Ferris Mx’s Reviews > The Man of My Dreams > Status Update

I send this letter with the greatest affection and appreciation for the many ways in which you helped me.

When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models - templates, almost - and I wonder if they are the only three in the world: The man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours. I can't claim no other dynamics exist because I haven't experienced them, but I can't imagine them.

If a man wants to be romantically involved with you, he tries to kiss you. That's the entire story, and if he doesn't kiss you, there is never a reason to wait for him.

But maybe this is what Hannah has always wanted: a man who will deny her. A man of her own who isn't hers.

It's not that she didn't know bringing Oliver home for her mother's wedding was a questionable idea - it's that she couldn't help herself. This good-looking, charismatic man is, sort of, hers; she wanted witnesses.

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And not even of the couple but of the individual trying to move forward in her life, making choices that she hopes are the right ones when, really, how does anyone ever know? Forcing Allison to stand up for Sam, Hannah thinks now, was naive as much as obnoxious. Hannah used to imagine a greater merging between two people, a point beyond which you felt an unquestioning certainty in each other.

She didn't understand then that you don't ask a person to defend her significant other, that she never should have asked Allison to. Not because of the sanctity of couplehood (as far as Hannah can tell, there are only ever fleeting episodes of sanctity between any couple) but because maybe the person can't entirely defend her mate, because maybe the person has her own ambivalence, and your criticisms are undermining.