Tag: love

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says, “was to risk being your true self.” We ignore our demons at our peril.

Insomnia is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

“It is so essential to morale that army and ­navy officers of the highest rank list mail almost on a level with munitions and food.”

Allie Zenwirth falls in love within the confines of an all-male Chasidic school.

“Play like a man, look like a lady.” At Narratively, Britni de la Cretaz looks at the history of lesbianism in early pro women’s baseball and at the beautiful love stories that the movie “A League of Their Own” chose to ignore.

When you live alongside anything for a long time — any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker — you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.

In this intimate and moving essay, Gabrielle Bellot decides she needs to stop allowing others to define her.

Elizabeth Flock on the years she spent studying other people’s marriages in Mumbai.

Essayist Leslie Jamison visits Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships.

Dating after a Big Love ends never feels quite right. What do big loves leave us with, and what do they take?

Diana Spechler recalls fleeing her life in New York City for a new one with a painter in his village in central Mexico.

“Once, when I was sick for a long time and too weak to eat, she chewed my food for me and put the small pieces in my mouth to swallow.”

Veteran music journalist Michael Gonzales reflects on a long love affair and Prince’s deep, varied catalogue of hits.

New technology and information access in the Philippines is shifting the online-dating power dynamic from Western men to Filipina women.

Alexander Chee didn’t realize that his boyfriend, M., was pretending to be someone content to be monogamous.

Noah Cho ruminates on why his blond, all-American mother chose his “barely bilingual” Korean father.

“Under the influence of Leonard Cohen’s words, Germaine Greer’s polemic, and [Anais] Nin’s lies, I believed that sexual rapture was the key to connection through chaos.”

BuzzFeed has a touching, intimate excerpt of Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me, Bill Hayes’s memoir of his relationship with late neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks. 10-13-16 I, soaking in the bath, O on the toilet, talking, talking about what he’s been thinking and writing — short personal pieces, for a memoir perhaps. He […]

Breaking up is hard to do.

At Lenny, read an excerpt of Ayelet Waldman’s memoir of LSD microdosing, A Really Good Day.

Fresh from a go-nowhere relationship, Gemma Sieff writes an engrossing personal essay in Harper’s about her passing encounters with a series of men she met on Tinder.

Joe Berkowitz has been writing a series for the Awl about modern relationships, and his final installment was published this week.

[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as […]

Orlando has long had a towering, and very much deserved, reputation in the LGBT community; it was published the same year Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness, depicting lesbianism as a tragic curse, became a bestseller. Woolf’s creation of a figure who effortlessly changes sex casually upends any notion that biological sex is related […]

“Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose.”

A central agony in these books is alienation—not only the pain of abuse, or heartbreak, or evaporation, but the pain of having your pain appropriated. The books themselves reclaim the hurt for their authors, and whatever their literary merit, they offer at least some catharsis for the reader, who can always relate. Rock songs make […]

At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage: The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The […]

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words) Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) I. In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was […]

I left that place still believing in pleasure, but where love was concerned, I had become as atheistic as a mathematician. Two months later, I was sitting alongside that exquisite woman, in her boudoir, on her divan. I held one of her hands clasped in my own, and such lovely hands they were; we were scaling the Alps of emotion, picking […]

“How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and […]