It used to bother me when I read books where the main characters fell in love or became best friends after only knowing each other a short time. I’d complained about it to Tommy once, and he’d said that’s how it happens in real life. Everyone we meet begins as a stranger, so we project onto them who we need them to be until we get to know them. He said we have to fall in love with the idea of a person before we can fall in love with the actual person.

People can begin on the same trajectory only to wind up, twenty years later, so far from one another that it’s impossible to chart a course back.

For me,’ I said, ‘sex was like reading an epic story. Kind of confusing at first, but when everything began to make sense, the world disappeared—I lost myself in something bigger than me—and when it was over, all I could think about was going back to the beginning and doing it again.’ ‘Only you could make sex sound boring.

...blaming her took less effort than trying to understand her.