Nell Frizzell

“For people already in the together-forever camp—the people who had bought houses together, gotten married, were trying for a baby, had already become parents—my life was a perfect encapsulation of everything they had traded in. I had freedom, I had variety, I had a healthy disregard for my own security. While they planned a babysitter and an evening of bottle-feeds two weeks in advance just so they could spend three hours out of the house eating a dinner they hadn’t cooked, I was rampaging up a dew-wet meadow with someone who might try to undo my bra with his teeth. It was only later, as I sat on their sofas, ashen-faced and nails-bitten, telling them how I’d faked an orgasm or risked an STI or how I’d cried in the night because I’d felt so lonely, that I would catch them looking over at their partner with something like relief.”
― Nell Frizzell, The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions