“Maybe it was the way he said, ‘I’d rather spend my summer with you than any other girl.’ Maybe it was how being around him made me forget the brace and the wounds, made me feel whole and unbroken.”— Natalie Lindeman, nytimes.com
“Most people I know have a Jeremy in their lives, someone whose consequence a label can’t capture.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“But by not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity t…”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“But now, more than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, I’m still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“And in the end, my married friends were right: There may be a limit to passion, but love flourishes.”— Marc Jaffe, nytimes.com
“I believed I should not allow her to love me . . . But she was also a woman, beautiful and vibrant, and I was a man — in a wheelchair, true — but a man full of heat and desire that sometimes rendered the chair irrelevant.”— Gary Presley, nytimes.com
“Only now have I begun to see that letting go and trusting in the unknown doesn’t have to mean driving off a cliff, that leaps can be leaps of faith.”— Kelly Thomas, nytimes.com
“I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person.”— Emma Court, nytimes.com
“I worried that I may never again feel as completely safe and at ease as I did making funny voices for a French bulldog with him by my side, but you can’t control how someone else feels.”— Tonya Malinowski, nytimes.com
“I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.”— Marguerite Fields, nytimes.com
“Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.”— Marguerite Fields, nytimes.com
“I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.”— Marguerite Fields, nytimes.com
“OLD LOVE is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise.”— Eve Pell, nytimes.com
“I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.”— Ayelet Waldman, nytimes.com
“Did we find love because we grew up, got real and worked through our issues? No. We just found the right guys.”— Sara Eckel, nytimes.com
“To Mark, I was not a problem to solve, a puzzle that needed working out. I was the girl he was falling in love with, just as I was falling in love with him.”— Sara Eckel, nytimes.com
“She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.”— Maria Bello, nytimes.com