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In the evening, I looked it up online: twirling, first date, pickup moves. Within seconds, I was reading a list of ways to ensure a successful date. On a first meeting, the website instructed, you should casually remove something off your date’s clothing. Even if there was nothing, you could always…

We can still spend time together, she said. He stays with us, after all.

I hadn’t realized that, I said. It was very generous of her to allow it.

There’s no big drama, she told me. In fact, they were perfectly civil. It was a state of mind. At some point, it had dawned on her that the marriag…

My date that evening was with a high school science teacher. His pictures made him look athletic, in a rugged, nature-loving sort of way. I knew that these profiles rarely matched reality, but I was still disappointed to discover that he was nothing like his photographs. He was unfit and unkempt, w…

I’d finally started online dating. The idea had seemed absurd when I was even a year younger, still certain that I would eventually meet someone naturally, as if the people encountered through dating sites belonged to a different ecosystem or were not entirely human. But recently I’d begun to feel …

As the boy was clearing his throat to read, my husband whispered that it was such an honor to listen to a Nobel laureate.

“Shhh,” I told him, but I smiled.

The poems were what you might expect from a boy of twelve. There was one from the perspective of a snow leopard, on the brink of extincti…