Manar

“Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it’s a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. Ideally, though, we’re lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance

“The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.”
― Vikram Chandra

“We have two selves: a real-world self and a phone self, and the nonsense our phone selves do can make our real-world selves look like idiots. Our real-world selves and our phone selves go hand in hand. Act like a dummy with your phone self and send some thoughtless message full of spelling errors, and the real-world self will pay the price. The person on the other end sees no difference between your two selves. They never think, Oh, I’m sure he’s much more intelligent and thoughtful in person. This is just his “lazy phone persona.”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance: An Investigation

“I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we are looking for- adventure, excitement, emotion, connection-we turn to stories that help us find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with- sometimes ones so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them- we look for answers in stories.”
― Katherine Center, The Rom-Commers