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21 " Anna loves Ted, but she does not want him in a way that causes her to suffer; she does not want him desperately, despite herself. And it turns out that is how Ted has always wanted to be wanted: the way he has always wanted women. The way Anna wanted Marco, and he wanted Anna, and Rachel (or so it seems, in retrospect) wanted him.In the absence of this painful wanting, Ted has trouble getting hard. "
― , You Know You Want This
22 " I didn't mean to hurt anyone, he tries to tell them. I just wanted to be seen, and loved for who I am. The problem was, it was all a misunderstanding. I pretended to be a good person, and then I couldn't stop. "
23 " . . . banishing his desires to the realm of the imagination, where they couldn't do any harm. "
24 " Why did no one satisfy her? What was she looking for that she couldn't find? Her battered heart offered her no answers. "
25 " But I guess that was the whole problem, at that point, my inability to deal with normal human interaction. "
26 " Whenever he was bored or anxious, his brain distracted itself by worrying at the question of whether he could ever make Anna like him, like a dog working the last bits of marrow from a bone. "
27 " Was there a point at which your ego was crushed so completely that it died, and you no longer had to lug around the burden of yourself? "
28 " Why do you like me? Why can't you tell I'm not that into you? "
29 " You want this, right? You know you want this. So go on. Finish it. Finish what you started. "
30 " Lizzie is hapless about romance in an ironic, self-deprecating way. "
31 " Kath experiences a moment of confused dislocation, as though her soul has suddenly relocated into her body from very far away. "
32 " That was how I responded to beauty, in both women and men: drawn to it at first, and then recoiling. Ruled by my own shallow impulses, then angry at the trick. "
33 " Oh, my God, Ted," she moaned, fakely.They dated for the next four months. "
34 " Using covertly acquired information to feign a mysterious psychic bond was a new realm of deception for Ted. "
35 " Did he even exist in her mind, as a living, breathing, thinking person? He spent so much time trying to figure out what she was thinking, but what kind of a consciousness did she imagine lived behind the mask of his face? "
36 " But he still wished Anna would do something to reassure him—ideally burst into tears and say, You were always there for me, always, and plead with him to forgive her for all her years of neglect—but he'd have settled for even a hint that she intended to make an active effort to meet up. "
37 " There are tears in her eyes. Ted has never seen her look so despondent, and Anna often looks very, very sad. "
38 " What do you want to do now?" he asked her."We should probably just kill ourselves," she imagined saying. "
39 " Margot thought: oh, no. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn't that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting they stop now, after everything she'd done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she'd ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back. "
40 " . . . she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marveled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who'd just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. "