I'm with you in theory, Socci, but I don't believe her professed self-doubt about being different. She comes across as smug & disingenuous. I mean, if she were really so unconfident about her feelings would she have gone and had 4 children, first of all? Maybe, but. . .I doubt it. She's a writer married to a writer; writers don't usually have 4 children lightly. My main complaint with this article is the typically American tell-all, indiscreet manner of it. (I'm American, by the way, and it's only something I started to notice once I moved here.) And worse is the fact that she tries to soften those jarring personal (& boring) facts with pseudo-elegant prose. And my problem isn't just with this particular article, but with the whole New York Times column in which this piece first appeared. If you all read the Times regularly, you'd all be parping every week over these boring tales of "modern love" with each contributor smugly thinking she's different or special while force-feeding us too much personal information. It's the kind of column that regularly drags down the quality of the New York Times as opposed to this one-off blip in the Guardian. (I wonder if the editor at the Guardian thought, well, if this piece appeared in the New York Times it must be OK. . .but it wasn't.)
But in fairness to you, Socci, I wonder if this kind of story of mad, passionate love for one's partner is threatening to the average wife/partner, and that some of the disapproval might have to do with wishing we had this kind of relationship? That's a smallvery smallpart of it for me, if I'm honest.