Word: retrospectively
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...marriage has been so thoroughly dissected that it can be understood only in retrospect. "I think," said Diana in her riveting 1995 interview on BBC television, "like any marriage, especially when you've had divorced parents, like myself, you'd want to try even harder to make it work, and you don't want to fall back into a pattern that you've seen happen in your own family. I desperately wanted it to work. I desperately loved my husband, and I wanted to share everything together. I thought that we were a very good team... Here was a fairy...
Meeting fellow classmates posed the biggest challenge and, in retrospect, the best opportunity of any Orientation Week experience. It was a thrilling mixture of nervousness and excitement to meet scores of new people in nine days. ("Where from? " "Phoenix. " "Oh, I've been through Arizona before. " "What dorm? " "Hollis. " "Really? Do you know this guy Ray lives in Stoughton? " "What prospective major? " "Biochem. " "Sure! I took some physics in high school! ") Only weeks afterward did I realize that most of the people with whom I had the typical conversation would slowly drift out of my life, though even...
When there's no happily ever after, revisionism can really set in. What was ill-advised can in retrospect look involuntary. If you meant not to, wished you hadn't, know you shouldn't have, you can rationalize saying you didn't and not think of yourself as a liar. Some forms of withholding information are sanctioned. Alcoholics Anonymous, which otherwise insists on brutal honesty, allows an exception for not telling your spouse about affairs. Annulment, when an applicant says he lacked due discretion to enter into marriage, is a form of sanctified lying about...
Back in 1947, no political provisos were attached to the Marshall Plan, but when Congress appropriated funds for it, the preamble to the European Recovery Act called on the beneficiaries to form a United States of Europe. In retrospect that looks like the old American ambition to remake the world in the U.S. image, but what motivated Congress was national security rather than ideology. If the Europeans would stop slaughtering one another and band together, the U.S. might not have to march into another transoceanic...
...Retrospect...