Love is like a bottle of gin

The graphic for yesterday's Modern Love column, which was by essay contest winner and college junior Marguerite Fields, sums up the content better than illustrations sometimes do. Find it here.

The idea, in short:

And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.

This article is about 120,908,325 times more insightful than any Laura Sessions Stepp article or book has ever been--and it comes from a girl who hasn't even graduated yet. Pure gold:

Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man who walked around in graying long underwear.

Unfortunately the end is kind of weak, but overall it's one of the more refreshing things I've read there in awhile.

It also makes me think of the last New Yorker cover, which had the gall to include "Mother's Day" in the title--the image of a woman drooling over babies that are enclosed as if in a pet store, while the man whose hand she is holding is desperately trying to lurch her away. It could have felt more like a comment on noncommittal guys if the desperate woman and the babies hadn't been the ones in the foreground. Blah.