Don't get me wrong: this is an interesting piece. It's the account of a scientist's breast cancer relapse, and it's brisk, mordant and absorbing.

I had a fresh case, in my previously unscathed breast. The new occurrence was local, meaning no multiple surgeries, no chemotherapy. This time I had the very best form of breast cancer. Way to go!

Whereas before the author, Sally Hoskins, took comfort from a support group of similarly afflicted women, this time she wants to go it alone, treating the relapse with a strictly-business matter-of-factness.

But now, a decade and a half later, roads had been taken, choices had been made. This time the idea of a support group didn’t even occur to me. Breast cancer? I knew the drill.

However, she and the other women end up bonding over the pain-dulling effects of Xanax (necessary to get through the onerous "wire insertion"), which the sisters-in-arms share generously with each other.

Yes, I was buoyed in part by my Xanax-filled water wings. But what really kept me afloat was the one thing I had mistakenly believed I could do without: the loving care that flows freely among female strangers even in short-term groups like this one, established within minutes and disbanded just as quickly, only to re-form with a whole new cast in the next waiting room, and the next.

Nice, interesting...but whither the modern love?! Even defining the term pretty loosely, this seems to fall a little short of what the poets speak of. The closest we get is various unspecified references to what would seem to be Philip Nobel's infamous Elle essay.

After starting my IV, the nurse ushered me back to the public waiting room, where I grabbed a copy of Elle magazine with the cover line: “I Left My Wife for a Younger Woman ... and Ruined My Life.” I wanted details. I needed to hear how this man learned his lesson. But I was still searching for the article when — Step 3 — they called me to the inner sanctum waiting area...I started feeling a familiar camaraderie but resisted, saying: “If I’d known we’d be here so long, I’d have brought Elle. Did you see the article about the guy who ..."

And then it dawned on me: Personal essays referencing personal essays! This is some meta shit, kids! And using the essay as a means to avoid intimacy! Further, playing with ideas of love, self-love, relative love and degrees of pain! Is "modern love," then, at the end of the day no more and no less than the sum parts of personal experience, relationships no more than the filter of another individual's amour-propre? Is this seemingly not-at-all-really-related-to-any-kind-of-love...in fact a deft piece of literary sleight of hand?! Or... am I overthinking?

The Kindness, and Xanax, of Strangers [New York Times]

Earlier: Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness

There's another story about John Edwards in yesterday's Daily News, about how he's been calling former staffers and asking for forgiveness for his tawdry business with Rielle Hunter. When we asked Philip Nobel about his research assistant fucking ways, he asked to be "to be treated as an individual case." And here's the thing with both Edwards and Nobel and many other cheating spouses: they've taken for granted the rights and feelings of another individual, with their public philandering... their wives. Their actions did not take place in a vacuum. And even if I could muster some sympathy for a man trapped in a bad marriage or a marriage that made him unhappy, I can never ever feel bad for someone who has forced another person, willing or not, to deal with it in public. And as the following five stereotypes of cuckolded wives show, the fucked-over wifey will be judged by that public, no matter what she does.

1. The Ball Buster: Of course Bill cheated on Hillary, many said, she was a feminazi who never let the poor man have his way. And anyway, like Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary "allowed" the affair to continue and participated in a cover-up because all she wanted was power in the first place.

2. The Doormat:: Silda Spitzer got a lot of this, especially from other women, who were disgusted that she stood behind Eliot at the press conference after he was caught frequenting prostitutes. They called her "nauseating . . . phony and awful."

3. The Nag: Nobel said that his piece in Elle was about "the burden of being a lightning rod for the fears of women and the resentments of burdened men." The implication there is that all married men, even the ones who are happily married, are burdened by the responsibility placed on them by their nagging harpy wives. Who wouldn't want to ditch all that and run off with a twenty-something! Which brings us to…

4. The Crone: Nobel's preference for firm young flesh is shared by another political philandering John: McCain. McCain left first wife Carol for current wife Cindy, because, as Carol said, "John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does." Even Carol herself has bought into this piece of media claptrap!

5. The Martyr: Those who don't see Silda Spitzer as a doormat probably see her as a martyr — someone's who's keeping the family's life as private as possible so that her three teenage daughters can have some semblance of normalcy in their lives. While this stereotype isn't necessarily negative, I'm sure Spitzer — and the rest of these wives — would much rather not walk down the street and have everyone feeling sorry for them. As Erica Jong said in an impassioned defense of Hillary in the Washington Post earlier this year, "She cannot have enjoyed her husband's playing around. She certainly never condoned it. But he was clever enough for her, he supported her dreams, and they both loved their smart and beautiful daughter. Besides, what does anyone know about anyone else's marriage?"

In Which People Are Atrocious To Elizabeth Edwards And Not Nearly Atrocious Enough To Her Idiot Husband [Radar]
Edwards' Wife Criticized For Silence On Affair [AP via WRAL]
Hillary Vs.The Patriarchy [Washington Post]
John Edwards Calling Former Staffers Asking For Forgiveness [NYDN]

Earlier: Elle Writer "Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness"
Women On Silda Wall: "I'd Have Paraded In Front Of A Microphone With A Knife"
Oh, About That First Wife

We started off talking about the article itself, which he says he wrote at the suggestion of Elle editor Amy Goldwasser. Other than what he calls "the little Jezebel shitstorm," he says responses have been mostly positive. A female friend of his told him that his detractors were just afraid, that "the mammal brain's first response is 'Oh fuck, that could happen to me.'" Which, to be fair, is true. Lots of women are afraid of getting dumped for a younger model, and when someone does this, we're not exactly going to be thrilled.

But if that someone is our friend, Nobel thinks we owe him a little more. "The only thing I wanted was to be treated as me," he says, "to be treated as an individual case." He also says that those who thought his actions were classic untrustworthy male behavior were themselves reverting to cliché, lapsing into a "limited way of looking at the world, one that doesn't allow for humanity."

Of course, it's entirely possible that Nobel's friends actually did see him as him, and just didn't like who he'd become. There's a whole post in Nobel's reactions to his friends' reactions, but we wrote that post last week. What's more interesting — and more troubling — is Nobel's view that "there's a poor fit between societal institutions and biological fact." He thinks "maybe there's something wrong at the structural level with the whole idea of state-sanctioned monogamy" if so many people have trouble sticking with it. It's not a new idea, but Nobel takes it to sort of a new place, suggesting that Jezebel spearhead a "marriage strike until the institution could be fixed."

"What would fix it?" I asked him.

He said it wasn't "the introduction of loopholes that would allow infidelity," but as to what the solution actually was, he was more vague. He mentioned the need for a "critical discussion," the fact that marriage is not a panacea, the fact that the happiest couples he knows seem to live apart. But he also said, "I believe in love, and I believe in children, and I believe in commitments, and I believe in lifetime commitments."

The guy is a cynic and a romantic! And he's not alone. It's hip to criticize modern marriage, to state, as Nobel does, that the conflation of childrearing with "romantic love and all matters of the heart and mind is a relatively recent societal occurrence." Esther Perel says exactly that in her 2006 interview with Salon; Susan Squire makes a similar claim in her new book I Don't.

But both of those women are married, and it's certainly not yet hip to forgo marriage entirely. Nor is anyone offering us any particularly good ways to decouple love and child rearing, or excitement and commitment, or emotions and economics, or any of the other potentially conflicting aspects of modern American marriage. What we're left with is just what Nobel's friend identified: fear. Fear that we'll never get married, fear that our marriages will suck, fear that our husbands or wives will leave us, fear that we're doing it all wrong. Nobel doesn't have the solution to any of these fears. I'm sure hoping someone else does, because I for one, am stumped.

Danger Man [Elle]

Earlier: Elle Writer's Ex: "It's A Strange Luxury To See Someone Else's Version Of Your Life"
Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness

Throughout the piece, which is not available online, Nobel uses Ingrid (not her real name) as a foil — first for his wife, and then for himself. In the first instance, he builds Ingrid's character up, favorably contrasting her proficiency in the "verbal sparring [that] was intense and playful, erotic when it wasn't obscene," which contributed to their "profound intellectual compatibility" with his wife's supposed intellectual timidity and general inhibited wimpiness ("She thought the world was a scary place"). In the second, Nobel tears Ingrid down. When his relationship with her has run the same course as his marriage, Ingrid's role in the essay shrinks to simply being the yardstick — the culpably naïve, young, substance-sotted yardstick — against which the author measures his progress toward sound mental health and adulthood.

“My first reactions were ‘No, that's not how it went,’” said Ingrid. (She has remarkably different — and sometimes flatly contradictory — accounts of several of Nobel’s essay’s key scenes.) “But my second and third [reactions] were just interest in how decisions or moments that to me had been insignificant or profoundly significant had been perceived either than or now, and written about — now.” Turns out it’s deeply weird to wake up and discover you’re a cover line on a women’s magazine.

What's also strange is I didn't find Nobel's plight inherently unsympathetic, at least at first. Nobody can help whom they fall for; I don't believe anybody who's ever been in a long-term relationship can truthfully say they've never felt their eye wander. (Of course, the choices you make when that almost-innocent flash of attraction occurs are what truly matter.) But Nobel structures his little expiatory exercise as a demand for not just our understanding, but our support.

Situations like his, you see, require women to exercise our "moral imagination"; the essay rests on the premise that it is precisely his newfound ability to fuck around (sorry, his "free[dom] to bounce through different situations each night") that has cured Nobel's depression, awakened his long-neglected personal identity, and made him the kind of father who, rather than spending as many evenings away from the family home as he can, calls his kids "My love" and "Handsome." (Or at least quotes himself doing so in the pages of national magazines.) Leaving his wife, Nobel wants us to understand, was a Good Thing He Needed to Do. It was "original."

And if his portrait of personal growth just happens to require two women to be the canvas, well, so be it. Nobel doesn't imbue the character of Ingrid, or the character of his ex-wife, with much agency or independence; towards the end, he even tosses off a casual reference to going back to his wife — as if he assumes such an option must automatically be available.

And he uses Ingrid shamelessly in the closing paragraph to show how far he's come. After the break-up of their two-year relationship, Nobel runs into her on the street, "walking home at nine in the morning." (Yes, he has the audacity to try and slut-shame her, after everything.) Nobel writes

And without the distractions of others, or maybe because I had grown up a little, or maybe it was just a trick of the light, I saw her for the first time as a little girl — is that what everyone had been trying to tell me? — too much a stranger to herself to settle down. As I was. Twice.

How nice for him!

Turning his most recent girlfriend into a device to throw into positive relief his own life seems to encapsulate the problem of this essay: you can’t ever write honestly about others when your goal is just to excuse your own behavior.

What does it feel like to be made into a character in someone else’s (wholly public) story? Especially one that seems so unsympathetic? It's something I've been thinking about a little guiltily since I wrote, rather unkindly, about some of my dating experiences (to his credit, when I rang the Guy to tell him there was some shit written on the Internet about him that it might not make him happy to read, even if it was all knitted out of grievances I'd aired with him previously, all he said was "If you don't use my name, then I don't care, write what you want.") (I did, however, get a sort of irate e-mail from the would-be impregnator.)

Ingrid had some interesting insight into this question because she too is a writer. She gets how what she called “the iron filings of ‘fact’” get rearranged into narrative, and how that’s an author’s prerogative. “If I wanted to write the story of how I was the awed 20-year-old, I could. And if I wanted to write the story of how this all led to my recovery, I could do that, too. And if I wanted to write the story of how I had a relationship with an older man that had its good parts as well as its struggles, I could do that.” In a way, she said, “it's a strange and fascinating luxury to be able to see someone else's version of your life.”

It's hard to write honestly about the people closest to us in life, for the simple reason that it's hard to see them objectively — they are so much personalities to us, we are often hard put to describe them as actual people. Nobel's various unkindnesses in describing the women the choice to leave his marriage most impacted might well be simply the unconscious result of never questioning his own perspective long enough to wonder if he was fairly getting across theirs. But there is a suspicious convenience in the narrative arc of "Danger Man" — man leaves dull marriage, man is enlivened by life with younger woman, man realizes in dating younger woman how mature and adult he is — that denigrates both of his exes at once.

And having met Ingrid and found her to be a fascinating, sassy, intelligent, shit-together kind of type, I'm going with the conclusion that it is Nobel who's utterly failed to describe his ex girlfriend — and, I'm willing to bet, his ex wife. (Call me, formerly-Mrs-Nobel!)

Which leaves me thinking that my initial reaction to the essay — what an entitled creep — is probably right on the money.

Earlier: Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness

Nobel wants women to support his new life, and when they don't, he gets critical:

I've learned that otherwise intelligent, urbane, and morally imaginative women — the bulk of my friends — often cannot bring themselves, even when they invite the conversation, to hear my stories, to deviate from a high contrast model of human behavior, see how grey it can be in practice, to see the devil in their friend.

He goes on to lament "the derision in the eyes of and occasional open attacks from friends' wives (it's not contagious)" and "the burden of being a lightning rod for the fears of women and the resentments of burdened men (three drinks in, they all admit they're jealous)." "I've suffered plenty," he says, "I still suffer. But our reigning cultural norms demand that, like Hank Moody in Californication, I suffer more. [...] Why?"

The reason is in your parentheses, Danger Man! You say your choices are original, that "it's not contagious," and then you say all men are jealous of you. You want us not just to listen but to like you, even as we contrast your life as a "DILF" dating "twentysomething hip-hop intellectuals" with that of one of your naysaying friends, a "single, 42-year-old" woman whom you imagine "dead in her Upper West Side one-bedroom, prized dachshund licking at her corpse." Gee, Phil, do you think women might want you to suffer because, in your vision of the world, men either fuck around or want to, while single women get eaten by their dogs?

What Nobel did may not be "contagious," but it happens often enough to make a lot of women worry. We worry that a man will do grown-up things with us, like marry and have kids, or just fall in love and make us feel safe, and then he'll announce that he never really grew up at all and that he needs to go back to his twenties, with a twentysomething girlfriend to match. A few exceptions aside, this option still seems far less open to women — especially when others assume that not being married means becoming dachshund fodder.

Of course, none of this is solely Nobel's fault. It's the fault of a culture that trumpets the sanctity of marriage while painting male fidelity as lame. And that casts older women as unsexy and unsexual. The solution to this problem isn't to force people like Nobel to stay in unhappy marriages — it's to understand the sexual double standard that makes women feel so vulnerable, and to set about changing it.

Elle