I broke up with a serious boyfriend last year. Our relationship was really complicated. Our breakup wasn’t. When we ended it, we were both of the same opinion that it was over. With initial reluctance, I acknowledged to myself that I was getting less than I wanted or deserved from the relationship. With the honesty that was typical of his
Read moreI have no problem with the Friend Zone. The Friend Box. Friendship Island. The Vortex of Platonic Optimism…. Whatever you want to call it, I think opposite-sex friends are splendid. They can be an arsenal of insight when we need help understanding, well, the opposite sex. What’s not so splendid is the opposite-sex friend who desperately wants to be more
Read moreI jokingly instruct the guys I date that if I ever ask the dreaded question, “do I look fat in this dress?” they should lie, lie, lie. “Always tell a girl she looks fantastic,” I say to them. Yet, even the littlest white lies make me uncomfortable. To me, the problem is that a few harmless snowflakes can easily turn
Read moreI had an interesting encounter with a married friend the other night. My husband, our two-year-old son and I went to dinner at “Jack,” “Jill” and “little Johnny’s” house. They’re friends of ours, and we were looking forward to catching up with them after not seeing them for several months. I should mention now that Jack and Jill have a
Read moreI’ve come to expect all sorts of reactions when I tell people that I’m dating someone eighteen years older than me. The blood-curdling screams have been (thankfully) few in number, though I usually expect jaws to drop and eyebrows to shoot up into hairlines. There are also those whose expressions remain suspiciously blank. When their trained smile spreads across their
Read moreI’m a bad girl. I don’t mean that I’m promiscuous, a partier, or a bitch. I mean I’m bad at being a girl. All my life, societal norms have told me that I’m not a good female specimen. And I’m generally okay with the fact that I play pool, own a snake, am an engineer, like sports, and didn’t own
Read moreAugust 23, 2010 Rough day for me today. I stayed at work a little later than I had planned, so I had to hustle to get to the hospital before visiting hours were over. My friend’s father had to have surgery to remove infections from both of his artificial knees. His son (my friend) lives in Georgia, so I went
Read moreTell me if this sounds familiar. You’re at a party and find yourself talking to a friend’s friend. He seems really cool and makes you laugh, but honestly, you don’t find him all that attractive. Later, he asks if you want to hang out sometime. You agree… hesitantly. Then you make an excuse to leave before he can ask for your number.
Read moreWhen my friend is going through a breakup, it becomes my personal mission to mend her figurative heart. The quantity of chocolate ice cream at the supermarket diminishes noticeably. The local Blockbuster’s angry-girl-loses-guy-but-then-meets-even-cuter-one genre experiences a huge spike in rentals. I have all the right tools to combat my friend’s newly acquired depression…. Except the verbal skills. Some people are
Read moreOne of my pet peeves is the single person who hates being partnerless. Hollywood loves to play up the stereotype of the woman who is desperate for anyone to love her. Sadly, a lot of my friends fit right into this cliché. They hate going to special occasions without a date on their arm. Or they complain about being the
Read moreFriendship. It’s so many wonderful things. It’s caring. It’s affection. It’s laughter and inside jokes. It’s also the last bastion of the freshly dumped. After all, how many breakup conversations include the phrase, “can we just be friends?” So why do we go along with such a “request”? Are we that desperate? Do we get so attached that we’re willing
Read moreYou may not have known Jake, but maybe you can still take something from his death: if there’s someone in your life you still care about, don’t just let them drift away. If you really do still care about them, make that effort and keep them a part of your life. Because you never know when you might lose them.
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To all these random people walking down Fourth Avenue on this random Tuesday afternoon, he was just some motorist they read about in the paper. He was some unlucky guy who had a run-in with the cops. He was a footnote, a statistic, on a simmering issue of police brutality. As far as these people were concerned, he was simply “that guy who got shot.” But to me, he was a friend.
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