Rating: ☼ ☼ ☼

Comments: I’m not a big fan of relationship memoirs, but I enjoyed this one. It’s witty, honest, and the love charts are just plain hilarious. I’m inspired to make a few myself.

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From the book:

I was a serial monogamist love junkie, a romantic extremist with no sense of irony.

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The more he loved me, the less I wanted him. I was becoming like the men I detested, recoiling from any neediness or emotion. I told Dr. G. I feared I was more masculine than feminine. I was too tough and self-sufficient to ever get married.

“So what? In your family, anything masculine was praised more,” she said. “There’s not a certain type who can’t get married.”

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I had never considered myself impressionable. Yet Dr. G. said being around crazy people was a quick way to be crazy.

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“You didn’t want to date him, you wanted to be him,” Aaron said.

“Yes! And I am him. But not the him he really was, the him I wanted him to be.”

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Though Aaron didn’t think people changed, Dr. G. said there were three ways they could: through therapy, the death of a parent, or healthy love. My mother had saved my father. Richard’s father left his mother– that was what wrecked him.

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I thought of how Rilke defined love, as “two solitudes that protect and border and salute each other.”

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It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.