This is a highly relevant and compelling look at sexual identity in a culture & society that's struggling not only to be secure its own indentity, but have one of its own in the first place. Many of Ms. Dowd's views and attitudes are off-the-wall, but they are startling in how genuine and heartfelt they are. This is a woman writing with a lot of passion and desire for something that she can't identify immediately, or consistently.

Seriously, who among us doesn't know that feeling? Who among us has spent portions of our life trying to escape the uncomfortable and unknown? And then regretting it later, wishing that we had the courage to admit to our failures, our mistakes, our humiliations and defeats, our unrequited desires?

The conflict exists here: who we are, who we want to be, and who we think we're supposed to be. It starts as a teenager and most of us never get beyond it entirely...including those of us fortunate enough to have found true love.

Men really aren't necessary in an objective sense; men remain necessary only because many women, on some level, rely on them for security, for validation, for satisfaction, for something to round out their identity (essentially being dominated by something outside of themselves--an arbitrary notion of what they're supposed to be, etc). Its unfortunate. And men do the same thing, obviously. Both types of behaviors aren't particularly constructive. Our society is so celebrity-centric that we think that its normal and admirable to put most of our energy into ourselves. Clearly, this doesn't work for the long-term for anyone. It's exhausting and miserable after awhile. But its hard to resist the residue that such a pervasive attitude leaves on you and on those around you.

Successful relationships CAN and DO happen. But they only happen when both people have absolute genuine desire to love the other person more than themselves. Any aspirations to status, security, and other inherently selfish wants have to melt away in order for that relationship to last.

Ms. Dowd deserves much credit for being a staunch, self-determined, self-defined individual yet honestly wanting to love someone else so much and not letting that desire define her or best her.

What I find interesting about Maureen Dowd is that she's actually challenging the tyranny of romantic love in this culture, almost as much as she's questioning the tyranny of men (for sure, the two are related. What a handy way to control the ambitions and passions of young women if we tell them from a young age to focus all their talent and energy on attracting a man).

I love the fact that her statement "not everybody gets everything" single-handedly equalizes "everything": a pulitzer, great friends, personal fullfillment, romantic love. It is clear that she doesn't have romantic love up on the giant, heart-shaped pedastal that we are all trained to have.

It is an old, old tradition that a woman without romantic love must have an empty, hollow, life, and reader responses are rife with the suspicion that Ms. Dowd must secretly lie awake at night with gnawing feelings of missing something. We are a society that refuses to cherish all types of love, all types of experience, and is fixated on one and only one form of 'fullfillment': the achievement of a romantic love that correlates with what is portrayed in movies. The closer the correlation, the better.

What a collossal waste of time, and what an easy way to distract a lot of young girls. What a huge cause of divorce.

Ms. Dowd's love of her friends is love, her love of her work is love, her love of her mother. Love is love. I hope she doesn't fall into the trap we all do so often of minimizing these by comparison to what love is "supposed" to be. I hope she sleeps soundly, full of appreciation for the very real love she has in her life.

I'll answer her title's question: No, romantic love is not necessary. Love is necessary. Being known is necessary. Intimacy is necessary. But those all take many, many, equally valid forms.

To me the question isn't about whether men are necessary, but why do we care so much whether a woman--any woman--has one or not? Why do we feel a need to pyschoanalyze a heterosexual woman who hasn't "settled down" and married in a way that we don't seem to do with heterosexual men? This certainly suggests that feminists have more work to do!

I don't see marriage, partnership, or romance as a necessity--just as icing on the cake of an already fulfilling life.

I can't wait to read this book. It sounds like a reflection of the many contradictions I've been wrestling with for years. You can love men and not like living with them. You don't have to be bitter or lesbian or asexual to arrive at such a conclusion, either.

Some women LOVE being the object of men's desire, they just adore getting down on their knees to scrub the floor, suck him off, or polish the bottom of his toilet. Like girls who've been sold into sexual slavery, it's the only life they know. But women who've had many experiences, including success on their own terms see that the vast majority of men need to be on top (in virtually every way) or their smiles turns upside down. It's the only model that seems to work for 'em in the long haul. So who needs that? It's boring. To think that as a woman matures and comes into her own she begins to threaten men is so sad you end up laughing because crying about it is pointless.

When I was about sixteen, I remember walking up the hill to my house late in the day, at dusk. My family lived in a home built into a hill, so the back porch, on the second story, extended out into the treetops. It was summar, so it was a warm, quiet evening, and I walked around the back of the house, and up the flight of stairs to the porch. My mother and father, who had been married for twenty-five years, sat there together, not saying a word. This has always been my image of love -- no drama, no Tracy/Hepburn cleverness (it's a MOVIE, folks), no cues from popular culture. Just a man and a woman, who have lived together for a long, long time, raised children, taken care of one another, and who are secure, content and grateful to sit quietly together on a nice summer evening. Words aren't necessary. In fact, they get in the way.

And underneath all the words, words, words, the money, the prizes, the references to an idiotic TV show written to help sell deodorant and soda, and the constant, corrosive hatred, lies the simple fact that Ms. Dowd doesn't have any idea what a scene like the one I saw is like, or why it matters. She kind of obviously desperately wishes she did -- the opposite of love is, after all, indifference, and she's not that. She seems to have constructed this pathetic world for herself full of symbols -- everything stands for something else, or has a mediator, or a theory to support it -- but it sounds like there's not much in her world that's real, that's authentic, that can stand for nothing but itself. Nothing exists unless you can tell someone about it.

Love between a man and a woman is, ultimately and finally, always a secret. It takes decades to build. It's not glamorous, or pretty, or easy, and nobody else will ever really know about it or care about it. And anyone, like Ms. Dowd, or some of the other letter-writers here, who is dumb enough to claim that the men who are a necessary part of this are "optional" or "unneccesary" or by definition, some kind of vicious slavemaster because they are male are missing the point so badly that it's kind of painful to think about. In particular, I am referring to the reference to men wanting women on their knees to suck them off, or clean their toilets, etc. The amount of sheer hatred in that sentence is astounding.

That mentality, and Ms. Dowd's, isn't simply hateful, it's unspeakably ignorant about one of the most basic parts of life. A man and a woman loving one another has been a foundational element of every society that's ever existed. This is deeper than common sense -- it's part of being human. If this isn't happening for you, that's unfortunate -- REALLY unfortunate -- but writing about it as if you have discovered the gears and pulleys of the machine that animates it, and you're going to analyze it and explain it and thus subordinate it to your cleverness and achievement, is not just hopeless, but pointless, and pathetic. The pointlessness of Ms. Dowd's writing about this is what ultimately remains. She really, truly, isn't equipped to know what she's talking about. If you're 53, and have never even been able to live with someone, then what right do you have to presume you know anything meaningful about relationships or men at all? You don't. Win all the Pulitzers you want -- you're unspeakably ignorant, and transparently bitter.

It's the end of a long day. I'm going to drive hom, make the coffee, check on my three daughters, get undressed, and get into bed beside my wife, as I have done every day for a decade, and hope to do as long as I live. Goodnight, Maureen, and I'm sorry. Truly.