Amy Sutherland’s hugely popular story featured in the New York Times, June 2006, is one of my all-time favorites on the subject of understanding men. I’ve put her advice to use – and it has worked, ladies (wink, wink). She writes: The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Love’s a bitch August 23, 2007
…No human had ever seen an adult giant squid alive, and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe. The melancholy of this situation washed over Sai. Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. -Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
