Kristan Higgins

I'll tell you something, Harpy," he said, his voice almost a whisper now. "It never even occurred to me that we wouldn't make it. And it never occurred to you that we would. You were just waiting for us to go down in flames. I thought we could get through anything.

But they're family, and you forgive them, even if they are human equivalent of hyenas. Because that's what you do, Posey. Forgive.

In most marriages, lust and love become tempered by normalcy. If you hear your husband farting in the bathroom seconds before he emerges and asks if you want to fool around, you generally don__ want to fool around. You might, after a few minutes, but you have to forgive your husband for_ well, for being human. For eating a bean burrito. After all, you ate the bean burrito, too.

Book club meets every other month or so. Besides marriage counseling and the very occasional night out with my sister, I__ home twenty-nine nights out of thirty, and still the girls resent me. Not once have they ever complained about Adam__ late meetings__hich may or may not have been booty calls for amazing porno sex. Me, I go out to my stupid book club, and I__ punished for it.

Forgiveness is difficult,_ she said, making me feel small-hearted and brittle. __ou don__ have to trust Adam again, not right away, but it does mean you have to accept what__ happened and start to take steps away from the infidelity._ So once again, the burden is on me. Planning the wedding, though it was a genuine joy, was on me. Once we figured out why we couldn__ get pregnant, the burden was on me, too, with those horrible shots that made me so hormonal I had to go into the bathroom at work and cry, and everyone knew and was so nice, which made me cry more. All Adam had to do was switch to wearing boxers and have more sex. The pregnancy__e again. I__ the one with a four-inch scar and a pooch of skin. The house decorating, painting, hiring people to overhaul the plumbing and electric_ me. His mother__ birthday__lso mine to remember. Holidays, vacations, weekend plans, all mine. And while I would never call my girls a burden, the huge responsibility of raising them is 99 percent mine. And now the future of our marriage is on me. I have to forgive him. I have to accept his apology. I have to get past this. That first night, I lay stiffly next to him. He gave me a meaningful basset-hound look and said, __hank you, Rachel,_ and it was all I could do not to flip him off.

You asked why I couldn't forgive you," Nick said, very quietly, and I jumped a little. "It was because you were the love of my life, Harper. And you didn't want to be. That's hard to let go.

Not everyone has to be in a relationship to feel good about themselves. Some people are better off on their own.

I don't get it, guys, I continued. I'd want to date me. Why is it so hard for me? I'm wicked fun, I dress nicely, I'm friendly... I'd love to date me. Wouldn't you?

You know what I loved about 'Sideways'? Well, the wine, of course. But it was one of the few movies in which being a writer was realistically depicted. I loved how the Paul Giamatti character tries so ineptly to talk about his book.

Commandment #1: Believe in yourself. Commandment #2: Get over yourself.

Granted, I'd waited a long time to hear those words. Would've sold a kidney-maybe two-to have heard them at one point. Now, though...they didn't have the same impact. They were, in fact, an overcooked noodle in the pasta salad of love.

I had to get over [him]. For months now, a stone had been sitting on my heart. I'd shed a lot of tears over [him], lost a lot of sleep, eaten a lot of cake batter. Somehow, I had to move on. [Life] would be hell if I didn't shake loose from the grip he had on my heart. I most definitely didn't want to keep feeling this way, alone in a love affair meant for two. Even if he'd felt like The One. Even if I'd always thought we'd end up together. Even if he still had a choke chain on my heart.

Get out of bed. Go to classes. Try to be normal, and pretty soon all that grief you carry...it gets easier.

I guess I've found that I'd rather be alone than with the wrong person.

The bewilderment is the worst part. That__ what they don__ tell you in divorce articles. They talk about anger and loneliness and growing apart and starting over and being kind to yourself, but they don__ tell you about the untold hours in the black hole of why. Why? What changed? When? Why was I the one you chose to marry, but all of a sudden, I__ not enough anymore?

When an eighty-five pound mammal licks your tears away, then tries to sit on your lap, it's hard to feel sad.

She smiled, and there it was again, that aching pressure in his chest. Love, or a heart attack. Kind of the same thing.

....And then I turned and saw a guy staring at me...."What are you looking at, idiot?" I asked, giving him the sneer that had served me so well."My future wife. The mother of my children.