I always tell her I don’t care what’s normal after what happened; I just want normal – without qualifiers. I want to open my closet, pull on any outfit, and not obsess about people thinking I’m asking for it.

Forgiveness is rarely this once-and-done thing. It’s an ongoing battle, a struggle to remember that love is worth more than pain, and that fighting for it matters more than a grudge.

She always wants me to run with her, but I strongly believe if God had intended man – or woman – to jog, he’d have scaled way back on breast size and sent some of that padding to the soles of our feet. Just sayin’.

These don’t look so bad, right? Maybe you think women are overreacting when they talk about stuff like this. But there’s the thing... women keep telling us this crap makes them uncomfortable. And what do we do?” Ted waits a beat. ” We ignore them. We tell them to lighten up, accept a compliment, stop making everything about them, and that’s wrong. It is about them. We should be strong enough to be able to back off when women tell us the things we do scare them.

For what it’s worth, any man who ‘tries to score’ with a girl he’s not dating isn’t much of a man in my eyes.

Dude, the key to scoring with a chick like that is to show her what you can do for her – not to her.

I force myself to keep walking instead of running for home, running for the next town. I want to turn to look at him, look him dead in the eye and twist my face into something that shows contempt instead of the terror that too often wins whenever I hear his name so he sees, so he knows he didn’t beat me. But that doesn’t happen.

Kenneth James Mele.

Guys are so dumb. You actually believe this crap. You waste half your lives trying to prove to everybody and their mother how tough you are, how strong, how manly, and then say crap like, ‘Ooo, baby, you make me so hard,’ because there’s absolutely no way you can control your own body.

What the hell, just what the hell was wrong with how I looked today? Why does he care if I wear eye-black like the football team? It’s my face. It’s my body. I can dress it up or down however I want. Why is that such a hard concept for guys to accept?