3 more shorties

sorry folks

a woman whose boyfriend will not live with her chooses a series of more & more unsuitable roommates, in order to enjoy the habitual couple of weeks that he takes her in while she looks for a new place, when the roommates inevitably go off the rails.

an autistic man is pursuing a woman. he is very rules-oriented, so every conscious choice he makes in their courtship is highly chivalric: he’s up early getting her coffee, he’s walking her dog, he’s solving her problems. this doesn’t normally work out for people, but he is so naturally inconsiderate of others & bad at flirting that his behavior kind of unintentionally averages out into a hot/cold game that keeps her guessing. they enter into a relationship which is far more stable than any she has had before.

she is reading adolphe in the sunshine, enjoying the contrast between the comfort of the sunshine & the discomfort of the reading. it’s a fortifying little novel for women to read when under siege: a young man with poster mindset volleys a woman with compliments & reproaches until she falls. at the zenith of their shared love, as she is growing more & more devoted to him, he already feels a little constrained by her desire for him, which is far more demanding than her coldness. but rather than break things off he toys with her & vacillates & weakens until she does what he threatened to do in the early days of their courtship & dies of unrequited love.¹

1. to me it seems dragons-and-fairies level fantastic to expect people to really die of love, but lewis has used adolphe as an exemplar of “realism of content” & insists that “we never doubt that this is just what might happen,” & he’s both wiser than me & a man, so i take his word for the aspects i can’t verify myself.