Cliché

“If you’re not happy with yourself being single, you won’t be happy in a relationship either. You have to create your own life first before you can share it with someone else.”

“Never let someone be your priority, while allowing yourself to be just their option.”

Cliché is an expression or idea which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect. We tend to shy away from cliché because we do not want to be categorized as old-fashioned, traditional, corny or what not. At one point, we need to recognize that being overused does not change the fact that some clichés continue to be right. As we fall in love, even if it is not our first time, we are all beginners and clichés are wisdoms that remind us to be cautious and protective of our hearts. It is ok if our hearts get broken. However, it is not ok when we knowingly let it be broken.

Misplace

The thing you’ll misplace the most: time.

Crush

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there — you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.

– David Levithan

ASKDJFH;KJ

You will probably get texts at random hours of the night like this. It means I love you.

– to my wife

Sex is not a goddamn performance

Sex should feel as natural as drinking water.

It should not require confidence.

Sex should happen, because the moment is ripe.

Ripening lips, ripening labia, ripening cock, ripening pupils, ripening state of being. Ripe and augmented and brimming. Your energy goes to your pumping heart, then to every external nerve, then to theirs, on fire.

You bask, roll, play in it. You sigh, moan, laugh.

It’s not about being “good in bed.”

It’s about being happy.

One should never worry if they’re doing it “correctly.” Sex is not factual. I don’t want your cookie-cutter sex, I don’t want your meticulously crafted, calculated, fool-proof fuck. I don’t want a show. I want you. Let your instincts, urges and whims define that. It’s enough.

What do most girls like? Forget about it. Statistics are meaningless when there’s only one. Hello, here’s me. Here’s you.

Don’t worry about taking it too slow. We got time. We got infinite rhythms, combinations, possibilities. Explore each fuck. Take our time. We can do a different one later.

Don’t worry about making me come. I’m here. Right where I want to be.

I am overwhelmed by wanting; you don’t have to convince me. I want you because I like you. So don’t put on a front. Don’t taint this.

I’m frustrated—it’s just authenticity I want.

It’s originality.

It’s passion.

It’s joy.

Don’t say that something I like is ugly. Don’t compare yourself to the rest. You will live and die with and within your experiences like everyone else. If someone thinks you are amazing, they are not wrong. Their universe is as real as any other; it is forged through perception.

I don’t care if you accidentally slammed my head into the wall, if you slipped out, if my arm cracked, if the delightful pressure of your wet lips on my anything made a silly sound. There is no right way and no wrong way.

“Good in bed,” what.

You’re good in my bed. I’m pleased you’re there. I feel it suits you.

Shove your technique. Let your memory swallow it. Fuck me like you’d fuck me, fuck me like you feel.

This isn’t a test.

– Anonymous

To my future husband

My dear, I am desperate for you.

I know you are out there somewhere and I am desperate for you. Is he you? I do not know. My heart is telling me no but I am so tired of waiting that I am convincing myself that maybe.. maybe he is you.

Please be the flirty type and turn me on with every word you say. Please be the flirty type who is not afraid to hold me, kiss me and caress me in public because you love me so.

Please be the thinking type, let me win then beat me in our debate. Please be the thinking type and endure with me this over-thinking disorder. Please be the thinking type, because as our thoughts intertwine, I belong to you.

Please be strong, not physically, but mentally. Lift me up with your will and protect me with your love. Please be strong when you cry to me, to me and only me.

Please be open minded, to accept yourself, to accept me and the world we are to build together. Please be open minded for our kids and the roads that they will take. Please be open minded because only then will you realize how vast is my love for you.

Please be into sport. I will try and will fail to understand your passion for sport but I will be there at the games with you. I will be there at your practice, at your competition and at your sport meets. I will tape the games for you when you are stuck at work. I will do chest bump with you when our team scores. When you play, I will be at the sideline, cheering you on because there is nothing else I rather do.

Please know your way around the kitchen, not so you can be my personal chef but just so we can cook together. Please make the rice as I make the main dishes. When I wash the dishes with soap, please rinse them with water. As we wash the dishes together, I may stop abruptly to kiss you, simply because I love you so.

Please be the type who reads. I want to tell you about Ender’s Game and how many times I have reread To Kill the Mockingbird. I promise I will not ditch the Godfather or Catcher in the Rye even though I’m not very fond of them. Tell me about the books you read, why you love them, why you hate them and I will fall in love with you over and over again.

Please have integrity. Please stand your ground but recognize that integrity is not static. Demand my respect and I shall be at your mercy.

Please love music. Sing duet with me. Sing off-key and I will kiss you smiling. Spend hours with me getting lost in music.

Please be a Beatles fan. I want to sing In My Life to you on our anniversaries. I will hum Here Comes the Sun to you on a summer day. Please dance to Twist and Shout with me simply because we can.

Please be patient with me. I know I am no perfection. I am clingy, and weak for you. Please be patient with me because I am plagued with crazy hormones.  Please be patient with me and melt my heart during my most ridiculous moments.

Please stand by me. Truly, honey, ignore my pleads and demand. Besides your love, this is my only request. Please stand by me because I do not plan to fail you. Please stand by me so I can reach for your hand when I fall, so I can reach for your heart when I’m tired, so I can hold you when you’re down. Please stand by me because I am scared to stand alone. Please stand by me because I need you more than anything.

Until the day we meet.

Reality

There is no fine line between dreams and reality. There are stairs leading from dreams to reality that you must climb to pass.

You should date a girl who reads.

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent.  Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

– Rosemarie Urquico 

(In Response to Charles Warnke’s You Should Date An Illiterate Girl.)

You should date an illiterate girl.

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life. *

– Charles Warnke

* alternate ending

Romance

“We mistake sex for romance. Guys are taught that pushing a girl up against a wall is romance. Sex is easy; you can do it with anyone, yourself, with batteries. Romance is when someone you like walks into a room and they take your breath away. Romance is when two people are dancing and they fit together perfectly. Romance is when two people are walking next to each other and all of a sudden they find themselves holding hands, and they don’t know how that happened.”

– John C. Moffi