Welcome to the Waves, Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and living without romantic love.

Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our

minds.

Today you've got me, Rebecca Añan, a senior editor at Slate.

Later in the show I'll be joined by author Amy Key.

Before I picked up Amy's new book, which is called Arrangements in Blue, I didn't know

her work.

And although I do love Joni Mitchell's album Blue, which provides a frame for this book

and inspires its title, I'm not usually a huge reader of music writing.

But what I was interested in was the personal story.

Amy describes herself as someone who had to learn how to live without romantic love,

which is what she calls it.

In the first few pages of her wonderful book, she describes her first encounters with

Joni Mitchell's record, when she was a teenager, when she would do what she calls, test her

feelings against blue sentiments, looking forward into the future.

She writes,

While I have certainly bled for romantic love, I've largely found myself living without it.

The last time I had a boyfriend, I was 22.

I'm about to turn 44.

In my early years of knowing blue, I thought I was at the beginning of romantic love's presence

in my life.

All beginnings incorporate the potential for an end.

...