What inspired these diverse women writers to pick open scabs often healed over, to bare their pain to their readers? The essays talk about choices when "enough is enough," and when trying one last time paid remarkable dividends. Although the essays are often raw, and edited with a too-light touch, the rhythm and beat of each woman’s exploration of an intimate love relationship is much like looking in a mirror. Whether happily married, happily single or somewhere in-between, the stories provide fodder for our own imaginations, dreams and unexpressed wishful thoughts.

Leslie Lehr writes movingly of changes and finding a new style and rightness to life after 18 years of marriage, of learning to hammer out care of the children, re-learning lifestyles and habits long subjugated to a husband, and discovering she was happy with the "her" she had become, without the wedding rings and the man.

Patricia McCormick writes with a touch of irony and humor about her "electric husband," discovered during a period of separation from her husband. This vibrator became her way to view a world without her husband, learning to live alone and like it. Although she and her husband hammered through their separation, and emerged strong and with a renewed courage to face marriage together, she never let go of the lessons from the break. She still maintains a tiny apartment of her own, an escape hole, and a place to talk to herself and rejuvenate her creative spirit.

There is more to these essays than just a pouring out of angst; each story reverberates with the reader, whether or not the reader’s experience echoes the authors’ or not. We learn that there is strength found in the struggle. And, that even when relationships don’t work out, and an uncertain future needs to be faced, maintaining a vigorous and honest approach to life lifts even the most devastated woman out of the slough of despond into the ripe richness of new relationships and enhanced enjoyment of the love they share with their children, parents, siblings and friends.