Personal reflections on relationships and fiction, no actionable leads

she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It's equally questionable whether Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Bjorn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Bjorn?) I've never watched Friends or Sex and the City, but I know the feeling. Personally, I'm more of a novel girl. The other day, I found myself thinking of my long- ago roommate and her thoughts on arranged marriage while I read Monica Ali's beautiful book Brick Lane. Monica Ali is an immigrant to the United Kingdom, and the characters in her novel all come to the UK from Bangladesh. Some of the characters accept traditional arranged marriages, while others make "love marriages" instead -- often defying their parents, their whole set of cultural norms, to do so. Towards the end of the novel, one man reflects on the early days of his marriage: We thought that the love would never run out. It was like a magic rice sack that you could keep scooping into and never get to the bottom. It was a "love" marriage, you See. What I did not know -- I was a young man -- is that there are two kinds of love. The kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished. And the kind that you don't notice at first, but which adds a little bit to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand. As you can tell, this character is currently unhappy in his "love marriage.” Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side. What's the difference between the big love and the pearl love? Can they even be compared? Is it like apples to oranges? But couldn't all this be a false dichotomy? Who says it's about arrangement versus randomness -- chemistry versus choice? Can we have both? Can we find the big love, and nurture that so it develops into the pearl love, too? My ultimate conclusion about the Art and Science of Flirting, from my "studies" of pickup artists and also my entire life, is that flirting is all about strategic ambiguity. Deliberate uncertainty. Manipulating ambiguity and uncertainty can contribute to many intense feelings. Some people learn this, and decide that the only way to have a relationship with chemistry is to include a constant generous dollop of uncertainty about love, loyalty, or something equally important. These people decide chemistry can only derive from little pieces of confusion: tiny mismatches that lodge underneath the similarities that bring people together, constantly unsettling, like a prickly burr. But I don't think that's what I want. And after all, S&M creates extraordinary feelings too, but plenty of people do S&M in very controlled circumstances: pre-discussed, with safewords and so on. Arguably, S&M is another form of mismatch, of contrast, of uncertainty -- but it's a form that can be HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018623