... Interesting.


Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define

By MARGUERITE FIELDS

RECENTLY my mother asked me to clarify what I meant when I said I was dating someone, versus when I was hooking up with someone, versus when I was seeing someone. And I had trouble answering her because the many options overlap and blur in my mind. But at one point, four years ago, I had a boyfriend. And I know he was my boyfriend because he said, “I want you to be my girlfriend,” and I said, “O.K.”

He and I dated for over a year, and when we broke up I thought my angsty heart was going to spit itself right up out of my sore throat. Afterward, I moved out of my mother’s house in Brooklyn and into an apartment in the East Village, and from there it becomes confusing.

So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

I sucked my teeth and looked over at the next table, where two men sat opposite each other. One looked over his shoulder and gave me a closed-mouth grin. Steven explained that it’s not a question of faithfulness but of expectation. He can’t be expected not to want to sleep with other people, so he can’t expect her to think differently. They are both young and living in New York, and as everyone in New York knows, there’s the possibility of meeting anyone, everywhere, all the time.

For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys, or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once. But there have been many, many encounters.

I’ve met guys in the park, at the deli, at galleries, at parties and on the Internet. The Internet idea came from thinking that if I could sift through people’s profiles, like applications, I could eliminate the obvious lunatics.

And that didn’t work out very well. One leaned across the table an hour into dinner and screamed: “You love me! I know you do!” Another stood outside my apartment with one finger on the buzzer and another covering the peephole, occasionally banging his fist, until he finally exhausted himself and left.

As for the guys I first met in person, there was the construction worker I ran into on the train twice before saying anything, kissed the third time, kissed the fourth time, got stood up by the fifth time and never saw again. Then there was the guy with tattooed knuckles, the young Republican, the Irishman on vacation and the guy who stole $300 from me to buy drugs. There was the activist, the actor, the librarian, the waiter and the bond trader.

So when my friends and I started having a conversation about the nature of monogamy, I thought I knew something about monogamy. Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence. Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time.

And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.

But noncommittal is what we’re all about.

There was the guy with red hair and big steaklike hands that walked with me arm in arm through Washington Square Park, kissed me on the stoop of my mother’s brownstone and said he wanted to be my boyfriend. Until our next walk, when he kept his hands to himself and said he meant boyfriend “in the theoretical sense of the word.”

Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man who walked around in graying long underwear.

There was the guy who wore more makeup than I did, and the one who waxed his eyebrows clean off his face. And the one who slept with a guy when he was drunk, then with another when he was sober. (But he insisted he wasn’t gay, just curious, and since when was I so uptight anyway?)

Over the summer there was the Jesuit taking a break from the seminary who stopped calling after I said I wouldn’t sleep with him on our third date. In the fall, back at school, there was the banjo player from the woods of New England who took me home to meet his family, then moved away and told me to wait for him. And I did, for months, until he called to say he was falling in love with me, and oh, man, I had to come see him right away (“Buy your ticket tonight!”), before he called again to say it was moving too fast and he wasn’t ready.

And on, and on, and on.

Then this winter I met a guy while waiting to have my computer fixed. He had big blue eyes and a wide red mouth and delicate hands and greasy brown hair. He sat down and asked what I was reading and did I have a boyfriend because he was asking me out. He smelled like incense and clean linen, and I was overwhelmingly and instantaneously smitten. Among other things, I liked his indifference, confidence and knowledge of foreign film directors.

On our first date he explained his theory of exclusive relationships, which was that they shouldn’t exist. We talked about our (and all of our friends’) divorced parents, about how marriage was nothing but a pragmatic financial venture, and about the last time we cheated on someone. He said that his disregard for monogamy wasn’t a chauvinistic throwback, but quite the opposite: the ultimate nod to feminism.

On our second date we watched coverage of the Iowa caucus, and later, after listening to jazz at his apartment, he crawled onto his bed, leaned against the headboard and said he didn’t burn artificial light after dark. I sighed and edged into bed next to him. During the night he kicked and snored, grabbing greedily at me with his well-moisturized hands like a child snatching at free candy.

We overslept. In the morning I watched him dress frantically, the way a drifter would (gray pants and shirt tucked in and tie and vest and brown wingtip shoes and gray sweater and red scarf and jacket: it was lovely). He looked up occasionally from his scrambling to give a big toothy smile. I made the bed and drank the orange juice he bought for me the night before. We left his apartment and tried to find a cab.

As we crossed Hudson Street, we waded through a passing stream of preschool children walking in pairs, holding hands. I watched their teachers — one at the front of the line, one in the middle, one at the back — while he hailed a taxi.

A week passed before I saw him again. I was about to go back to school in Vermont, and he was headed to Jamaica on vacation. When I entered the restaurant, he said: “The nice part about having a shoddy memory is I forget how pretty some people are. You look beautiful.”

As we ate, we theorized about the effects of pornography on romantic relationships. Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked casually when I was going to see him again.

He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.”

I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly straightforward.

Then it came. The story. The long, boring, aggravatingly rehearsed and condescending story. It spewed, overflowed and dripped off our table and onto the floor and underneath the shoes of the other patrons and into the street. He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me; he thought I was special. Cross my heart, he actually called me special.

[Bruinrab]

WHEN he was done, he asked: “That’s what you were talking about, right? Seeing me again and the nature of our relationship? Like, what are we to each other?”

I said I just meant to ask when we were going to see each other again, because I thought that was the polite thing to do after a few dates, and I wondered if he wanted to make time for me to come back to New York to see him. And he said no, that was “too much, too soon,” but if I’m ever in town I should call him. He would love to see me.

We left. It was raining, he hailed a cab for me, and we hugged without looking at each other. I got into the cab and rode away.

And tried to process it. And tried to remind myself that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs, and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the end it’s our collected experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.

Marguerite Fields is a junior at Marlboro College in Vermont.

[thejellymill]

Perhaps for her this life is good, but for me it would be one of the most empty and unsatisfying lifestyles imaginable Thanks for sharing, it's really good food for thought and an eye-opener to see how other people live their lives.

[Bruinrab]

Originally Posted by thejellymill

Perhaps for her this life is good, but for me it would be one of the most empty and unsatisfying lifestyles imaginable Thanks for sharing, it's really good food for thought and an eye-opener to see how other people live their lives.

Hmmm... I don't think she finds her life all that satisfying though.

[Bruinrab]

This one is really sweet.

The Day the House Blew Up

By RONALD K. FRIED
Published: March 26, 2006

WE went out to the house last month to celebrate Valentine's Day. But then the house exploded. The house that we always joked would be taken from us because of our outsized love for it literally blew up.

It was an easy house to love, built in 1830 on a tree-lined street in the heart of the unpretentious, austerely beautiful historic fishing village of Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island. We'd owned it for close to a decade.

We were inside the house when it exploded. The firefighters, the ambulance driver, the doctors and nurses in the E.R., the insurance agent all agreed: We were lucky to be alive. It's a miracle, they said.

This was our 21st Valentine's Day together, and for 15 of those years we've been married. Before I met Lorraine I hadn't taken Valentine's Day seriously since grammar school. But my fiercely intelligent, utterly modern wife, despite her abhorrence of cliché, observes holidays in a pleasantly sentimental way. Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween and all the rest are occasions for the baking of frosted cookies and, on Valentine's Day, the creation of handmade cards.

This sense of occasion connects her to the best parts of her childhood near Pittsburgh.

Our Valentine's Day ritual is simple. I cook dinner for Lorraine, and we split a bottle of Champagne. We always try to arrange our schedules so that we can be in Greenport for the holiday, and I can make a wintertime barbecue, preferably in a backyard filled with snow. This year everything was working out. A huge snowstorm was forecast, and we were planning to prolong our weekend until the day after Valentine's Day, a Tuesday.

When we walked into the house late that Friday night, we smelled the familiar mix of ancient wood and mildew, and heard the centuries-old creak of the front door and the endearingly crooked pine floor. I said, as we both often did, "We're so lucky to own this house." And that was true. The house was perfect in its simple way: clapboard siding, original wide-plank floorboards, handblown glass in the sidelights, a modern kitchen and bathrooms revamped a few years back. But it was also the way the house seemed to hold the light throughout the day no matter what the season.

Late that Saturday afternoon, we sat in the living room with friends. One, an architect, asked that we not turn on the lights after the sun had set so we could watch the lilac-colored twilight linger on the walls. Frederick Law Olmsted himself could not have sited the house better, we all agreed.

Martin Amis said in an interview, or maybe in one of his books, that couples without children are funny. O.K., I admit it: my wife and I are funny. But at least we know it. So, yes, we knew there was perhaps something inappropriate about our love for the house.

What was more suspect — to us at least — was the love we had developed for our next-door neighbors' cat Speckles, a calico with beige and white highlights in her black fur. We started making friends with Speckles as soon as we moved into the house. The neighbors, Bob and Debbie Allen, told us their cat's story. Speckles was a stray that Bob's mother had taken in. Soon we started taking her in as well, and Speckles began spending nearly as much time in our house as theirs.

WHO wants to listen to a middle-aged man describe the wonders of the cat he loves but doesn't even own? I'll add only that I wouldn't have noticed Speckles if my wife had not taught me, besides much else, to love animals. She loved Speckles first, but then I fell, hard. Harder, perhaps.

Amis is right: couples without children are funny.

On Valentine's Day morning, I slept past 9. I was awakened by the sound of Lorraine chatting downstairs with the man from the gas company who had come to fill the propane tanks that hung on the outer wall of the house and fed the kitchen stove. Coming downstairs, I smelled what I thought was the scent of cooking tomatoes and garlic, and I wondered why Lorraine was preparing dinner. The smell was gas, Lorraine said; probably just residue from the delivery. But she was concerned. I boiled water for my coffee, no problem. Lorraine reread the notice the gas company had left, debating whether or not to call. She went into the dining room to see if the birds hopping on the snow in the garden were tufted titmice.

I turned away from the stove. And then the house blew up, a pulsing boom and pressure against my face, like the wave of sound you feel if you sit up close at a big rock concert. I thought: This is it, I'm going to die. It was a surprisingly calm moment, almost as if I was finally finding out how a story ended, the story of my life. There was a brief moment of recognition: Oh, this is how it ends. How unexpected. I felt a great sadness, of course. How sad, I am going to die. But no panic really. And then I didn't die. I was forced to conclude that I was alive and ambulatory.

I walked into the backyard shouting Lorraine's name, and I was astonished to see that the back wall of the house had preceded me there. Broken window frames and shattered glass were spread out on the snow. A few seconds later Lorraine followed me. Though she had been closer to the explosion than I was — directly above it, we later discovered — she had dashed into the kitchen to find me or what was left of me.

We hugged each other and reported the amazing news: we were alive. We said what everyone says at moments like this: I love you. I love you, darling. I love you with all my heart.

And then we went back inside to get the fire extinguisher. But the fire behind the stove, where once the kitchen wall had been, was not the only fire. There was fire in the basement. Probably the propane had leaked under the crawl space in the kitchen and then, because it is a heavy gas, filled the basement, which was below the dining room. It's likely that the electric water heater down there sparked on, causing the explosion. Or so we reasoned later.

The wooden planks in the dining room had exploded upward toward my wife, and the dining room chairs slid into the basement. Lorraine's hair was singed, her nose was cut, there was a huge bump on her head, and she had more bruises than she knew. But she was alive.

Standing in the backyard we saw that the blast had blown out our neighbors' windows. But it had not killed us, even though we were right on top of it. Why? Perhaps because we were at the epicenter of the blast, a friend later speculated.

"Speckles is in there," Lorraine said, looking into our second-story bedroom, which we could see clearly because the back wall of the house no longer existed. "Speckles is dead." Speckles had joined me in the bedroom as I slept, and had been sitting on the red farm chair in the upstairs hall the last time I saw her. Speckles dead? This news hit me much harder than the destruction of our house.

I love my wife for her brave and heroic heart, so I should not have been surprised to see her charge into the house in her bare snow-covered feet to look for Speckles. I did not follow Lorraine, owing to either good judgment or lack of physical courage, I'm not sure which. I was trapped in the backyard for maybe 10 minutes. I couldn't get out through the driveway because the walls of our house had collapsed and blocked the way. I tried to climb over the picket fence, but it was too high.

I later learned that Lorraine had searched for the cat briefly before leaving the house through its nonexistent front wall. My wife then pushed past a policeman to get into our neighbors' yard, where she was able to help me over the fence that separated the properties. Together we walked through our neighbors' house to the safety of the street. Lorraine had tried her best to find Speckles, she reported, but no luck.

FROM the street we watched as flames began to engulf the house. But the loss of Speckles weighed on us. Oscar Wilde warned that we destroy what we love, and had it not been for our perhaps misplaced but entirely heartfelt love of that cat, I told myself, Speckles would not have been visiting with us that morning. And she would be alive still.

But she was. She was alive.

A second tank of gas caught fire. As the orange flames and black smoke bellowed toward the heavens, Speckles jumped out of the ruins and scampered down the street. "Speckles! Speckles!" we cheered.

"She's alive," we said. "She's alive!" I hugged the Allens' son, Teddy, and gave him a kiss on his stubbly cheek, and Lorraine hugged and kissed their daughter, Susie.

A great sadness had been lifted from our hearts. Our house was gone, but we were alive, and our love for each other — the love of a married couple who had put up with each other for 20 years — would survive. Though we accused ourselves of indulging in a foolish love for a cat, that love had not destroyed her.

I still believe Martin Amis was right: couples without children are funny.

But at that moment we were not funny. On this Valentine's Day I knew what grown-up love was, or at least I knew one of the things love does.

It tells us what matters.

[thejellymill]

............

[Jamroll]

Originally Posted by Bruinrab

Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define

So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

I really don't get how people can live like this. It seems so clinical and distant. Where's the intimacy and love?

[Aryan_]

All this confirms is that women who write that much about themselves are automatically whoores.

I'm also guessing Stephen was married and was just saying that to hit on the author. It's a good line.

[Sugarberry]

Originally Posted by Bruinrab

So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

I.

My suitemate is just like that, she is like " i love everybody, why be tied to one person"

....she also smokes weed so maybe that has something to do with it.

the column as a whole is too long and over analyitical on love, for my taste.

[zzze]

assalamu alaykum

i didnt like this article, but i found a few interesting ones on that site. thanks

[sally]

Originally Posted by Bruinrab

I love my wife for her brave and heroic heart, so I should not have been surprised to see her charge into the house in her bare snow-covered feet to look for Speckles. I did not follow Lorraine, owing to either good judgment or lack of physical courage, I'm not sure which.

lame.

ten char

[thejellymill]

Originally Posted by sally

well, that doesn't justify anything..since just about anybody can make a generalized statement and use that excuse

Well I guess it comes with growing up and noticing more how they (desis at the masjid) act towards me being half white and all and how they treat my mom who is a white convert. Desis may like white skin but a lot are secretly racist and unfortunately I found that out quite early. Plus, for some reason being half white qualifies them to make condescending remarks while my half desi side seem to qualify some people to force retarded desi customs

[Bruinrab]

OK, stop fighting in my thread!

Jelly, :hugs:. People suck.

This is so sweet and so sad. Sigh.

Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive
By BRENDAN HALPIN

Published: December 5, 2004

MY wife is about to die. As I leave the hospice to pick up our daughter at school, I tell Kirsten I love her. She is bald, gaunt, jaundiced and slipping in and out of consciousness. It takes a lot of effort for her to speak. "I love you," I tell her, and she surfaces briefly and croaks, "I love you too." It's the last thing she will ever say to me.

I take our 7-year-old daughter, Rowen, from school to the hospice for a brief visit, and later that night I go back alone and sit by Kirsten's bed with her parents and sister. Kirsten is unconscious, rasping and moaning with every breath. Sometimes there is a long pause between her breaths, and though it has become clear to me that prayer is ineffective, each time this long pause happens I just pray that she's dead because I can't stand for her to be alive like this.

I fall asleep holding her hand, and I wake up at 1 in the morning. I tell Kirsten's family I have to leave, because Kirsten and I agreed in advance that it was important for me to be with Rowen at bedtime and in the morning. I kiss Kirsten goodbye, and five hours later it is Kirsten's parents and sister who are with her, singing, as she dies, and not me. I know I did what Kirsten wanted, but still. We were together for 14 years. I wish I had been there.

Weeks later I have a dream. Kirsten, Rowen and I are in the same mall where Kirsten and I went walking to try to get her contractions restarted on the frigid January day when Rowen was born. There's a bookstore on the third floor, and Kirsten and I take escalators all the way up. Suddenly I realize that I don't know where our daughter is. "Where's Rowen?" I ask Kirsten, beginning to panic. She is unfazed: "I guess she's still down by the bathrooms."

"Well, I have to go get her," I say, and as I get into the elevator, I see Kirsten heading into the bookstore. On the ground floor I get off the elevator and find Rowen. I throw my arms around her and wake up. I'm at home, in my bed, where I need to be, with the living and not the dead. I am annoyed with my subconscious for choosing the mall as a metaphor, though I am comforted by the idea of the afterlife as a bookstore. If that's true, I'm sure Kirsten is content.

Of course I don't really believe that's where she is. But she's certainly not here. Oh, I have some of her ashes with us in Boston, and since I gave out baggies of ashes like party favors at her funeral, she's in the ocean, and in Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. I will never again hear the ZZ Top song "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" without thinking of Ki