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I felt like we were playing cover songs of our own conversations. We just didn't enjoy each other in the same way.

James was sure he was an unlovable person. Maybe it was why he had decided to accept scraps of it from Dr. Byrne.

“We knew we loved each other, but we didn't know whatto do with it, given the current circumstances, or what it meant. Neither of us knew how long this would go on for, and neither wanted to hold the other down.”

Girl 😀

"I just feel like I want to staple him to the ground, you know? Like, nail his shoes down," I said, tears slipping off my chin and onto her. "I feel like we could really do love properly, if he let me." I don't know why I was so upset. Carey and I were, technically, still together. But he couldn't be relied on, and I needed so badly to have one thing I could rely on. The uncertainty overwhelmed me.

Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in.

THERE'S PLENTY OF LANGUAGE, now, for what Carey did to me in April of 2010. […] ghosting, as psychological manipulation. As gas-lighting, even. The only credit they would give him would be the fact that he rightly assessed his situation. That he was too old for me, that the relationship was doomed, that he was too childish, and that he needed to grow up and get an age-appropriate girl-friend.

"The thing about you, Rachel," he said softly, "is that you make me insane."
"Fucking hell," I blurted out. "Is that it?"
"It's true! And I make you insane!" He picked up his phone.
[…]
"Pet, listen to me. I'm twenty-seven."
"So?"
with a teenager."
"Twenty-seven is very old to be dossing off work to stay in bed
"I'm twenty-one, Carey," I spluttered. "Which you would know it you came to my birthday party."

This was the problem. I could stay with Carey for as long as I wanted, but as soon as I left, it was hard to get back in again. Like a Grimms' fairy tale, or a reverse Hotel California.

“When we had sex I could taste the day on him.”

GIRLLLLLLLLLLLLL

It was easy, now that I understood passion properly, to see why you would move heaven and earth to secure it.

“My attraction to him came on like food poisoning.”

THIS IS SO GOOD

For years straight women talked about men never eating them out, and now that they do it all the time, none of us want to admit that most of them are bad at it. They sucker on to your clitoris like a fish at the side of a tank, or they randomly poke about with their tongue. With Carey I felt like a shrine. He was going at this not like a person with a plan, but a person with a calling.

BAHAHCSJVAHAVAHAHABAHAB

But on the whole, I was curiously unbothered. Not because I was this divinely liberal, unselfish twenty-year-old. I was quite self-obsessed, but I was also used to being passed over. I had learned not to take it personally.

“Maybe that's why the Fred Byrne fantasy had been so appealing to me, as a rebound option. Something that had to be kept a secret and that guaranteed touch, stimulus, novelty.”

EXCUSE ME !!!! WHO has cameras around me in this airport

“I don't know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boy-friend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.”

Some sick shit right here

I wanted to protect him against the world's many disappointments, guard him with my body like I would a baby or a small dog.
On top of all that, he was the only man I'd met who made me feel petite, and to feel protective over someone who physically towers over you is a hell of a drug.

This is what it's like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming. But we were close in age; but I was still his student; but we are in love; but what's to say he won't fall in love again.

Despite being so uninvolved with college, I was very aware of the situation with Dr. Byrne's wife. Crushes are like that. No matter how checked-out you are, there's always one microphone left switched on, and it only records information about your desire.

It's tempting, when you're talking about your sex life as a young woman, to slip into little melancholy asides about how you gazed heavy-lidded at the ceiling while a dull brute pummelled away at you, Sadly, I don't think I can say any of that and get away with it. The sex was unsatisfying but I couldn't have been more obsessed with having it. I was always on top, moaning away like a stuck pig.

"We need to get you to a place where you can come out," a new
therapist said to me when I was twenty-three.
"No, that is impossible," I replied without thought.

"I'm miserable." It was as if someone else had said it. A new
guest over my shoulder.
"What?" they said, attention shifting to me.
And it came out. I was hurting, the closet too much, my relationship crumbling, I couldn't leave my home. I believed it unattainable to ever be out. Unthinkable the idea I could be where I am now.

Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. […]
Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, […] and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.