And I say, "Right on, Liam my man."

  I've been out here in the trenches of singledom for about 14 years since my divorce, and from my experience, Liam has a point. Now that we've reportedly entered a new millennium, it's time for guys to get a grip. An indefinable malaise began to creep into the souls of American men at about the same time that women were finally getting out from behind their aprons and into the work world.

  And sadly, here at the dawning of a new age, American men are still afflicted with it. Symptoms involve an inability to make eye contact, engage a woman in playful banter or, if a Lourdes-like miracle occurs and a conversation does take place, remember more than five percent of what a woman says.

  Now, I've made a personal study of the aforementioned behavior in supermarkets, coffee shops, bookstores and especially at Lowe's and Home Depot, where men tend to hang out. And let's not forget the local health club.

  Granted, I'm no Heather Locklear or Pamela Anderson Lee, but I consider myself not a bad specimen for a woman in her prime, and I threw myself into my research with gusto. I struck up conversations with men in grocery store lines, smiled at men in the socket-wrench aisle and gazed at them over my lattes. (Actually it was hot chocolate, but who's to know?)

  The results were discouraging. Not only were there no takers, but only one in 10 men actually made eye contact and only about a quarter of those who did would smile back.

  As for witty repartee, I'd get a better response from my refrigerator. The one time I actually thought a man was admiring me and my cut triceps at the gym, I realized he was gazing past me into the mirror, ogling his biceps. Maybe I'm asking too much. Maybe I should adjust my standards to: 1) anatomically correct, and 2) no obvious pathology. Or maybe it's time for a Ken doll.

  In her new book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, feminist writer Susan Faludi blames male malaise not on the women's movement but on the same consumer culture that in an earlier time transformed women into hollow Christmas tree ornaments. Faludi says:

  " ...men and women both feel pushed into roles that are about little more than displaying prettiness or prowess in the marketplace. Women were pushed first, but now their brothers have joined that same forced march."

  So now the guys are getting the you're-not-OK messages from Madison Avenue that have historically driven women's insecurities. In the 2000s, it's not OK for men to be balding, overweight or have less-than-perfect teeth. Unless, of course, they have a whole lot of money.

  Then all bets are off. Some women will pursue a toad if he promises financial security with a bit left over for the yacht, a shopping allowance and a second home in Palm Beach. Whether Faludi's theory is correct, we're still stuck with a daily grind unleavened by the occasional male-to-female frisson that can make a day worth getting up for.

  I have two key words for the single men out there: flirting and dancing. If you have to go to one of those workshops to learn how to flirt (yes, they do exist), drop the dough and your pride and do it (or better yet, spend some time in France learning from the culture that invented the pastime). Enjoy the art of flirtation for its own sake, like relishing a good meal or a fine wine.

  It doesn't necessarily have to lead to the altar or to whatever else you might wish to avoid. On my recent trip to a French territory, young men half my age flirted with me, and it felt great. Contrary to what you may believe, women appreciate sincere compliments.

  Finally, for heaven's sake, don't be afraid to dance. If men only knew how much dancing is like foreplay for a woman, they'd be flocking to Arthur Murray studios like gladiators to the games. My theory, which is shared by many women I know, is that a man who's at ease enough with his body to dance reasonably well is bound to be a good lover. Remember Dirty Dancing?

  So here's my advice for the man of the 21st century: it's time once again to savor la difference. Even Jimmy Carter admitted to having lust in his heart.

  Along with the facelift, Tripp has scheduled her own PR rehab tour, with the stops at NBC's Today show and Larry King Live, where she claims only to have tried to be "a surrogate mom" to Monica Lewinsky. More like "Mommie Dearest."

  Tripp is no dummy when it comes to tapping into the contemporary Zeitgeist: She understands that good looks count for something in this age of celebrity and instant information and gratification. But will the American public be able to forgive the owner of a new and improved visage? Or will they recall instead the pulsating glob of betrayal and greed that lurks beneath the newly sleek profile and slick hairdo?

  Rumor has it that a "friend" underwrote the cost of this magnificent makeover. For "friend of Linda" - and this is just a wild guess - substitute "enemy of Bill."

  Journalist Jeffrey Toobin's new book, A Vast Conspiracy, reveals that Tripp suggested to Lewinsky that she keep an Excel spreadsheet of her contacts with the president. And for sending the First Boyfriend gifts, Tripp advised using the courier service belonging to relatives of the now-infamous literary agent Lucianne Goldberg. (Turn over a political scandal rock and you'll find Goldberg under it, with her ear to the ground and her finger on the cash register key.)

  If, as Tripp whines, she was only manipulating and taping Lewinsky for the purest of patriotic motives, then why did she consult Goldberg first instead of going to a lawyer or a prosecutor? Tripp obviously had her own visions of profit and fame, but they weren't the ones she ultimately got.

  Unfortunately - to borrow a phrase from radical French writer Guy Debord - Tripp is a Frankenstein that only a modern "society of the spectacle" could have created. Debord's book of the same name, written in the late '60s, was prescient in its analysis of a commodity and market-driven culture where everything has its price, including betrayal. Add to the mix a media that thrives on scandal and celebrity, and you have the perfect cauldron for the witches brew that Tripp and her coven stirred up.

  Though it's unkind and unfair to conflate looks and character, it's not surprising that the media portrayed the pre-plastic surgery Tripp as something of a Bozo the Clown in drag. What's the old saying? Pretty is as pretty does. But I wonder: If Tripp had been a more attractive woman, would the media have paid as much attention to her act of betrayal?

  Why Tripp would want to prolong her ordeal in the limelight is a mystery to anyone with a memory and a grip on reality. But she must believe that the American public, often forgiving to a fault (think of Marv Albert, Dick Morris and even the president), will kiss and make up with someone who now looks like she could actually get picked up in a bar.

  I remember a time in the more innocent part of the last century when it was considered crude to make a spectacle of yourself. Faced with a situation like Tripp's, anybody then with a lick of self-respect and moral conscience would want to get out of the media high beams as soon as possible and slink into obscurity - if not to a religious retreat for some serious self-scrutiny. But now, Tripp is determined to make us buy her new spin on an old story of jealousy, spite and greed. Put ribbons and bows on a pile of horse manure and it still smells like manure.

  Of course, the media has not been overly kind in its depictions of Lewinsky, either, focusing on her weight and endlessly re-running the now legendary news footage of her in the beret as, with obvious adoration, she busses the president. Thus is Lewinsky (and Tripp) reduced to fodder for Saturday Night Live skits. But what does the object of satire do to address her own image problem? She goes on TV to shill for the Jenny Craig diet plan. Like her former mentor-turned-tormentor Tripp, Lewinsky is clinging to her 15 minutes of fame and counting on a superficial transformation to win friends and influence people - and probably rake in some extra cash. Either way, it's hard to give her the respect she no doubt craves.

  And a $30,000 makeover can't buy Linda Tripp the trust of the next so-called friend she cultivates. At least I hope not, or we're all in trouble. In the end, Monica and Linda, it's not your looks, money or couture that count. It's your good deeds and your good name.

  I made an interesting - perhaps Freudian - slip when I first typed the title of Harrison's essay incorrectly as "Connubial Bliss." Despite my best intentions to be accurate, my unconscious mind betrayed me, revealing my own tenacious notions about romance and its potential for leading to a fulfilling and enduring marriage. And this despite personal experience to the contrary.

  Like most in our culture, I've been saturated, from childhood on, with romantic stories, novels and movies where the tale ends at the altar and the couple is presumed to live "happily ever after." In the romantic dreck that rolls out of Hollywood - think of You've Got Mail, Runaway Bride, Notting Hill and a hundred other Tinseltown clones - we collude with the filmmaker in accepting the formula plot: girl-meets-boy and, after surmounting a few obstacles to love, girl-ends-up-with-boy. From the beginning, we know how the script will end, but still we eagerly follow all the little detours on the road to romance so we can reap the pay-off: destination "Love 4Ever" and a confirmation, however flimsy, that such a state exists, and we don't have to work at it.

  But what happens after the honeymoon is perhaps the most fascinating and challenging part of the love story. Few, if any, Hollywood directors dare to tackle that plot. Why? Because a movie that plumbs the complexities of the marriage relationship wouldn't sell tickets. A movie ticket is a pass to dreamland, and we want our illusions intact.

  Instead of a lack of imagination, I wonder if marriage doesn't result from an excess of imagination, or at the least, a set of unrealistic notions about what it means to share a life with someone. With pop culture continually spoon-feeding us romantic fantasies, we imagine a future with an ideal mate, a soulmate, the other half of our semi-circle.

  As Harrison points out in her essay, we often choose our marriage partners based on an unconscious desire to return to a state of union with a parent. If we were parented adequately, there was a time when we didn't know where Mother left off and we began, when our every need was anticipated. Harrison says, "this absolute togetherness still has the power both to compel and to terrify... remembering an Eden of quickly gratified desire and no responsibility, we worship unattainable, self-annihilating love, a union that makes one flesh of two."

  What a setup for disappointment when the fantasy fades and the realities and demands of daily life come into focus; when we realize that the beloved can never meet all our needs; or when the tension between the desire to merge with another and the fear of being overwhelmed by the other tips the balance too far in one direction.

  Elaborate wedding ceremonies with production values rivaling that of Cecil B. DeMille are testimony to the persistence of the fantasy. Families will bankrupt themselves putting on a show for friends and relatives, only to find themselves still paying off the bills when the happy couple are consulting attorneys and dividing up the wedding gifts.

  One of my favorite quotes about this "thing called marriage" is attributed to Duke Divinity School professor Stanley Hauerwas: "You always pick the wrong person; the challenge is to love them anyway." I may be paraphrasing Professor Hauerwas, but the idea is the same: Loving someone over the long haul isn't automatic or easy. Marriage in a culture of surface glitter such as ours is a fragile thing indeed.

  More than 20 years ago, I plunged blindly and trustingly over the matrimonial cliff, and the union lasted just long enough to produce two beautiful sons and then wreck their young lives by dissolving in divorce. (Thankfully, we all survived and are doing well.) I based my decision to marry on physical attraction and some vague notions about love. I see now that I didn't have the remotest idea of how to sustain and nurture that love. I was both attracted by the feeling of merging with my beloved and terrified of losing my identity as a separate individual. Taking on his last name was traumatic for me (I've since taken back my maiden name) and was the first hint that the question of identity would become a big one.

  The concept of maintaining a separate identity in marriage, of even savoring one's apartness, is central to Harrison's essay.

  She makes the case for a union where there are two distinct individuals existing in a state of self-sufficiency, "a capacity to stand alone, without needing to crash the boundaries of another personality, to experience all that might be inside it." She uses as an example the 40-year marriage of novelist Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, which was ended only by Murdoch's death in 1998 from Alzheimer's. Bayley writes in his 1999 memoir, Elegy for Iris: "We were together because we were comforted and reassured by the solitariness each saw and was aware of in the other."

  "Losing oneself in another may be romance," Harrison writes, "but it isn't love, nor is it fully human."

  Harrison argues that romance is backward-looking, "an infantile wish for total immersion in the other."

  The challenge of marriage is to look forward, to engage in the hard work of loving instead of "being in love" and to walk alone together in the face of our mortality.

  When she was lying, semi-conscious, in her hospital bed, a morphine drip entering a port inserted in the back of one withered hand, I experienced an almost desperate desire to crawl into the bed beside her and cradle her in my arms, much as she must have done for me when I was a baby. A sense of hospital propriety and the presence of my siblings stopped me. I also knew that my mother, had she been of sound mind and body, never would have welcomed such a gesture. She wasn't given to overt displays of affection or sentimentality.

  Her first two days in the hospital were marked by brief periods of consciousness when, with great effort, as if surfacing from the bottom of a well, she recognized her children and grandchildren. Then she smiled, and in slurred but still recognizable words she said: "My beautiful family." "Mom," I said. "You seem happy."

  "I am happy," she replied, with more clarity than before. There were other moments in those first two days when she conversed with relatives long gone, especially her own mother, who died some 36 years ago at the same age. As my mother looked up at me with eyes that seemed to gaze past me to another plane of existence, she called out, "Mama."

  More than anyone else, it was her mother she wanted in her time of need. And when she called for her mother, I answered. "Mama loves you," I said, over and over again. I said it as an affirmation of her mother's love for her and as an affirmation to myself of my mother's love for me. In the years before her illness, ours had been a difficult and bumpy relationship, but I knew the love was there. And in her hospital room, its presence was palpable. On the afternoon of the third day, my youngest sister and I took a break from our bedside vigil and walked a few blocks around the hospital as my brother kept watch in my mother's room.

  "I know this sounds weird," I said to my sister. "But suddenly, I feel the urge to buy something."

  "Oh, you wouldn't believe all the money I've spent in the past month," she replied.

  We are sisters, after all - even if 10 years and tastes and preferences separate us.

  On the fourth day, we all knew the end was near. Mother was in a state of deep unconsciousness, and the death rattle seemed to go on for hours. We had wanted to be with her when her time came. But it was just like her to take her last breath after we left the hospital for the evening. She was with one of the caretakers we'd hired to look after her over the last few months. Her breathing slowed, the caretaker said, until it finally stopped. No struggle.

  No sign of fear or pain. We needed to hear that.

  A few days later, as we were cleaning out the drawers in the guest bedrooms of my mother's house, we found enough of her sweaters to outfit a battalion.

  Evidently, my sister and I came by our shopping urges honestly.

  To lose the last surviving parent at a respectable old age of 84 is considered part of the natural course of events, and an event not to be mourned too deeply or for too long. Nonetheless, losing a parent who's lived a full life and is ready for death still unleashes in the children left behind a welter of emotions: guilt, sorrow, anger and the impact of having to break up a household and clear out the accumulated belongings of a lifetime.

  Jane Brooks, who recently wrote Midlife Orphan, said in an interview that she was amazed at the emotional response of the readers who greeted her during her book tour. Middle-aged orphans finally had found a voice through her book - and permission to talk about the tangle of feelings that attends the loss of the remaining parent.

  For me, my mother's death put an end once and for all to my childhood. Every one of her generation who would have remembered me as a baby and a young child is gone. In their absence, and especially in the absence of my mother, I've lost a part of myself and my past. I mourn that just as I mourn the passing of the mother who gave me life.

  In his 1989 book, A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean eloquently and poetically wrote about the impact of death in the family:

  "Now, nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.... Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."

  It was only during the last months of my mother's illness that I was able to make peace with our differences and accept her as the flawed human being each of us is. Understanding often comes late. But the legacy is love.

  * From the World War II song: "I'll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places, that this heart of mine embraces... "