One of the quotes I put on our chalkboard wall right after we moved (because our home also has a chalkboard wall, why not) was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ​ So I take all of that back. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is a little more complicated. … I think I’m saying that L and I chose a situation that forced real intimacy, and compromise, and looking outward in the same direction, from the very beginning.

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

Maybe technology made it all too easy to slide into a life I wasn’t meant to have. ​ We still have to make our way in the world, alone, save for our technology built from other people’s frozen choices. ​ I spent so much time trying to organize the life that I thought I wanted. It wasn’t the same as living.

Every now and then, at brunches with other couples, baby showers, weddings, endless cocktail parties for your company, I would have looked at you, myself, and the other wives, each woman coiffed and preening, and wondered about the women we could have been had we chosen ourselves over you and your brethren. The women we could have been had we decided to pursue our untapped talents instead of helping you pursue your greatness. The women we could have been had we been raised to believe we were more than negative space, waiting to fill into and be filled by men. The women we could have been had we chosen the path of our creation versus the path designated. I would have mulled these thoughts, and you would have caught me, alerted by the pensive, frozen smile on my face. You would have placed your hand on the small of my back, reminding me that I am yours, and asked, “You okay, baby?” I would have replied, “Of course, my love.”

Lately I’ve had to call on words for little shots of strength. Some use tequila; I use poems short enough to memorize. Their lines float around in my head, counteracting the insidious words t…

Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” — like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps.

But the person with Chill is crucially missing these last ingredients because they are too far removed from anything that looks like intensity to have passions. Because Chill is the opposite of something else too: warmth. And kindness, and earnestness, and vulnerability. And we need just enough of those things to occasionally do something so remarkably unchill as fall in love.

and exercise and yoga and turning off devices and caffeine and pep talks—these can all help with our metaphorical recharge, but they’re not a perfect formula like a plug into a correctly-shaped hole. Sometimes are bodies and minds are stubborn mysteries. I have been thinking lately, as usual, our language about wellness is bending toward the language of machines. the one and only infallible, deep-in-the-bones, rejuvenating source of energy, has been the love of good people. the warmth of friends I haven’t seen in a year, and who have lit my face up with a grin so expansive that I find my cheeks sore at the end of the day.

marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom

We know that people are marrying later in life, but that’s not the only shift. The whole relationship timeline is stretching.

Only spend time on people and activities that could break your heart. Otherwise, even if you win, will it have been worth it?

“I have hung prints of this poem by @officialdonika in our bedroom AND office, in case you were wondering about what I’m like”

Earlier this month, the Unicode Consortium debuted its final list of new emojis for 2019—and we debated it. Some men felt challenged by what Pinching Hand implied about their bodies while some women challenged Drop of Blood for not being explicit enough about theirs. If I see this next

“The friends that I keep close make me the best version of myself, but I’ve never found that consistently in a romantic relationship. I’m growing to understand that romance and love are not rational (thank you, therapy?). Historically, I’ve looked at romantic relationships as a test of what I have to offer. Do you like me? What are the qualities about me that you like? You’re having fun, right? What I’m getting at is this — I know I’m a good friend. I can evaluate friendships rationally, articulately. But with relationships or dating there’s this factor of capital-F Feelings added to the picture. They’re weird and messy. The butterflies-in-your-chest feeling is foreign, like anxiety rather than attraction. I’m not comfortable with capital-F Feelings yet. Because most of my past relationships have been maybe not in the absence of Feelings, but not formed on them alone. So I’m working through these things.”

this tweet inspired by elissa, who has been sitting next to me on the couch as i've spent all day writing, who just turned to me and said: "i feel like you think i don't love you when you're writing but i just wanted to let you know that i do"— jonny sun (@jonnysun) February 10, 2019

—with that eager, amateur’s love. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. Or it might even be in actual school. In my classes, I ask the students to find a poem they like and to get it by heart. To see someone in their late teens or early twenties, often by gender or ethnicity different from the author, shaping his or her mouth around those sounds created by somebody who is perhaps long dead, or perhaps thousands of miles away, and the students bringing their own experience to it, changing it with their own sensibility, so that they’re both possessed and possessing—those moments have been very moving to me.

Many of us think of love and happiness as an object – a thing to obtain. And once we have it, we’re scared to let it go. But there’s a better way to look at it – and even create more of it, without fear of loss.

We stop in front of a vacant store front for a long kiss and so I can wish a positive happy week since we have separate evenings planned.

Emoji hearts are hard to read but there’s one that beats them all.

“An airport after security and before boarding is, at least to me, the last place where every verb is only in the future tense.” “The veil feels thin between who I have settled into being and all the other people I could have been.” “Maybe it is possible to want the things you have”

“That was always my dream of this city, watching it from a fire escape, in it and not in it.” “To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction.” “New York, for all its well-worn jokes and pretensions, is much America as anywhere. The skyscrapers of the wealthy stand in for wide open fields. Here, if you can afford it, you can live in a rooted glass spaceship so far enough off the ground that you never have to notice that you owe anyone anything. You can float in an uncaring cloud city, with everything you need delivered to the door, a transactional life broken up into clean and independent pieces.” “The next day there was the same list of things that had to be done, small graces and details, mistakes and apologies, threads to tie to one another.“

“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”

“I think that’s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes, then the big things happen. The question is, can we stop the little things that take us further away from each other before it’s too late?” “At the risk of sounding unromantic, I think you have to look at a person and say, ‘Okay, is this a person who is going to make sense at all different phases of this journey? Because my life is going to change. I’m going to change. What’s important to me is going to change. Is this a person who can change with me so that we end up [moving] in the same direction? Or is this someone who makes sense for me at this chapter and may not in the future?’” “In the book, I urge people to just ‘hit send now,’ which means always call out those little things immediately in the moment, always address them right now. If you don’t do that, if you let the resentments grow, those raindrops become a flood and it’s too late to put everything back together again.” “It’s the same thing with love. I think you fall in love really fast, then fall out of love slowly. And if you want to keep your love alive, you have to be attentive to all the little things that go wrong along the way, and constantly course-correct. If you can do that, you’ll never set foot in my office.”

“But what happens if I can learn to measure love’s effect, and this love, which feels so real, doesn’t register?” “Reading this, I can’t help but think of those late-night phone calls, the easy seesaw of our conversation, our shared laughter. Also, the ways our bodies move together like practiced dancers, improvising to the same song. We, too, find shared rhythms easily.” “Does recording our sex occur to me? Of course it does. My urge is to clamp a hand over the mouth of that thought, much as, for many years, I used to clamp my hand over my own mouth at orgasm to stifle the sound. If I can hardly bear my own autoerotic sounds, how will it feel to hear those made in the company of my lover? Consider the mild discomfort of hearing a recording of your voice on, say, a voicemail. Multiply that discomfort infinitely. My lover has told me that I am noisy at orgasm (which she relishes), and though I suspect she is right, I have never heard myself. I am happy for this deafness. Some things I don’t want to notice, to reflect on, to consider.” “With her, more so than with any lover before, I follow my pleasure without fear of shame.” “My lover nods. This is news to only one of us. “I guess it’s not out of character,” I say. She shakes her head and smiles. When she turns back to her reading, I sneak a look at her while feigning interest in my work. I want to memorize this moment—sunlight dappling the floor, her long legs crossed at the ankle, the small rasp as she turns the page of her book—in which I feel utterly at ease, able to share my delight in multiple things with her: my strange study of our lovemaking, the recorded fact of it, her total acceptance and actual pleasure in this obscure corner of reflection. If there is a test, it feels like we have passed it. This moment, alone, is different. It is full of things I had not known before.”