Real Brief Encounters And the Romance Myth

“Here are your real brief encounters,” he said with a crooked grin, making fun of her romantic ways. Encounters, yes, though more like collisions, really, and certainly brief, but without the maddening joy, the dissolving of the self into something more than the self, the anguished longing afterward.

--"Matinee," The New Yorker, by Robert Coover