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This book has a total of 25 chapters. This page is to provide you with
a "taste" of what the actual book is like; therefore I've only typed a very small portion, if you like this book, please buy it!
Here's a Valentine's Day tale. Prepare yourself. An English Journalist came to New York. She was attractive and witty
, and right away she hooked up with one of New York's typically eligible bachelors. Tim was forty-two, an investment
banker who made about $5 million a year. For two weeks, they kissed, held hands--and then on a warm fall day he drove
her to the house he was building in the Hamptons. They looked at the plans with the architect. "I wanted to tell the
architect to fill in the railings on the second floor, so the children wouldn't fall through," said the journalist. "I expected
Tim was going to ask me to marry him." On Sunday night, Tim dropped her off at her apartment and reminded her that
they had dinner plans for Tuesday. On Tuesday, he called and said he'd have to take a rain check. When she hadn't
heard from him after two weeks, she called and told him, "That's an awfully long rain check." He said he would call
her later in the week. He never did call, of course. But what interested me was that she couldn't understand what had
happened. In England, she explained, meeting the architect would have meant something. Then I realized. Of course:
She's from London. No one's told her about the End of Love in Manhattan. Then I thought : She'll learn.
Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton's
bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing--but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to
remember--instead, we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How did we get

into this mess?

 Truman Capote undersood our nineties dilemma--the dilemma of Love vs. the Deal--all too well. In Breakfast at
Tiffany's, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak were faced with restrictions--he was a kept man, she was a kept woman--but in
the end they surmounted them and chose love over money. That doesn't happen much in Manhattan these days. We are
all kept men and women--by our jobs, by our apartments, and then some of us by the pecking order at Mortimers and the
Royalton, by Hamptons beachfront, by front-row Garden tickets--and we like it that way. Self-protection and closing the
deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op
When was the last time you heard someone say, "I love you!" without tagging on the inevitable (if unspoken) "as a
friend." When was the last time you saw two people gazing into each other's eyes without thinking, Yeah, right? When
was the last time you heard someone announce, "I am truly, madly in love," without thinking, Just wait until Monday
morning? And what turned out to be the hot non-Tim Allen Christmas movie? Disclosure--for which ten or fifteen million
moviegoers went to see the unwanted, unaffectionate sex between corporate erotomaniacs--hardly the stuff we like to
think about when we think about love but very much the stuff of the modern Manhattan relationship.
There's still plenty of sex in Manhattan but the kind of sex that results in friendship and business deals, not romance.
These days, everyone has friends and colleagues; no one really has lovers--even if they have slept together.
Back to the English journalist: After six months, some more "relationships," and a brief affair with a man who used to
call her from out of town to tell her that he'd be calling her when he got back into town (and never did), she got smart.
"Relationships in New York are about detachment," she said. "But how do you get attached when you decide you want
to?"
Honey, you leave town.