When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.

some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.

would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?

In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!

When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.

Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.

Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.

when we say “I want my partner to be ambitious” we’re actually saying something like “I want to feel relaxed around my partner” or “I want to feel safe around my partner”.Their ambition is just a way of accessing that internal experience.

Let’s say you want someone who is really emotionally vulnerable, someone who can and will communicate what they’re feeling. That, in turn, makes you feel relaxed, because you don’t have to guess if they’re mad or upset.The internal experience we’re seeking, what we actually want, is relaxation. Emotional honesty is one way to access that relaxation.

Validating whether the external characteristics you’re seeking exist in another person to the extent that you desire can be confusing.Much less confusing is this question: “do I feel relaxed around this person?”Or: “Is this person helping me access more relaxation in my life?”Instead of playing detective with another person’s personality, we now get to turn our attention inwards, towards how we’re feeling. In return, we get a much clearer answer.

our emotional experience reveals itself through our patterns of behaviour. We can gather evidence on how we’re feeling through how we’re showing up around that person.If I’m clear that I want to feel warmth when I’m around my future partner, then I can look at how I acted on a date. Did I show up as the warmest version of myself? Did the other person’s presence make embodying that warmth easier or harder?The ultimate version of this question is “do I show up as my favourite version of myself around this person?”

This question incorporates everything we’ve been discussing: it centers our attention on our internal experience, using the lens of our patterns of behaviour.It also avoids us having to do extensive analysis of whether this person is a “match” based on a list of characteristics we think we should be seeking.

consider these journal prompts:When I think of my favourite version of myself, what is that person like? What feelings do they have abundant access to? How do they show up on a date?When do I have the easiest time being that version of me? Around which people? What qualities do those people have?What feelings are most important for me to experience with a potential partner? Have I been prioritizing those feelings?⚡️ insights into cultivating your most confident self; delivered once a weekSubscribe

When our relationship first got rocky early on, everyone told me to try couples therapy. As a good little millennial raised on daily Oprah episodes and bolstered by viral Gabor Maté clips on Instagram, I thought it seemed like the obvious decision. And so for years, from the time we were just dating all the way to the brittle end of our marriage, we sat in front of an array of interchangeable therapists

I thought our troubles were fundamental to our personalities and would require significant work; my husband thought our issues could be chalked up to stressful life events.

I twirled in front of him in a new pair of gold sequin pants before my company’s Christmas party. “How do I look?” I asked, to which he replied, “You didn’t take out the trash.” We were such disappointments to each other.

Teresa No. 1 thought everything was my ex-husband’s fault, but Teresa No. 4 thought it was all mine. Teresa No. 2, after listening to me talk for 51 minutes about how I felt hopeless, shrugged her shoulders at me. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied. I did. I wanted her to say that we should end our relationship with the remaining scraps of dignity we had. She never did, and we instead just moved on to the next Teresa we found. When I cried to Teresa No. 3 that I felt like a failure as a wife, she cried with me, her heavy tears rivaling my own. That night, my ex suggested we should stop seeing her.

Teresa No. 5 told us we needed more sessions more frequently. “There’s a lot of work to do here,” she said, and I wanted to pull her hair. Should there be this much work between two people who ostensibly love each other? Even the ones who seemed to know we were doomed still opened their calendars at the end of each session and urged us to come back, to try again.

instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it (repeatedly): “We talked about this. I lashed out because I felt disconnected from you. We need more date nights.”

The kindest thing my ex could have done was leave me, even if we were still trying to make it work. After therapy, on the morose subway ride home where I would hold his limp hand, we’d zone out staring at ads for dating apps. “What should we do for dinner?” he’d ask, and we’d pretend, yet again, to be on the same team.

I don’t regret any of our time with the Teresas; I needed to try just a few more times to make it work, and I needed someone to be a witness to my misery. Teresas No. 1 through No. 6 never told me to leave, but little by little they helped me give myself permission all the same.

my ex made this final assessment about me: No one would put as much work into me as he did. No one would love me enough to try this hard. He would be the only person who’d ever try to keep me. I thought about this a lot as I untangled my life from his, as I went through my calendar and removed the future sessions we had planned with lucky Teresa No. 7. I thought about it when I added sessions for just me and my own therapist — while no one would split the cost with me, I knew it would be worth every out-of-pocket cent. I knew he meant it as a cruelty, but I repeated his words to myself whenever I felt unsure about ending things for good: No one will ever put this particular kind of work into a relationship with me again. No one will ever fight this hard to stay with me.  God. I hope he’s right.

often these days I find myself in the position of defending someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous.

Players must assume full responsibility for their cards, a strategy dubbed “C.P.E.” — Conception, Planning, Execution — that was designed to combat the male tendency to execute (pick up milk from the market when asked) but leave the conceiving (recognizing that your toddler only drinks 2 percent milk) and planning (monitoring the fridge to ensure the 2 percent doesn’t run out) to the female partner. In other words, as Rodsky told me, “Own. Your. Shit.” Partners also must agree to a Minimum Standard of Care (or “M.S.C.”) for tasks, meaning that even if the owner of the Garbage card is fine with empty pizza boxes piling up on the kitchen counter, he may still have to throw them out promptly.

often, several persistent challenges emerge. Implementing the practice is time-consuming and so is maintaining it. In fact, in all of my interviews, I failed to find a couple who followed the rules to a tee for longer than a few months. Just to get Fair Play off the ground, the initiator has to read the book, procure the cards, create an organizational system (I’ve seen everything from Google spreadsheets so detailed they resemble stock-portfolio trackers to oversize whiteboards dotted with custom Etsy chore magnets), then explain it all to a partner.

A woman recently polled one group to ask whether her spouse should be expected to pick up his own socks if she owned the Cleaning card. Another turned to the Fair Play community after a family member died, seeking advice on how to ask her partner to cover her chores while she grieved. All this time and effort falls overwhelmingly on women by design.

social movements start with the oppressed,” Rodsky says, because “people who want the status quo maintained” won’t push for change. As Rodsky recently said on a podcast, “You teach somebody something now because it will benefit your future hours.” But the prep work has pushed many women away because, as one Brooklyn mother put it, it’s “more than I can handle right now.”

Stories also abound of partners agreeing to cards only to quietly drop them. This sometimes leads to “chore chicken,” a resentment-fueled phenomenon in which Partner A refuses to pick up the slack on Partner B’s tasks, so the dirty dishes fester or shirts languish at the dry cleaners. Partner A silently rages because this isn’t how C.P.E is supposed to work.

Other spouses, when invited to play fair, have responded with “I get it. You want me to do more. But I don’t want to play a game. Just tell me what to do.” That’s what Paige Connell, 33, a Boston mom of four under 6, heard when she first showed her husband the deck. “But that places the burden right back on the woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be his project manager.”

The manner in which the “fewer cards” partner responds to the Fair Play system can serve as a barometer for the health of a relationship, says Jenny Cooke Malstrom, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle. Fair Play doesn’t cause divorce, she says, but it’s more likely to backfire in at-risk relationships where the baseline level of love and respect is already low. “To have your husband straight up say ‘This isn’t important’ makes what’s already implicitly happening explicit,” Malstrom says.

a 2017 Sex Roles study which suggested that the perception of fairness in family labor is a stronger predictor of maternal mental health than the actual division of labor. The study is the primary reason her system intentionally prioritizes feelings of equity over literal equality. Rodsky isn’t the only relationship expert to say that a 50/50 chore split isn’t realistic. Brené Brown famously went viral in a 2020 appearance on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, when she explained that the balance of responsibility in her marriage changes day to day depending on each partner’s mental and emotional capacity — and that constant responsibility trading is critical to supporting one another.

“It was never written to be prescriptive. My intention was to [help women] hold their boundaries in a different way. Any movement towards ‘I’m not going to live this way anymore,’ I consider a win.”

I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened.

Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies.

I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one?

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl.

Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.

we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?

There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan.

the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write.

I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.

One key problem across the apps is the slog of self-presentation, or “impression management,” said Rachel Katz, a digital media sociologist who studies online dating at the University of Salford in the UK. “An important aspect of it is knowing your audience,” Katz said. On dating apps, you don’t know who exactly you’re presenting yourself to when picking a profile picture or composing your bio. You also don’t have physical cues that can help you adjust that self-presentation. “You’re trying to come up with something that’s generally appealing to people, but it can’t be too weird. It can’t be too unique,” said Bryce. “That’s partly why it’s exhausting,” Katz explains, “because it’s this constant labor. ... You’re not really sure of how to do it, you can’t just fit into a comfortable social role.”

When dating apps are not delivering on compatibility, Dean said, they are leading you to “believe that there’s a forever volume of people you can always like.”

Ury rejects the notion that apps should be asking people for more about themselves in writing or through extensive questionnaires. Users may match up on paper but end up disappointed in real life. “I would have rather that people understand that sooner by meeting up earlier,” she said. “Use the app as a matchmaker who gives you the matches — and then, as quickly as possible, the two of you should be chatting live to see if you are a match,” she said. “We found that three days of chatting is the sweet spot for scheduling a date.”

People get too caught up in finding a perfect person, and don't understand that their partner is fluid and ever-changing. Love is a choice. If someone asks you why you're with your current partner, the answer should always be "because I chose to be." If that choice is dependent on your partner remaining fixed in place, or dependent on a fantasy version of them you have in your head, then you have fantasy love. Love is not desire or admiration, it's acceptance. It's saying "I love the person you are, whoever that may be today."

People are not Pokemon to be worn down slowly over time until you eventually get a chance to capture them. If you want to ask someone out, just do it.

Each person I've been with wants a different set of things from the relationship smorgasbord, but most sort of assume that everyone else wants the exact same slice. So get specific. Ask for what you want and be clear about what they want. If that changes, talk about it.

Sometimes when you're around someone, you may morph into some version of yourself that you don't like. I used to believe this was a problem with me and the other person: unfixable, requiring a split. But this is something you can cultivate too, if you're aware of it. You fix it by noticing which habits cause you to be that way. If you express it, your partner is your teammate in getting you back to the person you want to be.

People aren't really themselves when they're going through strong emotions and really just need support. Love is saying "yes, I choose you, even now."

the heart is a muscle: you can make it bigger by training it, and the bigger it gets the less it cares for symmetry or saving face. Instead of repetitions of lifting weights, you train your heart with repetitions of directing compassion at things, like that friend who's less available to see you than they used to be, or the crush who ghosted you after several nice dates.

someone saying no to you is your opportunity to show yourself who you really are. Because it strains your capacity, in the moment, to feel love. The moment when you hear sorry I'm booked the whole weekend once again when calling a friend about dinner plans. When you learn an old friend is in town and hasn’t reached out to see you. When you notice that your best friend is prioritizing their developing relationship to the detriment of your friendship.

The trouble with wisdom is that it's easy to forget. In my more sober moments I'm fully aware that we're all manifestations of the same thing, that however many followers or expensive things or famous friends you have, you are nothing more than a frail primate in a decaying body. I know that climbing any of these ladders brings a fleeting and unsatisfying happiness. But in the moment that someone says no, in the moment that someone I admire fails to show up when they had promised to, the world morphs back into something I know it isn't: this individuated, transactional competition. This zero-sum game that promises that if I just got a bit further ahead I’d be content and never feel bad about myself again.

There's a DFW quote that goes something like, sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt, and my mind wanders to it whenever I think about what I went through this year. When I suffered from excruciating pain, I desperately wanted something to take it away: a friend, a therapist, a new city, at times even the very person who caused the pain in the first place. But there's nothing that will really make you feel better. Nobody can bear the pain for you; you just have to sit with it until it subsides. And it might take a long time, but it will get better eventually.

we both commiserated over how rare it is to find someone that really clicks, "vibes", or is "on the same wavelength" with us, however you put it. In my experience, it rarely has anything to do with shared interests (which is how people typically try to look for friends), and I can't judge whether I'll click with someone until I talk to them and spend time with them in person. I've tried for years to dissect the components of this compatibility, or what makes my conversations with some people light up where others sputter out, but it's incredibly difficult for me to distill any useful insights.

Crushes are fun. Or at least they’re supposed to be fun as long as you keep them that way. As long as you don’t get emotionally invested or fixated or keep imagining your reality to be what it is not. But if you expect too much or feel too easily, you might end up with self-inflicted heartache which just leaves you feeling empty-handed or just empty inside. And all of this for someone who never even promised you anything from the start.

maybe it's better to think of people you know highly. It's good to have that positive outlook and perspective on that person because you want to do well in front of them. It's not delusional or scary at all. It's just a shift in mindset and honestly if you want to see things in flowery rose-colored glasses (and it helps) then I don't see why not?

somebody else in this thread has already commented on married men living longer. It works both ways, too. Each partner keeps tabs on the other, notices problems, encourages them to stick to health resolutions, etc. Plus you both are much less likely to forget things or miss appointments, because the other one is there to say, "Didn't you say..." or "Weren't you going to...?" and so on.

I don’t see myself ready to invest much in something I’m not even sure I want. Also, if it doesn’t work out, I’m scared of leaving a broken heart in another person.

I want to make myself accountable for taking these personal matters more seriously. As a friend told me recently, I should “whole-ass” it, not “half-ass” it, if I want to progress.

I’m not interested in a relationship for its own sake. I could never be with anyone I’m not genuinely interested in, only to have someone and not be alone. I don’t want to compromise or lower my standards to end singledom. I’ve written about perfectionism from a work-related perspective on this blog before. It apparently also applies to my personal life and partner choice.

Subject after subject reported that they were on Tinder to find someone to love and to love them back and defined love in the most traditional of terms: something that took work, a container in which sex was sacred and where intimacy built over time. They acknowledged that their encounters on Tinder didn’t offer that, yet they went to Tinder to find it. The contradiction was confusing: They wanted sex to be meaningful but felt that Tinder removed the sacredness. They wanted bonds to be lasting but acknowledged they were easily broken.