Love Quote by Anita Diament

Diament’s line punctures a comforting myth about “traditional” gender relations: that men and women have always been intimate companions in the modern sense. She grants the obvious counters up front - interconnection, passion, love - then pulls the rug out by separating desire from daily reciprocity. The pivot lands because it reframes what we mean by closeness. Not romance, not sex, not even devotion, but the unglamorous habit of mutual narration: swapping workplace annoyances, decompressing, comparing notes on a shared world.

The intent is corrective and quietly political. By pointing to the missing end-of-day chat, Diament spotlights how the office (or any public sphere of status and wages) long functioned as a male-only commons, while women’s labor was either privatized at home or treated as non-work. The subtext isn’t that earlier couples lacked affection; it’s that they lacked symmetry. If one person’s daily life is the “real” story and the other’s is background infrastructure, conversation itself becomes unequal: you can’t trade accounts of a world you weren’t permitted to enter.

“Until very recently” also does cultural work. It nudges readers to see companionate partnership as a historical invention rather than a timeless norm, tied to women’s increased participation in paid work and the expectation that marriage should deliver not just stability but friendship. That last detail - “at the office” - is doing heavy lifting: it marks the modern workplace as the crucible where identity, stress, and social capital accumulate, and it asks who gets to bring that home and be heard.