We live in a world that hates women so much that they would sooner blame a woman for reporting a crime than punish a man for committing it.

If anything was, that the world will always – it can only – disappoint.

She was not brokenhearted because the relationship had ended suddenly; she was brokenhearted because it had never truly ended.

If anything was, that the world will always--it can only--disappoint.

And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia.

Occasionally, she wondered if all couples struggled so much to understand one another, spoke so little at dinner together, spent so much time camped out in front of the TV. Did all women sometimes feel distanced from their man while they were making love?

There was something horribly depressing, she felt, about watching the weather report. That life could be planned like the perfect summer picnic drained it of spontaneity.

Was it possible there was some fatal flaw in their matching, that they were ultimately, impossibly different--dissimilar enough to fall in love, but too fundamentally distinct to stay together?

Physical attraction did its part to glue them together, but something stronger than sexual attraction sealed the bond. When men and women grow apart, it is for the same reason they are drawn together; because they are finally, inherently too different. Friendships among women, on the other hand, were burdened by similarity.

Time passed at an accelerated pace. They could be sitting in traffic or talking on the phone or waiting in line for a movie, and their time felt precious, important, worthwhile.