dating
All about dating. First dates, three years into a relationship, Tinder, and more.
The Vow
Why Our Second Wedding Was Better Than Our First THE VOW THAT SHATTERED 💔 On our wedding day in 2009 I stood across from my husband Thomas in a church filled with two hundred and fifty guests and spoke vows that I meant with every atom of my being: I promise to love you in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until death do us part, and I believed with the absolute certainty of a twenty-six-year-old who had never been tested that these vows were not aspirational but descriptive, that they captured who I already was rather than who I would need to become, and that the love I felt standing in that church in that dress with that man looking at me like I was the center of his universe would sustain itself automatically through whatever challenges life presented because love in my twenty-six-year-old understanding was a feeling that once established was permanent and self-maintaining rather than a practice that required daily cultivation and that could wither from neglect as surely as a garden untended 💍
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
The Anniversary
How Missing the Date Revealed What Actually Matters THE MORNING AFTER THE FORGOTTEN DATE 🤦 I woke up on the morning of October fifteenth to a text from my mother that read "Happy anniversary to my favorite couple! 15 years!" accompanied by approximately seventeen heart emojis, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach because I had completely forgotten our fifteenth wedding anniversary and based on the absence of any card or gift or even a verbal acknowledgment from my wife Rachel, she had forgotten it too, and this mutual forgetting which should have been a minor embarrassment that we laughed about over coffee instead triggered a crisis of evaluation that consumed the following weeks as we both separately and then together confronted the question of what it meant that two people who had stood before friends and family and God and promised to love each other forever had become so consumed by the logistics of daily existence, by work and children and mortgage and the thousand routine demands that fill the space where intentional love used to live, that the anniversary of their commitment had passed without either of them noticing 💔
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
Secret Journal
The Private Words That Changed How I See the Man I Married THE DISCOVERY I WASN'T SUPPOSED TO MAKE 🔍 I found my husband Michael's journal by accident while looking for the spare car keys in his desk drawer, a leather-bound notebook that I initially mistook for an address book until I opened it and recognized his handwriting and realized with the immediate guilt of someone who has crossed a boundary they cannot uncross that I was looking at his private thoughts, pages and pages of them written in the specific cramped script he used when writing quickly as though the words were coming faster than his hand could capture them, and I should have closed the journal immediately and put it back and never mentioned it because privacy within marriage is not just courteous but essential, and the trust that allows two people to share a life requires the confidence that certain internal spaces remain inviolate, but I did not close it because the first sentence I read stopped me: "I don't think Jennifer knows how afraid I am most of the time" and the shock of seeing my name combined with an emotion my husband had never once expressed to me in eleven years of marriage produced a compulsion to read that overrode the ethical imperative to stop 📖😮
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
The Fight
Why the Same Argument Keeps Happening and What It Really Means THE ARGUMENT THAT WON'T DIE 🔄 Every Sunday evening between approximately six and eight PM my partner James and I have the same fight, not the same topic necessarily though the topics repeat with depressing regularity including housework distribution, spending habits, family visit frequency, and the eternal question of whose turn it is to cook dinner, but the same underlying dynamic where a minor irritation triggers disproportionate emotional response that escalates through a predictable sequence of criticism, defensiveness, withdrawal, and eventual exhausted reconciliation that resolves nothing because the same fight will recur the following Sunday with different surface content but identical emotional architecture, and this pattern which we have been repeating for three years with the reliability of a weekly television schedule has become so familiar that we can predict each other's responses to the point where the fight feels scripted rather than spontaneous, and the question of why two intelligent adults who love each other and who are aware of the pattern cannot break it has become more interesting and more important than the question of who should do the dishes 🍽️
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
100 Dates
THE EXPERIMENT BORN FROM DESPERATION 😩 At thirty-three years old after three years of sporadic dating app usage that had produced approximately fifteen first dates, zero second dates, and a growing conviction that I was fundamentally undateable, I made a decision that my therapist described as either brilliantly strategic or clinically insane: I would go on one hundred first dates in a single year, averaging approximately two per week, using every dating platform available and accepting every match that seemed remotely reasonable rather than applying the impossibly specific filters that had been reducing my potential matches to a trickle of people who met criteria I had never questioned but that were eliminating the vast majority of potentially compatible partners before I ever had a conversation with them 📱
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
The First Date
How They Treat the Waiter Tells You Everything THE TEST YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE GIVING 🍽️ You are sitting across from someone who has been charming and attentive and funny for the past forty-five minutes, making eye contact, asking thoughtful questions, laughing at your jokes, and generally performing the specific version of themselves that they have determined is most likely to produce a second date, and everything about the interaction suggests that this person is kind and considerate and worth your time, and then the waiter arrives and something shifts, not dramatically enough to constitute obvious rudeness but subtly enough that you almost miss it, a slight change in tone from warm to transactional, a failure to make eye contact with someone who is performing a service, an impatience with a question about the specials that would not have been displayed if the question had come from you rather than from someone in an apron, and this shift which lasts approximately thirty seconds before the date persona is reassumed contains more useful information about your potential partner's character than the entire preceding forty-five minutes of performed charm because the way someone treats a person who can do nothing for them reveals who they actually are rather than who they are pretending to be 👀
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
The Ex
The Psychology Behind Digital Orbiting and Why It Keeps You Stuck THE GHOST WHO HAUNTS YOUR FEED 📱 You blocked them, unblocked them, muted them, unmuted them, and told yourself a hundred times that you would stop checking whether they viewed your Instagram stories, but every time you post something you find yourself scrolling through the viewer list with the specific anxiety of someone checking a pregnancy test, simultaneously hoping for and dreading the result, and when their name appears in the list which it almost always does because they watch everything you post with the faithful consistency of someone who is monitoring your life without participating in it, you feel a surge of validation so brief it barely registers before being replaced by the confusion and frustration of trying to understand what it means when someone who chose to leave your life continues watching you live it from the digital equivalent of a parked car across the street, close enough to observe but too far away to be reached, present enough to notice but absent enough to deny 😤
By The Curious Writerabout 14 hours ago in Humans
The Break
Even though the TV show 'Friends' has been off the air for over twenty years, there still remains an interesting discussion topic about whether Ross and Rachel were 'on a break' and whether his sleeping with another woman was cheating or not. You, the audience, will have to be familiar with the plot and characters to enjoy this dissection.
By Stephanie Van Ormanabout 15 hours ago in Humans
What To Do When You Love Someone Who Can’t Love Back
It is one of the most emotionally complicated and painful situations a person can experience when he or she loves a person who will not love him or her back. It establishes a silent yet strong struggle between hope and reality. One side has deep emotional attachment and the other emotional absence or unavailability. This disproportion may cause longing, confusion, self-doubt and even emotional exhaustion.
By Mark Hipstera day ago in Humans
How To Rebuild Trust After Betrayal Or Cheating
The most vulnerable, but crucial building block of any relationship is trust. The emotional blow of betraying or being cheated on can be devastating. It can be shocking, angry, sad, confused and insecure. It is not easy to build trust after such experience, and to some relationships, it is possible in case both partners are ready to involve themselves in honest, consistent, and emotionally mature healing works.
By Willian Jamesa day ago in Humans
Why Emotional Neglect Hurts More Than You Realize
Emotional neglect may be unseen, yet its consequences may be severe and lasting. Emotional neglect, unlike physical abuse or open conflict, is characterized by the lack of something rather than by doing. It takes place when emotional demands of attention, validation, empathy, and support are disregarded and not fulfilled. Since it is not that obvious, most of the people fail to realize it is harmful until its consequences start to determine their relationships, self-esteem and mental health.
By Willian Jamesa day ago in Humans
How To Recover After A Breakup Without Losing Your Identity
The process of a breakup may seem like an emotional tsunami. It trembles habits, interpersonal relations, self-perception, and future prospects simultaneously. To most individuals, the loss of a partner is not the worst thing at all, it is the loss of the sense of identity which was closely connected to the relationship. It is not impossible to come out of a break up without losing your identity, but it takes conscious effort to find your emotional strength, be aware of your emotions and give yourself time to heal.
By Willian Jamesa day ago in Humans
