flâneur

Russia against the Western way of love | Aeon Essays

aeon.co · 3,313 words · saved by 1 readers

Love in the West is consumerist – we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But Russians do things differently

In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States. It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend. In my desk, I kept a precious document of American life, sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York a year earlier: an article about the Pill, ripped from the US girls’ magazine Seventeen. I read it lying in bed, feeling my throat getting dry. Staring into its glossy pages, I…

related reading