friendship
C.S Lewis got it right: friendship is born when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!"
The Anniversary
How Missing the Date Revealed What Actually Matters THE MORNING AFTER THE FORGOTTEN DATE š¤¦ 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 š
By The Curious Writer3 days ago in Humans
The Fight
Why the Same Argument Keeps Happening and What It Really Means THE ARGUMENT THAT WON'T DIE š 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 š½ļø
By The Curious Writer3 days ago in Humans
The First Date
How They Treat the Waiter Tells You Everything THE TEST YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE GIVING š½ļø 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 š
By The Curious Writer3 days ago in Humans
The Ex
The Psychology Behind Digital Orbiting and Why It Keeps You Stuck THE GHOST WHO HAUNTS YOUR FEED š± 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 š¤
By The Curious Writer3 days ago in Humans
Letting Go Of Attachment Without Numbing Your Feelings
Releasing attachment can be misconstrued to mean closing down or simply moving on too fast. The truth of the matter is that healthy emotion release does not involve freezing emotion but rather learning to experience it in its entirety without being dominated by it. It can be attached to an individual, a relationship, a memory, or even a personality. Once it gets painful most individuals attempt to avoid it by ignoring feelings. However, emotional suppression is not a cure of attachment, but it postpones and intensifies it.
By Mark Hipster4 days ago in Humans
What To Do When You Love Someone Who Canāt 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 Hipster4 days ago in Humans
The Twelve-Year-Old in My Covers
My boy is twelve this yearāa middle school freshman. Heās already nearly as tall as my shoulder. Yet, despite being such a big kid, he still insists on crawling into my bed every single night, as steady and predictable as clockwork.
By Water&Well&Page4 days ago in Humans
How Do You Gain Respect Without Coming Across as Overbearing?
You thought you earned the respect of your peers. You thought everyone liked and admired youā¦Yet, you are dead wrong. Why? You found out through a trusted friend that people are talking behind your back. You no longer have the respect you so coveted. In fact, the comments are demeaning.
By Marie Dubuque5 days ago in Humans
