Remember being a teenager and desperately wanting to date and find that special someone? One of the most universal things about being a teenager is that we all can’t wait to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. We spend countless hours discovering ways to flatter our appearances (despite puberty’s deterrents), and scheming about how to land ourselves the holy grail of adolescence: a relationship. We wonder and fantasize about what it will be like to be elevated to the status of someone’s “girlfriend” or “boyfriend,” gossiping with our friends about who is going out with who, who we have a crush on, etc., completely unaware of what it really means to be in a relationship. The irony of our teenage years is that we spend all our energy agonizing and wondering, “who? how? …and when?” as if the end goal is to have our first boyfriend or girlfriend, but once we actually get what we wish for, we lament that relationships are not nearly as simple and carefree as they seem on the outside. Suddenly we find ourselves in a tangle of emotions—not just ours, but our partners’ too. Teenage dating is like putting a pair of baby deer on a trampoline together—before we even have a chance to find our own legs and confidence, we suddenly have another person thrown into the mix, creating a haphazard jumble of confusion.

(more…)

When in a relationship, we are challenged with the task of maintaining our individuality while also opening up to our partner to establish a strong union. Building a foundation of trust, love, and support takes work, because both people must negotiate the boundaries between independence and togetherness. Figuring out these boundaries is a lot like dancing. Couples have to figure out the appropriate distances between each other through a trial-and-error process of stepping on each other’s feet and getting too far away until they find the correct balance. And the “correct balance” is never 100% static because couples need to be flexible in order to adapt to changing emotional climates, unexpected variations, and big life changes.
(more…)

I recently started reading a book called “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin, and it got me thinking about marriage and communication. In her book, Gretchen talks about her approach to improving her marriage as part of a larger project to increase her overall happiness. Her marriage is not “in trouble,” but there are things that she wants to improve, including focusing less on small disputes, nagging and blaming less.
(more…)

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Committed,” she quotes, “[We] go through two puberties in life. The first puberty is when our bodies become mature enough for sex; the second puberty is when our minds become mature enough for sex” (105). In my own quest to emotionally understand sex, I came up with a personal analogy about the learning process.
(more…)

Inside all of us lurks a dark side. You may recognize this darker side as the cynical voice in the back of your head that whispers evilly that you won’t succeed, that you aren’t beautiful, or that you don’t deserve to be loved. Having a dark side seems useless and unwelcome, and it is completely natural that you may be thinking, “why do I have a dark side?? I never asked for that! What on earth is the point??” Unfortunately, having a dark side is as natural to being human as having a nose. The dark side provides needed contrast so that we can understand and appreciate the purer things in life like love and self-confidence. One of the biggest challenges that we face in life is to recognize that our dark sides cannot be eliminated, and to understand that the dark voices we hear come from a place of fear and uncertainty.
(more…)