Shelley Sharp Brown’s Reviews > Us Against You > Status Update

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is

Things are always connected — when it suits us.

Isolated malcontents

In the heat of the action people have a tendency to overreact, that’s all

A tiny, almost invisible crack. Where all the darkness gets out.

Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthought.

It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.

There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily. But what is a marriage if you take away the infatuation? A negotiation. Someone has to sacrifice something.

A fanatical antimonogamist

We only exist for them in the form of negative headlines

It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: how much am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become.

A marriage. You measure it from everyday life at home at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems.

Schadenfreude