The best thing you can do for the people you care about is to try to help them meet their needs.

I’ve been thinking about this tweet since I first saw it. When I examine my current and past relationships, it really does come down to this: all the good things are about the ability to communicate. All the bad things come down to the inability to bridge the gaps between us.

But it’s a beautiful thing to choose and to be chosen. It’s something our culture feels so disconnected from—the deep joy of making permanent decisions. ​ The reason we talk so much is that we have so much to talk about. We are very different people. ​ Within a lifelong commitment, I can free him from the burden of being perfect. Without the expectation of being the “perfect man,” he can be exactly what he is: A great man. (Crumbs and all.) That’s freeing. ​ But for me, I’m choosing to believe the commitment is the beginning. It’s where the story starts.

It’s deep work trying to undo the knots — the deepest work. But it’s also pretty much the only work that matters.

I think one of the best (and rarest) feelings in the world is knowing you’re doing something that feels right. I really really respect people who are good at listening to their gut instincts, who are in tune with what feels right and chart their actions accordingly. ​ True resonance between the right people has its own language. It’s incredibly effortless, a warm glow of energy they give you. Some people you can’t help but love. You can’t resist being a moth drawn to a flame. Something in you just knows: these are my people, this is my person. ​ “If you get close to what you love, who you are is revealed to you, and it expands” – Ethan Hawke ​ A lot of my friends are ‘free’ in ways that I am not and therefore they inspire me to grow and change.

And social media is playing a role, allowing them to distantly observe people they once truly felt connected to, which opens up the gap between their wishes for those friendships and the more anemic reality ​ our lives are not as easily separated into pots that can be placed on separate burners. Extinguishing friendship has consequences for every other aspect of life. ​ As anyone who’s taken time out of the workforce to be a full-time caregiver knows, it’s not always easy to switch a burner back on after it’s been extinguished for a long time. ​ We’re more interested in resilience. You can’t stay truly connected without some level of misunderstanding or conflict, so the real Big Friendship goal is just to stay in it. Instead of pretending we won’t be challenged, we want the ability to bounce back and heal our inevitable wounds. ​ “Friendships don’t have the hallmarks,” Langan says. “They don’t have the milestones.” So it’s up to the people in the friendship to create them. ​ Langan says that another key to staying attached is to find verbal and nonverbal ways to tell each other you plan to be there in the future. ​ Usually the only way through it is to acknowledge it’s happening. And yes, it’s hard. ​ No one human can meet your every single emotional need.

The first installment.

and I realized we’re actually all the same: strangers, smiling on a screen.

I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or—being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology”—but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

for a love that would hurt in a way she could translate into forever.

something else entirely going on but no single person can ever know it, so we fall in love. warm with trust

that hunt is healing. ​ and you haven’t wasted any time. You just spent time learning. And now it’s time to learn something new.

When you double the choices, you halve the agony of deciding whether you want pasta or seafood this evening. You’ve also increased your possible solution sets;

Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. ​ when you engage in any intense activity for the great majority of your waking hours, that activity will tend to become more and more central to your identity — if only because it has displaced other activities and relationships with which you might identify.

When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was. ​ She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing. ​ That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it. ​ It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? ​ Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. ​ To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. ​ What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.

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…

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

This has been so exciting for me because (reason). Thanks for letting me share. What’s important about that to you? Likes don’t count, you can’t respond to them. The triangle of friendship is consistency, vulnerability, and connection, with the latter being the base. I’m going to continue to mingle. It was lovely to meet you/y’all! “Hi, I’m [Jasdev]! Mind if I join you?” Suffixing clothing compliments by asking where they got it from. We all want to be both seen and supported—in love, friendships, and work.

That was a day I felt our friendship leveled-up, because I knew I could trust her to give me honest feedback on any subject. "Truth is Kindness" ​ all forms of lying --including while lies meant to spare feelings-- are associated with less satisfying relationships ​ I slide into dishonesty more often than I’d like. It’s easy and it’s comfortable.

95% of having a significant other is pointing at every dog you see and saying “thats a dog” “look at that dog” and responding with “thats a dog”

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

Two exes give each other dating advice. What can possibly go wrong?

“However, I think this is more a case of accommodation rather than intended design. Group chat is simply a series of free pipes distributed via an app for you to send images and text through. ‘You’ as a group get to decide what is ok, normal, and expected to be shared. Rarely is it ever an explicit ‘decision’.”

“@purpleyay @not_unambitious I know someone who tracks contacting friends in OmniFocus – which sounds almost callous at first blush, but really strike me as a deep expression of caring”

“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.”

Twitter can be a strange place, which is why you woke up Monday morning wondering why your timeline was littered with posts about towels and/or lists of things that every couple should own. Here's why.