"It’s exceptionally clear to me that ever since the advent of the mainstream MeToo movement, the public (even women, even some so-called feminists) has been foaming at the mouth for a neat, uncomplicated example of an evil woman publicly conspiring to bring a good man down. The problem, of course, is that an instance of that is hard to actually find, and so — to paraphrase Voltaire — it became necessary to invent one."

"We are a generation of adult babies. You can see it in the widely circulated – and largely untrue – idea that the human brain isn’t developed until the age of 25, which means that anyone younger is still essentially a child. It’s there in the notion that people with ADHD can’t text back their friends because they lack object permanence (a skill that babies develop at eight months old). It’s there in the narrative that, because gay people didn’t experience a normal childhood, they’re living out a second adolescence in their twenties and thirties. It’s there in the hegemony of superhero films and the cross-generational popularity of YA, whose fans insist that grown-up literature is only ever about depressed college professors having affairs."

"I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity. But these people are wind-up toys. Try comparing them to the entertainments of the past: Flaubert or Eliot or Shakespeare. You can work out where Emma Bovary is headed right from her beginning, but her mind still dances. Hamlet might have been the first truly psychological hero, but he’s still an excruciating mystery to us and to himself. ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ He would like to feel things he doesn’t feel, and to act in ways he doesn’t act. Why doesn’t he? Not clear! There’s room to wonder, which is how you know he’s alive."

According to orange peel theory, which went viral at the start of this year, you can ascertain the level of your partner’s love and commitment by asking them for an orange. If they hand you an orange, okay, sure, they passed. If they plate up the orange, one grade better. If they peel it for you first, then congratulations! Flying colours, distinction, gold medal, etc etc etc. If your lover has done this well, they might as well go one step further and feed you the orange, segment by golden segment, whilst you recline in leisured state like Cleopatra in her bath of milk and honey.

If they raise an eyebrow and say: ‘My love, are you in engaging in another viral internet trend in order to prove some sort of point about the status of our romance, a habit which is tied to your competing impulses towards a) proudly and zealously exhibiting your ‘green flag’ relationship where ‘green flag’ means ‘does everything I want’ and b) asserting yourself as an activist ‘testing’ our relationship in a way which claims to be a feminist takedown of the patriarchy (which you fear you have bought into by dating a man) but is in fact the tiniest gesture of interpersonal spitefulness, because it sounds like you are. And besides, I don’t have an orange to peel for you. Wait — have you got a camera hidden in that fruit bowl?’, they have definitely, manifestly, 100% not passed."