Dear Olivia,

Please forgive me for having lapsed in my affection for you. It's just that my affection ebbs and flows with your character. There are moments when I feel your strength and you inspire me to be a better woman. But then, tragedy hits. I am reminded you are not the least bit happy. You never will be. Not until, that is, you give up everything that made me fall in love with you. When we first met you were this strong woman. In a man's world you stood tall, you held your ground against the manliest of men, even Elliott Stabler, and he's not someone to let a woman tell him what's what. But you did that!! You didn't take his shit. When he was the muscle, you were the heart and he respected you. You had compassion and always advocated for the victim when nobody believed her. These poor souls victimized by men, you looked into their eyes every week and had that female intuition to know what's really going on when a vic doesn't want to talk.

But that's just it: your female intuition. Your "femininity." Once I loved you because of it, but now I love you in spite of it. You once embodied it with a difference, taking attirbutes more commonly associated with men, and filtering them through womanly strengths to make you a super lady cop. But now, as you get older, everything in life you gave up to become sergeant haunts you. Your mother's rape haunts you. Attempted rapes of you haunt you. And I can't even blame you. Those are all horribly traumatic events that will alter somebody's life. Those viscous felonies, those sexually based offenses are especially heinous.

But I wanted something else from you. I wanted the writers to give you happiness. If anybody deserves it, it's you. You work so hard and love your job, but it seems that can never be enough for a woman. You have to want family and not the satisfaction of being a sergeant in charge of the elite squad the Special Victims Unit. I want you to he happy, but they won't let you. No woman can be happy by achieving her career goals, no. If you are a strong woman kicking the asses of men every god damn week, you must certainly lack something. Specifically, you must lack contentment. Every week you're in therapy or getting over involved with a victim, seeing yourself through her eyes.

I love you. Truly. You are an idol to me, a pillar or female strength, a beacon of feminine assertion. But alas, you always have to show those weaknesses, and thus your strength is never pure. This is not to say masculine strength is ever pure, I know Stabler had his issues at home that he carried to work every day, but that's just it. As a man, he had a home. He was a strict catholic. A man can have a career and a family. And you can't, so while I get it, it's something that will always stand between us. But unlike Stabler, it isn't religious dogma and ideas of what family life is that hold you back. Your problems are strictly female. That's not your fault. I blame Dick Wolf. He just can't let a woman be strong and accept the consequences of success?

That being said, I sincerely love you. Honestly, your strength carries me and I admire your poise through the most horrific situations. I wish you happiness, and the confidence to be happy on your own, not to let that dick, Wolf, tell you a woman can't be happy on her own, that she isn't equipped to suffer trauma and still be at the peak of her performance. Because you are Liv! You're a sergeant now and your career has only just begun.

Anita Stahl