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48712aa
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Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.
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Norah Vincent |
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7a83c7c
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I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.
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men
relationships
women
jerks
society
idiocy
women-and-men
power
fools
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Norah Vincent |
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0352f11
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Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with ..
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Norah Vincent |
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0c5a807
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You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.
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psychiatry
psychology
mental-health
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Norah Vincent |
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16a7586
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I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea.
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Norah Vincent |
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95127f9
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Gratification kills desire. And constant gratification kills it permanently
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Norah Vincent |
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c0c16f6
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Like so many other high school discipline cases, he'd probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD- bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We've all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they're twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst.
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Norah Vincent |
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6f0e85a
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they would have all the same stressors still in place, and they would have no means of lessening them, because, their will, if they had amassed any in their time away, was still weak and always a quick casualty. No match for the horrors of lost chances.
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Norah Vincent |
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7265955
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there is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for.
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Norah Vincent |
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1ba2c9c
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Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Like Sasha, many of my dates--even the more passive ones--did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. ..
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Norah Vincent |
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c04d379
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I was never mean to him, but I participated heartily when the guys teased him.
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Norah Vincent |
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b043d8a
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Dating women was the hardest thing I had to to as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor. But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't..
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Norah Vincent |
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5273c32
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Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother's bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age.
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Norah Vincent |
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191fd7d
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We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym.
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Norah Vincent |
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6f80889
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He could put up a gruff front and he was no angel, but he was really just trying to hide his sensitivities so that he could hang on to them.
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Norah Vincent |
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bd807ce
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It was the woman's job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy's job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all.
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Norah Vincent |
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c3e9ab0
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When were in the prence of another person, there Is always a masks, even if that mask is our face. There is no escaping it. And so the vast majority of what we say to each other, whether it is to our spouses, our family, our confessor, or perfect strangers, amounts to chitchat all the same. Or at best, a crack audition for that juiciest of all parts were literally dying to play: ourselves..
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Norah Vincent |
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95d0371
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Men's healing is in women's interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are--here is the dreaded word--victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role.
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Norah Vincent |
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d757a59
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It's hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can't exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fathers' love. These, it would seem, are matters for the therapist's couch. Private matters.
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Norah Vincent |
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6a87aac
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And yet, she squints disapprovingly, the wretched intellect at work. Always the masculine mind interferes, sucking the magic out of sounds and shutting it into words. The very word for this, the academic word--onomatopoeia--sounds like what it is, a chained sprite falling down the stairs.
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Norah Vincent |
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b862a94
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So, the image to start. The perception of the world as it is, the phantasm, the flare of the visionary idea is flattened to a page by the male intellect. Controlled, categorized, c-a-t-a-l-o-g-u-e-d. The ethereal is quashed. Address, that beautiful oration announcing itself, becomes a dress feebly worn, becomes a picture of a dress in a catalogue.
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Norah Vincent |
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23ca382
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Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Like Sasha, many of my dates--even the more passive ones--did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. ..
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Norah Vincent |
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7c935e9
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I was boring myself. That's the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, "I know I'm more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this cafe I wasn't in despair about the human condition."
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Norah Vincent |
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ecd529b
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If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What's more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check.
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Norah Vincent |