LOVE RULES

We are four women who have lived inside these rules.

We have broken them and been broken by them. We have carried them in our bodies and our minds years after the relationship changed or ended or found its way back to something true.

This work is about love. Complicated, consuming, painful and sometimes the only thing that holds you together.

It has been a year of us living in this apartment. And six months since my parents stopped talking to me.

the engagement ring began to lose its color and started to feel itchy, until it even left a rash on my skin.

And she felt revived and clean and she decided to masturbate and as the water poured over her skin she thought about her husband who was away in Rome on business and she imagined his body strong and hungry on top of her his tongue pushing hard into her mouth

I see him, smell him, touch him -- but he isn't there.

I am exhausted by the labour of trying to make us work. I feel the pressure to hide things -- like his anger and his punishing silence.

I started writing with another man. I started sleeping with another man.

Whenever the guests had gone, he would say, 'The masks can come off now.' He later claimed it was a just joke, but given the emotional distance and the cracks in our marriage, I believed him.

She put the wine on ice so it was cool and crisp ready for when her husband finished work. He didn't finish work however and so she served him supper at his desk while she ate with their son in front of the television.

quietly glowing from a hunger for intimacy finally stilled, and asked him to take my picture while my body still held a part of him inside.