“Promise” isn’t necessarily about love, or even about surrender, but about giving your heart over, repeatedly, and enduring the failures that come with the exchange.
breakups
Posted inReading List
Love, Lust, Loneliness: A Valentine’s Day Reading List
Essays, reading lists, and editors’ picks on relationships, breakups, and many different kinds of love.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Story
The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp
After a ten-year relationship ends painfully, Mona Kirschner finds herself searching for emotional and physical healing at a weight loss center in Brazil.
Posted inReading List
It’s Not You, It’s Me: A Breakup Reading List
A late bloomer as far as relationships go, my first encounter with heartbreak came from the track. It was junior year. The district meet: all big Texas sky and girls next to me adjusting hair ties and heat waves shimmering ahead. At that point in my life, I had devoted myself entirely to running. I […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How to Be Single
In this personal essay, Shelly Oria shares a manual for life after you’ve left your husband and your girlfriend.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Feature, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Man in the Mirror
In the aftermath of rape, Alison Kinney discovers that a new lover who helps you to heal can just as easily betray you.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Cataloguing the Detritus of Relationships Past
Essayist Leslie Jamison visits Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Breakup Museum: Archiving the Way We Were
Essayist Leslie Jamison visits the Breakup Museum in Zagreb, Croatia — created in 2003 after founders Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship — and considers what stories are told by the objects we shared with former loved ones.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Finder, No Longer a Keeper
Jenny Klion tries to make sense of her super power of finding lost jewelry where ever she goes, and reflects on how finding someone else’s engagement ring helped her let go of her own.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
A Finder, No Longer a Keeper
How finding someone else’s engagement ring helped Jenny Klion let go of her own.