The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
As I held the passport in my hand, I realized that both marriage and gender have a life beyond my own. Somewhere, my citizenship gender had been on file. Somewhere, a record of me existed that over-ruled my daily existence. Here, I was a man. There, I had been female.
...more
I’ve been at the newspaper only a matter of days, but I’ve already noticed the guy sitting across from me participating in some peculiar phone conversations. The calls always end the same: he’s cut off midsentence and carefully sets the receiver down, sometimes deflated but other times more carefree, like getting hung up on happens so often it has lost its sting.
...more
The only time I can stand the sight of the bouquet of bullshit is early in the morning, before I flip on the lights. In the dark their perfection is only imagined, not confirmed by sight. This eases the edges like a pain pill dulls the healing muscles around the site of my incision.
...more
What to do to when faced with the task of buying a shower gift for the bride of a “traditional marriage”?
...more
His loneliness lay around me like a fence. The promise was that once I solved the loneliness the fence would dissipate. But I couldn’t solve it.
Sativa January’s story, “The Phlebotomist” is about love, marriage and swingers, published on Our Stories, an online journal that publishes the best fiction on the web. Here’s an excerpt:
“But as Linda ripened and cured, marriage did something: It made her dowdy.
...more
“When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”
-In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
...more
In Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway examines the ambiguities of the human heart, sometimes answering life’s dilemma’s too elegantly.“As those early days blurred into weeks, I watched my newborn son losing weight. How could it be that we did not know how to feed our son? Where was our midwife now? Why, in the middle of this enormous city, were we so isolated? We needed help. We were doomed. We’d always been doomed.”
...more“Results suggest that facial hair is worn to enhance a man’s marriage prospects by increasing physical attractiveness and perception of social status. Men shave their mustaches, possibly to convey an impression of trustworthiness, when the marriage market is weak and women might fear sexual exploitation and desertion.”
— A new study shows that facial hair “increas(es) physical attractiveness and perception of social status.” (via Andrew Sullivan)
I mean, they used a regression.
...moreIn the current issue of The Atlantic, the newly-divorced Sandra Tsing Loh wonders out loud “isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?” but then holds off a little from answering that question directly in order to do a characteristically amusing roundup review of five recent and not-so-recent books about marriage and divorce: Marriage-Go-Round, The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, Open Marriage, Why Him?
...more
“What is this show about?” my four-year-old daughter asks. “Are they going to dance?”
“In a way,” I say. “A mating dance. It’s a game. See, these girls compete to marry the boy. In each episode they have to impress him so they can win a rose.