Up: [[Life]] > [!Orbit] [[Rebecca Solnit]] in *Recollections of My Nonexistence: A memoir* > Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret, erased, lost as she took on the name of a husband. (p. 85) > [!Orbit] Charlotte Perkins Gilman in *Women and Economics: A study of the economic relation between men and women* mid 1880s > … failure to marry is held as clear proof of failure to attract, a lack of sex-value. > [!Orbit] [[David Whyte]] in *The Three Marriages: Reimagining work, self and relationship* > There is a general human intuition that if marriage is refused in practical, physical terms it must then be lived out imaginatively. A Catholic sister, taking religious vows, refuses marriage to a man but says she is married in Christ. We constantly speak of being married to a job, to the mob, to an idea of the future. Saying yes to one subtler form of marriage, we are understood to have said no to the other, more obvious one. (p. 198) > [!Orbit] Sarah Manguso in *Liars* > You don’t think of a potential life outside your marriage unless you’ve already destroyed something essential about it. Once you can think like that, you’ve created the possibility that it could end. (p. 201) > [!Orbit] Sarah Manguso in *Liars* > I’d loved thinking of myself as having the capacity for mature love, which I’d experienced as self-erasure and processed as achievement. (p. 261)