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I read this in 2013, having wanted to read it ever since it was published in 2010. I imagined it would form a Trifecta of Awesome with Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage and Wendy Plump's Vow: A Memoir of Marriage, both of which I enjoyed and found illuminating. Thing is, I was in a serious relationship 2010��2013, and I didn't want my boyfriend to notice I was reading this book, as he would have felt certain it was about him. (I always felt I was walking on razor blades around him. That feeling, and not this book, is why I broke up with him.) Anyway, about a month after we broke up and I moved out, I ran to this book. It turned out not to be about whatever I'd hoped to find.

I posted this review that has gotten—as of Halloween 2023��209 "likes." On ŷ������ I've logged over 2,000 books I've read (cover-to-cover, over 21 years), and this is far and away my most-liked review. I don't understand it. Thank you all for being attracted to my rudeness, but: It is time for me to break up with this review. I wrote a couple essays (10-minute reads). The is more focused on the book and is a revision of the review that used to be here. I did not name the book (but we know). The focuses and expands on a brief personal anecdote that used to be embedded in the review that used to be here.

Meanwhile, look here: Real people come in different body shapes and sizes that different potential partners may find appealing or not. Real people answer ambiguously when asked if they want an open relationship. Real people get very excited about every new job and quit it before the end of the calendar year. Real people prefer certain TV shows and yell at you for changing the channel. Everyone has specific dating problems: Is the restaurant wheelchair-accessible? Will my date’s child like my neck tattoo of Ronald McDonald? Can I find an allergy pill strong enough to counter the 17 cats under their sofa? These are the sort of difficulties that real people face and so they are better illustrations of the meaning and limits of compromise in relationships. Real people have real relationships. Real people may also debate whether their high-class colleagues have unacceptably poor taste in martinis and thereby deny themselves a chance to form relationships at all—but, while those people are no less real, I'm less interested in hearing about them.

While I'm here: Are straight women really this obsessed with height? Half of the examples in the book were about men getting rejected at the starting gate because they are only two inches taller than the woman and not six inches taller, or because they don't make enough money or they spend too much time at work and they are not both prestigious and creative, or they don't dress well.

This book wasn't meant for me. That's OK. I don't know who it can help, and it's OK for me not to know or care about that. I turned to this book during a difficult gay breakup. My choice to intensely grapple with the book was poignantly about me and my breakup and not so much about the book. Books that I grapple with and don't click with are part of my growth. Rants that I rant don't have to remain online until death do me death. I'm aware that I'm limited. We can make astoundingly fascinating choices within our limitations. We can delete and rewrite our rants. I don't feel like I'm settling.