I traded unencumbered stars for city lights, cornfields for corner coffee shops, and never looked back, but there’s something to be said about going home again. I spent this past weekend at my childhood home, which lies on a storybook farm site seven miles outside a town straight out of Beautiful Girls where the men drive pick-up trucks with misogynistic bumper stickers and the women start having babies right after high school (if not during).
The Itch
Our attention spans are getting shorter in every regard, including romantically. A study released last month made the observation that the one-time seven year itch has inched it’s way closer to three years. Granted this study came as an effort to promote Hall Pass, so it should be taken with a grain of salt (as any study should), but it’s still disconcerting. The article speaks more to the staling that naturally occurs rather than directly about the cheating that has become a symptom of the itch. This I understand. Relationships will ultimately become familiar and it will take a concerted effort to (for lack of a less cheesy phrase) maintain the spark. But I feel like it’s at this point where that real love stuff everyone is always babbling about comes in.
When Our Male “Must Haves” Become Our Personal “Must Bes”
Many moons ago, shortly after the inception of this blog, I wrote about the idea of becoming the men we want to marry. The idea was reintroduced to my musings in a Vogue excerpt by Anne Roiphe. She recently released “Art and Madness” in which she chronicles her destructive quest to love a man who embodied everything she loved about art and literature (and some of the things she hated). She longed to be a part of the fascinating world of authors and she thought the only way to gain access was by becoming the muse of a man. She would ultimately realize that by becoming the man she had hoped he was, she could be a part of this world on her own accord.