.... that women feel they need to put up with so much for the sake of 'love'. Women and men should be taught that the relationships you choose to be in as an adult are FOR you. They are your choice. They should be good for you.

Somehow the whole idea that love sometimes hurts, and that love sometimes requires effort, and that love is a give and take gets twisted around by the romance narrative to mean romantic love trumps every other prriority or need in life and that it's worth putting up with anything for the sake of love.

My long ago abusive relationship ended when I realised the problem with me and my boyfriend had nothing to do with love. There was a tonne of love. It was all the other problems that were the problem, and love made no difference to those problems. It was like a lightning flash of revelation that I could love him and leave him. I didn't stop loving him but I broke up with him and have had no more contact with him to this day. (Umm ... fifteen years later.)

The romance narrative that so many women are sold and that they swallow hook line and sinker tells them that they shoudl sacrifice everything for love. That their key to fulfillment and in fact the whole reason they are here on this planet is to love. Well - maybe that's true in a grand spiritual sense. But in the context of a relationship wtih a man - what a load of baloney. A good relationship should be based on love, and it should meet your needs and his needs. It should support and empower you and him to do and be who you want to be. Anything else is a waste of your time and you would be better off alone, investing in a great relationship wtih yourself.

There is actually no law that says you are here to serve a relationship. That you are here to be in a relationship with a man no matter what it costs. Just a long running masochistic romantic narrative that has been going on for too damn long.

People often remember the past through rose coloured glasses. Of course I hope everyone pulls together and weathers the storm but some of the stuff people write here reads like a fairytale. Arthur Miller, playwright and author of 'Timebends' said Americans have the worst memories and the least regard for history. He says the truth of the Depression has never been told in the US and that there were many people, like his father, who simply never recovered from it.

I'm Australian and I have a very different view of what goes on in hard times. People get really, really hungry. People draw in on themselves. Damage gets done in the wake of the privation and hardship people suffer that gets passed down from generation to generation - to people like me and my friends. My mother, the child of middle class educated people, spent her infant years living in a tent - some bad stuff happened as a result of that - and then had to live alone in a boarding house with her sister from the age of eleven just so she could go to school. It was worth it though - my mother got her education and went on to university. My friend's father in Italy went to work as a farm labourer when he was six as his own family couldn't afford to feed him. On the farm where he worked they barely fed him ... and the stories go on.

The government in Australia and New Zealand made men go from town to town to pick up their relief cheques because they didn't want the poor and dispossessed gathering in one place where they might have rioted. This meant women and children were left without their menfolk to help them and many were evicted ... I don't believe the story was much different in America.

To say the people who committed suicide might well have done so anyway just shows how much the LW knows about what the grinding hardship and heartbreak of poverty can do to you. Ever seen someone die because you couldn't afford medical help that would have saved them? No, I haven't either, thank goodness - that's the kind of stuff that happens and no neighbour can make that all right for you. Ever seen a child with exceptional ability have to leave school at 13 and go to work as a labourer because they have to help their family eat? That's what they're talking about when they talk about what goes on in a depression.

The guy who has just met a mysterious, strong and lovely woman; the woman who has happy feet; the one who has just ben to all those weddings for people over 40; Allie, everyone, and especially Cary - what a fantastic bunch of letters.

And BTW: I agree. You've got to WANT the person, bottom line.