Emily Giffin

Looking back, I question whether I really loved Nate, or just the security of our relationship. I wonder if my feelings for him didn__ have a lot to do with hating my job. From the bar exam through that first hellish year as an associate, Nate was my escape. And sometimes that can feel an awful lot like love.

I review my three boyfriends, the three men I slept with in my twenties, searching for a common thread. Nothing. No consistent features, coloring, stature, personality. But one theme does emerge: they all picked me. And then dumped me. I played the passive role. Waiting for Hunter and then settling for Joey. Waiting to feel more for Nate. Then waiting to feel less. Waiting for Alec to go away and leave me in peace. And now Dex. My number four. And I am still waiting. For all of this to blow over. For his September wedding. For someone who gives me that tingly feeling as I watch him sleeping in...

I don__ know. She was a sweet girl. As sweet as they come. I don__ know why I didn__ love her. It__ something you can__ really control.

You can only control your own actions. Not other people__ reactions.

The feeling I have reminds me of New Year__ Eve, when the countdown is coming and I__ not quite sure whether to grab my camera or just live in the moment. Usually I grab the camera and later regret it when the picture doesn__ turn out. Then I feel enormously let down and think to myself that the night would have been more fun if it didn__ mean quite so much, if I weren__ forced to analyze where I__e been and where I__ going.

and more important, did he love me as much as he once loved me?

I'll remind you of that someday , Maura says. "when you're married to a man who once looked into your eyes and promised to forsake all others. I'll remind of that after you've just had his baby and you have postpartum depression and feel as fat as cow and you are pumping milk into a plastic containers in the middle of the night while he's running around with some twenty-two-years old named Lissette. I'll remind you of that. Maura to Jess.

I'm glad you were both here," I finally manage, thinking how strange it is to be standing with the two people who made you, something most kids take for granted every day of their lives.

I realize thirty is just a number, that you're only as old as you feel and all that. I also realize that in the grand scheme of things, thirty is still young. But it's not that young.

He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side.

True love is supposed to make you into a better person-uplift you.

What if two people want to be your partner, then what?

Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.

But certainly not everyday you can find someone who wants to have a monogamous relationship

You see yourself as very average, ordinary. And there is nothing ordinary about you, Rachel." (Something Borrowed)

What every girl dreams of when she's dumped is - that the guy will someday feel regrest and come back and tell her all about it. And the beauty of it is you have no regrets whatsoever.

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn't even know had a particular smell.

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room.