I try to think of the kitchen as a theatre of self-creation. Sometimes it’s as simple as putting pickles in a pretty dish and laying the table. Or slicing up fruit and arranging it on a plate that makes the colours vibrate. Other times it’s the rejection of restraint when cooking for one. I always feel defensive when people say ‘I don’t bother when

Plenitude of one love doesn’t reduce the pain or longing for a type of love you want but don’t have. Though I sometimes try to sell myself the idea that it does.

Absence of romantic love in my life had created its own awkward space in me. Like a corner of a room you cannot find a comfortable use for, a deficient space grasping for its own utility. And I sense other people can see this and that it makes them uncomfortable. They seek to solve it (‘get on the dating apps!’) or to refute romance as goal (‘I

Every time a woman – for it is most often a woman – says ‘oh, I’d love to have colour on the walls’ or ‘I love that pattern, but my boyfriend would never let me’ I feel a swell of pleasure that I don’t have to contend with the aesthetic veto of ‘the other half’. At least in my situation I haven’t had my taste neutralised into an unthreatening,

Often what was tearing at our hearts was what he described as ‘the givers of crumbs’, romantic objects that made us feel grateful for the other’s scraps of attention.

When I first read it, I thought only a lover could use the word ‘soul’ and get away with it. But it can’t be right that I need a lover so that I can speak of having a soul. That doesn’t do justice to the role platonic love plays in my life, its endless occasions for consideration of the soul. And it does not recognise the way art enables deep

A fear I often return to is whether intimacy of the self counts. Does self-knowledge have to rebound from another, be in collaboration with someone, to give you the best look at yourself? Otherwise, might I only be hearing myself as echoes?

have watched with distaste how coupled people transfer the need for the house to the need for a wedding, to the need for a child, to the need for a bigger house. The never-ending escalation of desires. How might I resist always wanting – scanning the future for the next unbearable absence that I must resolve, giving in to the emotional occupation

Sontag wrote about the symbolism of moving from one place to another, from an old status to a new one. She encouraged the graduating students to think about the experience as ‘a model for how you should try to live. As if you were always graduating, ending, and, simultaneously, always beginning.’ That’s what transitions in status give us, the