There is too much emphasis on being positive, to the detriment of being real.

Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don’t achieve that in reality.

For everything about him fitting her fantasy image of what she wanted, she still didn’t feel seen by him…and that made her all the more aware that maybe her fantasy wasn’t what she wanted at all.

She’d never spoken to anyone before of this business of being seen, loved for who she was; to have it voiced by this man she’d just met sent chills down her spine.