“Sometimes I’d pass couples eating brunch at the outdoor cafes or inside restaurants with doors that opened onto the sidewalk, and when I looked at them (I tried not to stare, but rarely did any of them look back anyway) I felt a confusion bordering on hostility. Flirting with a guy in a dark bar, at night, when you’d both been drinking— I understood the appeal. But to sit across the table from each other in the daylight, to watch each other’s jaws working over pancakes and scrambled eggs, seemed embarrassing and impossible. The compromises you’d made would be so apparent, I thought, this other person before you with their patches of dry skin and protruding nose hairs and the drop of syrup on their chin and the way they spit when they talked and the boring cheerful complaints you’d made to each other about traffic or current events while the horrible sun hung over you. I could see how during the night people preferred the reassurance of another body in their bed, but in the day wouldn’t you just rather be alone, both of you, so you could go back to your apartment and sit on the toilet for a while, or take a nap without someone’s sweaty arm around you? Or maybe you’d just want to sit on your couch and balance your checkbook and not hear another person breathing while they read the newspaper five feet away and looked over every ten or fifteen minutes so that you had to smile back— about nothing!— and periodically utter a term of endearment.”

— Curtis Sittenfeld, “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” a short story within This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers