When relationships end, we often give a reason. The reasons can be encapsulated in a single word. Infidelity. Abuse. Incompatibility. It requires no further explanation, as the listener nods their heads in agreement. It’s understandable, after all. They may not know our particular story, but they don’t have to. They know of one like it, having been there themselves or having heard tell of it before. While the experience is never easy, the explanation might be.

But sometimes the reasons aren’t so clear-cut. They require a story, the telling of it requiring a cup of coffee held tightly in our…

I have a temper. It’s something I work on, but it’s not something I try to hide. I talk openly about having one and how I try to control it or, at the very least, express it appropriately. I used to know rage well — and not just the road variety either. My anger comes out less these days, but not because I don’t feel it. Every day, there’s a fresh news story reminding me that people, women in particular, have plenty of reasons for rage.

But what I’ve found interesting over the years is that my anger when unleashed…

For a long time, everything I planted died. Succulents, reportedly easy to grow, shriveled up and died in my presence. Every seed I planted failed to thrive. I decided that I didn’t have my grandmother’s green thumb.

My relationships worked the same way. Every attempt at love would end the same. In heartbreak. In disappointment. Every love I tried to grow would fail to thrive.

But the year of the pandemic changed something in me. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of the world outside my doors closing. …

You won’t find “Love yourself” anywhere on my list. While I have said before that you should love yourself and chase no one, that’s a general rule for life, not just for dating. But when we come out of relationships and start to think about dating again, there are three things we might want to consider doing before we dip a toe back into the shark-infested waters of the dating pool.

Get Therapy

While I don’t believe that you have to be perfect or have your shit entirely together in order to date, I do believe that every single person would benefit…

Twenty years from the last time I sat in a therapist’s office as a client, I found myself there again. A different office, a different therapist, but the feeling was the same. If this is me at the end of my rope, showing up to therapy is proof that I’m still holding onto it.

Recent changes in my life echo previous trauma, and sometimes I am afraid that I’m in danger of centering my life story around this narrative. Sometimes, I am afraid that I already have.

Is this who I am, or is this what happened to me? …

Friendship never seemed that complicated to me. While I didn’t always find it easy to make a friend, I found a natural comfort in being one. I understood the dynamics of friendship. But I’ve never had quite the same ease with romantic relationships.

It’s a whole different ballgame, the kind where everyone is making up their own rules and those rules keep changing. Periodically, I bench myself because the game is just so hard I don’t want to play anymore. As I heal from my last failed attempt at a lasting relationship, I’ve begun to think about all the ways…

I am not who I once was. But I’m not meant to be. Growth should change us. Sometimes, pain changes us, too. The experience of loving fully while being abandoned completely changed me irrevocably. When I stopped loving, I did so with a vengeance — so completely disconnecting from that feeling that I could scarcely remember how I had ever felt that way in the first place.

I’ve begun to think about the love in my life, or lack thereof. I’ve decided that we all deserve the love we give — not the love we get.

Think about that. It’s…

My life experience hasn’t given me starry-eyed happy-ever-afters. It has given me a dark sense of humor and serious trust issues. In fact, I’m sometimes afraid that the next time someone says “I love you” to me, I’ll be tempted to tell them to come back in six months and tell me if they still feel that way because I have already seen the writing on the wall — and, for me, it’s an expiration date.

I want to say that I don’t trust love or that I don’t trust men, but I don’t think love is the problem, and…