PERSONAL ESSAYS

Reader Feedback on "Strangers on a Train"

Amazing essay! I rarely read all the way through a Nerve essay but this one was intriguing, inspiring, and rejuvenated (ever so slightly) my belief that man has, at his core, a will to do what is right and good. Thanks.
--WHB
04/30

You are the male equivalent of a woman who "accidentally" drops something so she has to bend over to pick it up or a woman who says implicitly "Come here, bad boy" and then says out-right "You dirty bastard, all you want is sex." Except here, your weapon is not sex, but your sensitivity. I think you played a very harsh game with the young woman you depicted. And the "cute little blonde girl from Las Vegas". You need to stop attracting people and rejecting them. I know, buddy. I know.
--CKT
04/29

I think you have it all wrong. This stranger needed you and you turned away from her. Even just one night, if you really meant it, would have meant the world to her. People look at the world in black and white while it is really gray. It isn't often what you do but why. You could have at least stayed and held this poor hurting soul.
--CES
04/10

OK. I vented. Now I'll tell you why I think the writer is honorable. I am 41, and have had a wide range of sexual experiences. I started into group sex 12 years ago, when even some of my guy friends made fun of me, and female friends said I could never marry a "real" girl since she would find out what I've done. Contrast this to last year, when a girl I adore asked me if I was into group sex because, as I later found out, she won't date anyone who isn't. I have slept with a lot of women, and at one point my motto was that, after the act, I never regretted any of it. Not to brag, but I date and sleep with very fine women, usually little more than half my age, last night being a 26 YO ex-stripper. I am not bragging, just showing my credentials. Over time, though, I have come to appreciate how a single sexual encounter can be so damaging to a girl. Had he slept with her, the writer, who apparently was way out of the league of the girl, would have raised her expectations, at least for a certain period of time, about who she could find for a serious mate. Women I have known, including those that I have had sex and "relationships" with, have wasted years of their life searching and holding out for what they never can realistically find in a guy. Each casual encounter with a ballplayer or lead singer in a band leaves them with the impression that one day, they'll permanently land a guy like that. In the meantime, the serious courters at their level are shunned, and what could be something special between the two never occurs. Whether it be the late-night booty call with what she views as am "ex" but who the "ex" views as someone who was just sex, or the one-nighter with the hot guy, expectations are affected, and at this point in my life, wanting to settle down with someone special but increasingly frustrated being able to find that someone, I think a lot of the reason is this type of thing and the access I have been denied to those women I truly adored. I was closing in a true romantic interest 3 years ago or so, when Bo Jackson decided he wanted some booty from her. Of course, she disappeared from my radar screen for a year. I've hung out, dated if you will, a girl who can't connect to me since her "boyfriend" that she really hadn't seen inn a conventional sense for a year by the time we met over a year ago still booty calls her every other week at 4 AM, and throws her out by 9 AM, when she comes crying back into my arms and bed, but she's so bonded to him from the sex with him, and I have so little chance due to the amount she limits me to, that our relatoinship will never go anywhere soon. So, he did the right thing. She'll understand her market value better. She was raped once - she doesn't need to go to bed with a guy who has one foot out the door before they even start, and have her life turned upside down, and her expectations hopelessly raised, even if for only a matter of weeks when a sincere, potentially-loving suitor might come along. This is not really an issue of men being different than women - but we just don't get nearly as many opportunities for sex with partners so desirable they would not want to date us for real, at least not without paying. So, the writer did the right thing. Maybe the next night, she will meet a guy who would worship the ground she walks on and eat her pussy for an hour. She probably wouldn't have given such a guy the chance if she had stud sex with the writer.
--ABS
04/10

This article displays the consciensciousness and sensitivity that most men operate under. A chick or couple on the prowl together probably would have gone for it, anyway.
--ABS
04/09

i couldn't possibly fill this space with anything interesting i just wanted to write to say i just about sent your story to all of my friends and still don't know what to think, but that just comes from me being slightly neurotic. guess i just felt the need to say, i can't shake the story from my memory banks. thanks.
--O.S
04/09

i don't get the hypercriticism here. consider that all the pieces in this special issue approach shame in a different way. this one, as far as i can tell, is from start to finish about shame of all kinds. try not to judge it for a minute. try to see that, whether the narrator knows it or not, whether he's got an ounce of insight, he's bringing you scenes that - i imagine - make you shrink back and away from the piece. that's how i know it's about shame; it seems to be the broad theme of it throughout: he should be ashamed (of the initial encounter with her), he tries to tell us about his unease with it later, her nakedness (too bad we never get her head... but this isn't her view.... ) just screams out shame she has. she feels compelled to undress. the awkwardness, right or wrong, is shame-making for both. okay so he has a lousy response; something else to feel ashamed about later. i like the piece for the layers involved. you can feel shame when you do something wrong (or even not quite the right thing that needed to be done) at the time and you can feel shame about it later. and you can change your mind, too, about how it all went.
--
04/07

"Who we were at our worst moment is who we are forever." True - but not the whole truth. Who we were at our worst moment(s) is only a piece of who we were then, now, tomorrow. Nothing in life is static - not the emotions in the train bedroom bus present, not the manwoman who experienced any of them, not even the memory of the experience when compared nowthentomorrow. Could he have shown more compassion, less self-interest, some sense of responsibility towards the events he'd set in motion? Of course. Can YOU think of a moment when YOU couldn't have done been, been more, taken less?
--ask
04/07

Wow...the lack of self-knowledge and self-reflection in this piece is astonishing. A missed opportunity to talk about fear of shame--other people's. That's what makes shame so interesting. I thought this was where it was heading, but no. Another shrugging cad who equates confession with revelation. Learned more about her bravery than his cowardice. Blech.
--LG
04/07

Slut: I agree that this piece was pretty frivolous, but the guy who wrote it also does a lot of political satire. Not exactly someone you'd accuse of fiddling while Rome burned....
--GO
04/07

"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was japanning. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
--slut
04/07

"At worst, I extricated myself from an uncomfortable situation without causing any permanent hurt." WRONG! For whatever reason, she bared herself to you both literally and figuratively and your response was to leave?? She didn't even get the level of sympathy you gave the guy on the bus. "ultimately a moral and emotional coward' says it better than I could.
--Kali
04/07

"It is a sin to not sleep with a woman when she calls you to her bed" - Zorba the Greek
--nk
04/07

"Who we were at our worst moment is who we are forever. And with that cheery thought, I bid you good day." I'm sure I'm not the first, but I wholly disagree with this easy, fatalistic kiss off of an ending. It's simply not true.
--alw
04/07

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