Tag: relationships

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 […]

Brick had gotten a new jaw, nose, and cheekbones from a surgeon in California, costing him around $30,000, and still he was furious at women and the world.

As she prepares to leave the home she shared with her ex, Marlene Adelstein finds herself fixated on the husk of a nest hanging in the yard.

Nancy Jainchill recalls a ’70s sexcapade that helped her make (one month’s) rent, and began her exploration into women’s pleasure and sexual parity.

Matthew Salesses considers the impact of his wife’s passing, and other factors, on his experience as a human passing through the fourth dimension.

Hoping to reconnect to their love for the iconic musician, Kevin Sampsell and an old girlfriend go to hear his best known band play without him.

Never eat pot chocolate on a third date, and other lessons about love.

A BDSM relationship gone wrong helped Britni de la Cretaz find God.

Their mothers were secrets, right up until their deaths.

Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Black women take power where they can find it, and sometimes that’s in a pot of hot, skin-searing grits.

My on-again, off-again love affair with Engelbert Humperdinck.

A declaration of dependence, excerpted from Briallen Hopper’s new essay collection.

In a tiny, remote Utah town, Lavinia Spalding learns the difference between longing and belonging.

Kira Martin struggles through her connection – both emotional and physical – with her troubled and destructive son.

In the desert at Burning Man, Joanne Solomon dissects the implicit transaction that defines her cross-cultural love affair.

Jennifer Chong Schneider considers what it is to be Asian, maligned, and fetishized in dating — and questions her own desire when she dates someone of her own ethnicity for the first time.

Yvonne Conza wrestles with the complexities of estrangement from her dying — complicated — dad.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar contemplates the powerful evolution of a woman’s beauty over time.

Jen Gilman Porat seeks a genetic excuse for her husband’s barbaric table manners.

Steve Edwards revisits an early heartbreak to ask: “How do we find compassion for who we used to be?”

Sarah Kasbeer reflects on a history of hookups — and why they left her cold.

After she proposes to her girlfriend, Amy Deneson rethinks what it means to wed.

Cherise Morris turns to astrology and Beyoncé lyrics to move through a difficult moment in her relationship.

When Eleanor takes a break from reading the news, her laptop goes missing. Full of self-abnegation, she asks Wallace Shawn for advice.

Vanessa Golenia contemplates the ins-and-outs of merging finances as the higher earner — and bigger spender — in her (heterosexual) relationship.

After years of bonding closely with other people, one woman finally goes searching for herself.

Laura Jean Baker finds that being a feminist married to a progressive man isn’t a fail-safe against sexism occasionally intruding in their marriage.

“In my family, love was the slow accumulation of moments in which I was not subjected to great harm.”

Nineties relationship books had some serious issues, man.