Here’s what I’ve learned from writing a book over the past year: It’s hard. And along with being hard, there are a lot of bits that can’t make into the final product for various uninteresting reasons. After talking to my professor, I’ve decided to change the narrator’s age. As a result, there’s a passage I can’t use anymore, but I still like. For my own ego, I’ve published it after the jump.

Whenever I spend time with a couple, I always feel like I’m missing the main attraction. And I am. We can all have a great time, chatting about the latest New Yorker article or judging mutual friends. And then after dessert, we’ll all do the dishes together. Maybe the boyfriend and I will flirt a little bit, but in an innocuous way that feels like chatting up your cousin. Or the girlfriend and I will have a conversation about our childhood pets that feels special as we clear the table. But then, once I leave them alone, I can see that I was just a preamble to their night together. It’s simplistic to think the rest of their night just involves sex. It involves conversations about their lives in a language that I don’t understand. From the outside, it’s impossible to tell what individuals love about each other, or what they love about being a couple together. That’s why seeing your parents, the ultimate couple, fight or have sex is so awful. You get a glimpse of their secrets, and you realize that you’d rather not know them.