“Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn't want to cause him any. Wasn't that love, after all?”

“...maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don't even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early--in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after--we may just lose that chance to be our best self.”

“Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone.What happened in their first five minutes?Time stopped.”

“But Eve - ow whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“But Eve - or whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.”

“I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him.”