ON A RECENT SUNDAY, our 23rd anniversary, I asked my husband to marry me again. This was not romantic. This was triage, a dose up the nose of marital Narcan. The night before, Dan had smacked closed his laptop, on which we were watching that tender, electric meet-cute scene in season two of The Bear. "Wait," he said. "Do you think we're going to be sitting on this couch watching Netflix until we die? Like, for the next 35 years?"
I said "yes."
In 2000, when we got married, we had two rules: No cheating and no dying. Back then, nobody talked about ethical nonmonogamy, just as nobody talked about gluten. On your wedding day, you just put on your fancy clothes, took (took?) your lover as your spouse, and walked away betrothed. The plan from there was ...no plan, really. Go to a hotel once in a while? Try not to destroy each other? Good luck!
The no-plan plan works well enough at first. Probably because when you are newly married, you're not really married anyway. You've promised to fuse your lives, but you haven't done it yet, so everything is floaty and roomy and easily forgiven.
Then we had a kid and another kid, a dog and another dog, two cats, a mortgage, miscarriages, foot surgery, melanoma, tax bills, black mold. Marriage working "well enough" began to seem like an idiotically low bar, almost a form of self-harm for a compact we'd (1) staked our sexual-economic-procreative lives on and (2) committed to forever.
So I bought a stack of books, looking for a relationship guru, hoping to find someone to tell me not just how to survive marriage but love it here and thrive. Let me save you a lot of time: Don't do this. There's little that's uplifting in these texts. The general view seems to be if you work very, very, very hard-if you make yourself less unruly; if you sand down enough of your weird human edges-you can fix yourself/your spouse/your relationship and make lifelong pair-bonding tolerable.
Denne historien er fra July 17-30, 2023-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra July 17-30, 2023-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Early and Often: David Freedlander - Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
WIth two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
Can the Media Survive?
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In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
Trust the Kieran Culkin Process
First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.
The Funniest Vampires on TV
What We Do in the Shadows is coming to an end. Its idiosyncratic brand of comedy may be too.
