diana athill

from carlene bauer's article "someone to watch over me" in march 13's elle magazine.

she quotes from diana athill's book "somewhere towards the end": "when spouses are concerned, it seems to me that kindness and consideration should be the key words, not loyalty, and sexual infidelity does not necessarily wipe them out. fidelity in the sense of keeping one's word i respect, but i think it tiresome that it is tied so tightly in people's minds to the idea of sex.... why, given our bone-deep, basic need for one another, do men and women have to put so much weight on this particular, unreliable aspect of it?"

      this was in felicity too. she cheats on ben and tells her counselor that she has to tell ben. and the counselor asks why, and she says something about needing to tell the truth or whatever. and the counselor says about how sometimes it's more important to be kind. rip and i talked about this a few times. he prefers me to be truthful. i think i prefer him to be kind. lol, i don't want this to come back and bite me in the butt later when i find out that he's just another tiger woods or anything, but people do mess up. and sometimes it takes that screw up to realize just how good you had it, or whatever. and you change. you become a better boyfriend/spouse/whatever. seeing as how he's already cheated on me, i would not take him cheating on me again very well. honestly, we'd most likely break up. but... if he really changed and recommitted himself to me. ...would i really need to know why?

and here she quotes diana from a conversation the two had. "one wants to live one's own life, and you can't really be married without living somebody else's life. a lot of women don't have a life they want to live, so they're happy to meld with a man. but if you have a life you want to live of your own, you've got to find someone very like yourself.

      while i think this is certainly true of many people (not just women), i don't think it's always true. i think for many people, the definition of a good marriage is where you do meld lives. and i don't think there's anything wrong with that. it's certainly not for me tho. i like having a life rather separate of rip. i think we get along better this way.

btw, i have a similar philosophy to jada pinkett smith, tho i def ask rip not to do certain things. ...well, okay, not so similar, haha. but i feel like, if he's gonna cheat, he's gonna cheat. it has nothing to do with me, how i am as a girlfriend, yaddayadda. it's on you. you make your own decisions. i just hope you don't fuck up!