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Imagine this: you've been waiting for this guy to call you. You don't usually wait for guys to call you, but this is him, a man you're really into. It's Friday afternoon. Your weekend is loosely scheduled, as usual, but you will tolerate some concrete thing because, as I said, this is someone you're into.

Some time ago, I attended a party during which I found myself staring intently into the eyes of a man I knew. He is both physically and intellectually sexy, and he was staring at me like he wanted to devour me and pick his teeth with one of my ribs. Nothing happened between us, and a few days later during a conversation about social media, he asked why we didn't hook up that night. “I don't hook up,” I responded.

“It's like this – let's take an extreme situation,” I say to him. “You meet someone and they're amazing. You have the heists, the car chases, the explosions. You're Bonnie and Clyde. You're enthralled. It's you against the world and you're on top. But you're fugitives.” Charles takes a drag from his cigarette. He doesn't know where I'm going with this. “You leave it all behind – you go away together, on the run.” “To India. It's always India.” “Yes – why is that?” I laugh.

In Defense of Valentine's Day

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I hadn't gotten married yet when I was assigned to write about Valentine's Day for the first time. I had just gotten engaged, and was a month from getting married -- but I didn't know it, yet. “An obligation is exactly what Valentine’s Day has become to a lot of us,” I wrote. “And it’s not just an obligation to give a gift. For some of us who’re single, it’s a clear reminder that we’ve failed in our obligation to couple up.”

The other woman. “Home wrecker” if she succeeds, “what did you expect?” if she doesn't. Everyday we are bombarded with stories of these women: former governor Mark Sanford's soulmate, John Edwards' baby momma, and Tiger Woods' menagerie of lovers. While the media will tell us all about these women, it's only ever the scintillating details – the love letters, the text messages, the alleged existence of a sex tape. The fact they are – or once were – party girls, porn stars, strippers.

The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we'd be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

“How many people have you slept with?” he asked me.

JULIET: Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say "Ay," and I will take thy word: yet if thou swear'st, thou mayst prove false; at lovers' perjuries then say, Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully: or if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse an say thee nay, so thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.

Socially, we are more mobile than we have ever been before. But digitally, we are now more connected than we have been for a long time. No longer are geographic moves tearing our social ties apart. We now inhabit more than a physical space—we are also living in the Cloud.

Like thousands of people around the country this month, my friend Gina re-activated her dating site profile this January. “New year, new start!” she said, excitedly, puffing on a cigarette as we cruised the PCH with the top down, the cool winter breeze blowing through our hair. “I'm doing this new thing, too, called 'sober dating.'” “Not drinking on dates?” I asked.

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