Daria Snadowsky

“If breakups are like deaths, then ex sightings are like seeing a ghost: you feel goose bumps, near loss of bladder control, and the sensation of your heart bursting in your throat. The distinction is that the ex is alive.”

“Ultimately, I have no power over what he or any boy thinks of me.”

“High school sweetheart" is such an innocuous-sounding term for something that can tear out your guts.”

“It’s so evident to me now that just because someone is a great guy doesn’t guarantee we’ll make a great couple, no matter how much I work at it and want it.”

“Pain was my tie to a past that a part of me wanted to hold on to. The more I hurt, the more I knew I loved, and that felt like a good thing.”

“For me, at least, feeling something, even something bad, is better than feeling nothing.”

“Blame your body. The whole biological purpose of existence is to mate, so from the time we hit puberty, our hormones are demanding us to couple up. Maybe it’s basic instinct to feel inadequate if you’re single.""That’s what sucks. There’s so many more interesting things than guys, but guys are what we spend most of our time talking about.""I think that’s just the way it is, though. No matter what we do, it’s always more special if there’s a boyfriend to share it with.""Or a best friend.”

“Nothing bonds people more than going through sh_t together, right?”

“In some ways therapists have it harder than surgeons, who can often correct the issue with one operation. There’s no quick fix for emotional trauma.”

“There’s nothing like feeling like sh_t to kill your libido.”

“I didn’t realize it was possible to obsess over a girl as much as you can over a boy.”

“I think how breakups can bring out the worst in the best people, and part of being upset is mouthing off crap you don’t mean.”

“But recalling how my ex had nasty BO after track practice never made me feel better. It seemed disingenuous to hold things against him that before I readily accepted as the price of love.”

“After a breakup there’s a momentary relief that you’re free again. But that’s quickly eclipsed by all the good memories you had together and the realization that there won’t be any more of them.”

“Doing things for someone else is what I love most about relationships, even more than having stuff done for me.”

“I can’t be happy going out if it’s not . . . going anywhere.”

“So it’s all right for him to rule out a serious relationship, but it’s wrong if I’m not ready to settle for less?”

“In the beginning, I wanted his heart. Then I shifted focus to his body. I was never interested in only friendship.”

“It goes back to keeping things equal. Friendship feels really demeaning if one person still likes the other more, which is probably what caused the breakup in the first place. It’s such a misnomer that ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ have the word ‘friend’ in them.""I don’t know, Dom. It’s screwed up that people who dug each other enough to go out can’t at least stay friends afterward."Spoken by a true love virgin.”

“How is it that two people can be in the same relationship and still have completely different ideas of what’s going on?”

“It’s sick how you can be intimate with someone one minute and then be furious with that same person the next.”

“It sucks enough when girlfriends break plans with each other for a boy, but at least that’s not against the natural order of things, like when a boy blows off his girlfriend for friends. . . . Or maybe I’ve had it wrong all along. Since friendships usually outlast relationships, why shouldn’t friends receive preferential treatment?Because you don’t sleep with your friends!”

“If love and hate aren’t true opposites, perhaps neither are pleasure and pain—if you go far enough in one extreme, it resembles the other.”

“I wasn’t expecting him to light candles or scatter rose petals. But I just made myself infertile for him, so the least he could’ve done was make the bed.”

“I realize that I’m far less familiar with my own privates than with Guy’s, and I’ve seen his only twice! I guess that’s to be expected, since girls can’t really look at ourselves without a reflection, whereas nothing’s hidden with boys. It seems unfair, but there’s also something neat about it being shrouded in secrecy.”

“Some scientists hypothesize that having children is the only reason romantic love came about. It kept couples together long enough to mate and see a baby through infancy.”

“The other big con is whether having sex could cause me to more than just like like Guy. But that could happen even if we don’t sleep together. You don’t even need to date a boy to dream about marrying him.”

“Just because the sexes are equal doesn’t mean that sex is.”

“I’m positive I wouldn’t consider having sex with Guy if I hadn’t already had sex beforehand. I always knew I wanted my first time to be with someone I loved and who loved me, which it was . . . but shouldn’t I want that for everytime? I disagree with what Amy said about how once you go all the way, you can’t go back to “everything but.” But now that I have done it, it doesn’t seem nearly as big a deal to do it again.”

“But when I gave bl0w jobs to my ex, I secretly hated it. What’s pleasant about sucking on a stiff, veiny appendage that spurts pee and sperm?”

“In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin.”

“Your love interest becomes the most important thing to you. And if the love is requited, it’s the biggest high in the universe, and you’d be fine never being with anyone else. But if this person doesn’t want you back, well, you pretty much wish you were dead . . . or that that person dies miserable.”

“Love is . . . needing to be with this one person. No—it’s more like wanting to need to be with this one person. Last semester my English professor read us this great Robert Frost quotation that went something like, ‘Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”

“Nothing makes you get down on yourself and worry that you’re undesirable like rejection, so having someone desirable desire you is the ultimate antidote.”

“A boy sees a girl topless for the first time only once, and the anticipation of the big reveal is really exciting. I feel like I’m a present being unwrapped.”

“How is it that human anatomy evolved so that something as stupid-looking as a repetitive back-and-forth movement can generate the peak of physical ecstasy?”

“Back in high school, I never understood how Amy could enjoy getting with guys just for the short haul. In a way, though, making out like this is more enjoyable because there’s no pressure for me to not do or say anything stupid. What’s the worst that can happen if I do? So I’m freer to focus on what I’m feeling, not what he feels about me.”

“I’ve been so caught up with mapping out a picture-perfect “forever” that I’m completely neglecting my present, which I have far more control over anyway.”

“I remember another thing Cosmo said. It typically takes half the time you’re dating a guy to fall out of love with him. My ex and I were together almost ten months before he admitted over the holidays that he’d fallen out of love with me, so by that measure I should’ve been cured weeks ago. But once you’ve anticipated spending forever with someone, I’m not convinced you can ever feel complete after being uncoupled. I think you just learn to live without the person. Like when someone dies, you don’t stop loving them just because they’re not around to love you back anymore. Breakups truly are a kind of death.”

“It’s so messed up how little control we have over whether we want somebody.”

“There’s something about the sight of a gorgeous guy in an open convertible heading in your direction that makes all bad feelings evaporate into thin air.”

“I love where he and I stand right now. It’s like we’re on the brink, and everything’s full of excitement and potential precisely because the heavy making out is still something to look forward to. I realize we can’t remain PG-rated forever. I’m all too aware, though, how easy it is to let hooking up become the crux of a relationship. Then you forget how to just be together and why you should stay together. So for the meantime I’d like to take things slowly in order to prevent hooking up from ever getting too important.Amy would say I’m overreacting, but I’m just trying to learn from past mistakes.”

“Whatever age you are when you’re first burned is old enough to lose hope that you’ll ever get excited about anybody else.”

“One of the pitfalls of having an ex-boyfriend is that people still pair you together in their memories, and sooner or later someone’s bound to mention him. And now that it has happened . . . I can’t say I feel nothing. I don’t think it’s possible to get royally dumped by the only boy I’ve ever done it with, let alone loved, and then feel nothing when he’s brought up in conversation.”

“Amy is so correct that a good personality can make a guy better-looking.”

“In the same way that a fiancée is a bride-to-be, I’ve always thought a girlfriend is a fiancée-to-be. Yes, most relationships bite the dust before things get long-term. However, that possibility of staying together forever remains the underlying force driving the relationship forward.”

“As juvenile as we sound, sometimes the most fun thing in the world is laughing with girls about boys.”

“I used to think all that game playing was par for the course and even kind of exciting. It just felt logical to pursue a boy the same way I applied to college—by expending exorbitant time and energy showing what a great catch I am and what a perfect match we’d be, so that after a lengthy waiting period I might get accepted. But now the idea of reliving any version of that charade seems like hell.”

“I can live without a boy. So why does it feel like I'm going to die?”

“Once you've ridden the roller coaster, the Ferris wheel's kinda restricting.”