dating

First off, in case it helps to hear this: it’s all right to want to break up with your boyfriend. You’re allowed to end a relationship for any reason, and “I only want to date women, and my partner is now very clearly not a woman” is a perfectly valid one. Sometimes, a person’s gender transition…

Despite the initial shame, guilt, name-calling, jokes, and fear related to disclosure, my STI presented me with a chance to love myself more deeply. It gave me a chance to sit with myself, who I thought myself to be, who I thought I was going to become, and who I really was.

Just because you face your own set of specific challenges doesn’t mean you get a free pass to discount the humanity of someone else.

The news is full of the wrong ways to try to have sex. Forever we’ve seen high profile men – almost always men – chasing people for sex, abusively. For the last few years, some high-profile men have been held at least a little accountable for it, which means it is not always swept under the rug anymore. But now that the abuse is more visible, if you stare into that abyss long enough, it might start to stare back at you. You could end up lying on your bed wondering if being a guy while being horny is somehow inherently tainted and gross. Most of us want to find someone or a few someones, for relationships or hookups, but right now, looking at some of that foulness, it might feel like trying to find a partner is a minefield of red flags because men’s sexuality is inextricably abusive. It isn’t.

It can feel like the world will end if you haven’t had sex or a sexual or romantic relationship by your mid-twenties. There are countless ways in which our culture puts pressure on young people to gain experience in romantic and sexual relationships. But truthfully, if you don’t have much, or even any, experience with dating and sex, you are not doomed to never experience romantic and sexual connection. The world also will not end.

A short, fast, sex ed summary about the bare basics of healthy relationships.

I love this question, because it’s something I think doesn’t get discussed enough, and while I think the answer is fairly simple, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I know the thought of asking someone out can be intimidating even to people who’ve done it before, so when you haven’t had any experience…

It sounds like this is really stressing you out. Hopefully I can help by answering your first question right off the bat: yes, this is normal. I think you’re right that the lack of contact could have been a factor in the cooling of your feelings towards your long-distance partners; that’s a common…

You’re facing down a process that, according to a bazillion sitcoms and teen dramas, ought to fill you with dread: introducing the person you’re dating to your parents and trying to peacefully navigate their feelings about your budding romance.

When people ask about lowering their standards and whether it’s worth it to do so, the answer to that question depends on what those standards are. You didn’t describe yours in detail, so I don’t have much to go on, but in general, I’d divide what people tend to call “standards” into two types of…