I used to believe rigor and love were mutually exclusive, or that they somehow worked against each other, that love was supposed to feel like something flooding you, something you surrendered to, rather than something you showed up for daily, tinkered with, sculpted, rediscovered. I guess another way of putting it, I imagined love as the bucket’s... See more

You talk about breakups as useful, if not altogether happy, opportunities to celebrate what was gathered over the course of a relationship. Most of my breakups have been dominated by the sense that I’d never be loved so well again, that I had fucked up with the one person who’d ever be capable of loving me. And I think that sense springs from a... See more

But of course the idea that I would know what I or anyone deserves is just another manifestation of my own outsize ego, right? That I should be the arbiter of such things. Thank the stars I’m not. Do you deal with this at all?