They had been married for thirty-two years. Did he really know so little about her?

Talk about not knowing other people — why, when you came right down to it, you didn't even know yourself!

Romance is different when two people approach each other from the space of knowledge rather than absolute mystery. No matter how well we get to know someone else, there is always a realm of mystery. Old ideas about romantic love taught females and males to believe that erotic tension depended on the absence of communication and understanding. This misinformation about the nature of love has helped to further the politics of domination, particularly male domination of women. Without knowing one other, we can never experience intimacy.

Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.

People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

I don’t think you know anyone fully until you know them in relationship to something else or someone else.

Well, marriage is funny, Mike, Harold said once with the wind whipping the vapor of his voice over his shoulder. You can go along for years without ever knowing who you're married to. It's a riddle. You're right, Michael said. It is. Then maybe once in a while you take a look at this girl, this woman, and you think: What's the deal? How come? Why her? Why me? Yeah, I know what you mean, Harold.

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now...

Another man, an American, had once told her in a high, laughing moment his theory of love. It was magic, he said. "The magic ain't real, darlin, but when it's gone it's over." Georgie didn't want to believe in such thin stuff, that all devotion was fuelled by delusion, that you needed some spurious myth to keep you going in love or work or service. Yet she'd felt romance evaporate often enough to make her wonder.

Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way just to fit in.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

Marriage was something I thought happened only to other people, like fatal traffic accidents.