Modern Love
50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion
No? No? No?
Let Me Read Between the Lines
Steve Friedman
She dumped me. what's important are not the de-tails but the pronoun placement, she preceding me. But there is no villain here. My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. there is no villain here.
There is no green-eyed, wasp-waisted, pillow-breasted, sneering-queen-of-the-damned villain who dumped me so swiftly and with such imperious, frigid beauty that I experienced chest pains and shortness of breath, leading to something called a Cardiolyte stress test, which I've just discovered my insurance company may not pay for and which has left me not only miserable and lonely and occasionally sobbing in public bathrooms but also about six thousand dollars in debt. But no one is to blame here. My therapist suggests I repeat this phrase, too. No one is to blame here.
Did she have her reasons? Could I have been a better boyfriend? Is it telling that I was forty-eight when we met and never married, that I had spent the better part of three decades shedding wedding-happy sweethearts as a tailback dances away from fiendish linebackers, and that I had recently looked in the mirror and seen, staring back, male-pa ...
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