Brittany Spanos is a pop music journalist who writes BRIT POP on Substack. She has written for i-D, The Cut, ELLE, Pitchfork, and more. She previously worked at The Village Voice and most recently was a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where she wrote cover stories on artists like Adele, Harry Styles, Chappell Roan, Cardi B, Miley Cyrus, and numerous other stars. She teaches a course on Taylor Swift at her alma mater NYU, as well.

The curse of being a beautiful, plus-size woman is the way people marvel at my confidence. It’s almost like they really want to exclaim How dare you?! at the idea that a girl who has never been skinny having the gall to believe that she is deserving of both love and desire.

Look, I believe any plus-size woman who survived growing up in the early ‘00s deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. “Representation” of fat women in movies and shows in the aughts left a lot to be desired: They were always either the butt of a joke, the reluctant last pick of a mid man who had no business having an attitude, or the helicopter best friend (and unofficial bodyguard) of a willowy beauty.

So, naturally, the first time a cute guy asked me out at a bar, I wondered if it was a trap, if the man had been Shallow Hal-ed — Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow, you know that we know what you did — to ignore all the thinner women around me. But I swallowed my trepidation and let him take me out for a glass of wine. When I realized I wasn’t into him because we had nothing in common, it was a relief. I could finally exercise my God-given right as a woman to lie and say It’s not you, it’s me.

As I started dating more actively in my twenties, I noticed that the majority of my interactions were literally… normal. Casual dates, second, or third ones weren’t out of reach. There was even something perversely rewarding about the more innocent catcalls I would get while walking down the street — shoutout to the man who hollered “Hey you, with the glasses!” at me in the East Village once — or laughing off the bad pick-up lines men would throw out at clubs.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I just as sexy as my skinny friends who had been dating with ease since they were in middle school?

Maybe it’s the privilege of living in a city as vast as New York where there are more options, but there was an ease to my romantic interactions that I didn’t expect when I was a teenager convinced that dating would be a battleground because of my size. Especially since I didn’t want to be a choice made of horny desperation or fetishization.

“Chalk it up to being both a Leo and an only child: At some point the little voice in my head that told me I was less than the girls who could fit into a Brandy Melville top just turned off.”

The sobering truth along the way was that dating was a battleground for everyone. When I graduated from college in 2014, dating apps were beginning to commodify romance and sex into a hell my friends and I willingly descended into at once. Over the years, I have commiserated with my friends who date men — all of whom are different sizes and of different dating aptitudes — about the hurdles we faced while navigating the scene. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of first dates between us, the problems were all the same: commitment issues, ghosting, mediocre sex. I realized if it was bad for all of us, I needed to unburden myself with the notion that my size was the roadblock to finding love.

I decided to start dating like the type of rom-com heroine who lives in a Manhattan penthouse on a media salary. I dated openly and stopped taking every meet up that didn’t blossom into romance as a reflection of society’s restrictions on what fat women are supposed to have. The reality is they weren’t: My first serious relationship ended because of a job he took that forced us to date long distance. It was my choice to walk away, knowing I needed something different instead of forcing myself to be unhappy out of fear of being lonely. Others turned into dead ends because we weren’t on the same page, a common disconnect in the types of connections we needed from each other. No one I pursued or who pursued me wanted to change my body. Besides, the majority of the time, the physical connection felt stronger than the emotional one.

By my thirties, I realized I am as hot to others as I believed myself to be — and I could feel the difference that confidence made, in my relationships with others and in the one I had with myself.

I’ve been marked safe from dating losers who have ever made me feel bad about my body. Even my most emotionally harrowing situationships have never made me feel physically inadequate — an Olympic level feat on my part. It allowed me to experiment and to date people I respected. There are still men I had brief, torrid affairs with in international cities whom I consider friends, who check in, ask for music recommendations, or even read my articles. They set a higher bar when I came back home, making me realize how important it is to be respected in any romantic or sexual connection.

There was no big reckoning at a swimming pool where I learned how to fearlessly wear a bikini in public or the introduction of some male savior who whispered “you’re perfect just the way you are” into my ear. I mostly chalk it up to being both a Leo and an only child: At some point the little voice in my head that told me I was less than the girls who could fit into a Brandy Melville top just turned off. So when men did tell me I was beautiful or sexy, I never felt surprised by the statement. I believed it intrinsically and carried that through my interactions well beyond my dating life.

By the time I entered a relationship with my current boyfriend, I knew the exact type of love I deserved. The secret was it was the same type as everyone else.

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Ali Royals loves true stories and hates writing in the third person, even though she’s doing it right now. She’s a writer from Baltimore whose work has been published in Byline, Office, and the LA Review of Books. If you’re tall, fun, and literate, Ali Royals is also single.

You don’t know how long a minute can last until you’ve spent one being told by a medical professional that you’ve tested positive for HIV. I was showing zero symptoms of STDs, but all the signs of post-hookup remorse, and, mostly, I wanted someone to medically reassure me everything was gonna be just fine. So I went to the MedRite clinic on 14th Street. Do not go to the Medrite clinic on 14th street.

My vision was blacking out in the back of a cab weaving its way uptown, on the phone with a nurse as she explained to me that my HIV test results had come back positive — detailing how the test itself works, the antibodies and the antigens, the semi-preventable progression to AIDS, her voice barely an audible buzz in my ears as I flipped through all the ways my life as I knew it was so totally over. My cab pulled up to my apartment and I stumbled out into the bike lane, my knees liquified at my new reality, phone pressed to my ear to keep my brain from spilling out into the street.

“So, the test…” the nurse paused, bored or stoned or uncertain how to right the terrible wrong she’d just committed, “...was actually a false positive.”

My vision refocused from total blurred-out darkness, my lungs refilled with air, my liquified patellas calcified. “You don’t have HIV,” she clarified.

I thought of all the ways I could handle this: phone calls to the medical board, the most negative Yelp review in history, a simple act of arson. When I regained the ability to speak, I asked the nurse, “Don’t you think maybe that’s where the story should have started?”

Let me tell you where the story should have ended. ‘Twas the night before Brat Summer. I was DJing at Gonzo’s, the entirety of the new Charli album already illegally digitized on my USB. I could see him in the crowd weighing the decision to talk to me. A woman’s (and a DJ’s) intuition is seldom wrong about such matters.

He was so cute. Cherubic. Boyish. Tall! A little mole dotting his cheek, curly-q brown hair, a smile so mischievous I could tell he was capable of causing real trouble. He made me laugh. I gave him my number. He texted me his name. I said: So who are you? He’d said: I’m just a chic normie. And I loved that line so much I stole it as my own, though I didn’t love it enough to let him, a totally random stranger, take me to dinner. Though he did ask twice. Don’t forget about me, he’d texted me, moments before I swiftly forgot all about him for a full calendar year.

Then I remembered. Seven words to capture my full attention: my friend has a crush on you.

“WHO?!” I’d all but barked at my friend’s boyfriend, who’d relayed this information to me and was henceforth commanding every ounce of my consciousness at an art gallery opening.

“He said he met you at a DJ set last summer…?”

Of course: The chic normie. My friend’s boyfriend is genuinely cool — which cannot always be said of all friends’ boyfriends — someone whose taste in companionship I trust. It was Brat Summer and it’s completely different but still Brat Summer, my desire for mischief rising with the temperature. So I did what any single, trouble-seeking young woman would do: I texted the boy.

Of course we slept together. The kinetic energy of a cute boy having a crush on me sucked me under, carried me away.

The act itself was nothing worth writing home — or even here — about. I will spare you the libidinal details, but I will tell you this: He was not a chic normie at all. He had a pale pink iPhone. He had also inexplicably been carrying a purse. But it wasn’t until his friend let his “occupation” slip at the bar that I discovered what his long, beautiful fingers spattered with black paint should’ve revealed long before: He was a graffiti artist.

I had a lot of questions: What was his tag? Had he been to jail? Did he buy his spray paint at Blick? Could we have paint-focused pillow talk?

“The hottest job a man can have is architect, followed by director, then composer, then fishmonger. The worst include: actor, line cook, and DJ (obviously). I wasn’t, at the time, quite sure where to place graffiti artist.”

He wouldn’t share his moniker, but through the scrupulous stalking of his friends’ Instagrams — he’s offline, of course, and I would be better than Kash Patel at running the FBI — I figured it out mere hours after he left my apartment. His tag was slime. But not actually. I’ve changed it for the sake of maintaining his anonymity and apparent street cred, which I’ve come to learn is very real. I’m not eager to incur the wrath of the graffiti underworld, which is one I know very little about, other than that there are rules and collectives and territories, each tag a badge of honor, a piece of proof. Respectfully, I hope the graffiti community does not read.

My friends and I are very intrigued by vocation-based romance. We keep a running list in our shared notes app about the best and worst male professions. For example: The hottest job a man can have is architect, followed by director, then composer, then fishmonger. The worst include: actor, line cook, and DJ (obviously). I wasn’t, at the time, quite sure where to place graffiti artist.

At first, having slept with the graffiti artist was kind of sexy, like I’d not only slept with EsDeeKid but had learned his secret identity — his real government name, the delicious details of his life, had his face-obscuring balaclava crumpled in the corner of my bedroom. I felt like I had gained access to a hidden side of New York. In the days that followed our hookup, I felt that vacuous sense of remorse that follows a mid, meaningless one-night stand. And then, of course, there was the matter of the clinic, the false positive, the HIV-induced emotional distress. I hated that I’d done it, hated the compounding horrors, the plasticky ping of regret. I pulled out my notes app and filed graffiti artist under the Bad Vocations column. The whole thing felt dirty — and not even in the fun way. A bad decision that I wanted to rinse myself clean of. So I ghosted the graffiti artist. But I still see him every day.

Wherever I went, there he was — not in everything but on it, every edifice of New York infected. Like a herpetic lesion, he’d broken out across all five boroughs, appearing at the most inopportune times, the highest points of stress. Slime blistered onto billboards with spectacular views of the city, the rusted underbellies of bridges, the water tower at the Greenpoint dog park where I dog-sit. Slime spotted on a building off the BQE while zipping to JFK on the precipice of missing a high-stakes flight. Slime scrawled on the railing next door to my brand new apartment while I waited for my movers to arrive with all my worldly possessions. Each outbreak forced me to reckon with the consequences of my actions. He hadn’t given me an STD. He’d done something worse: He’d given one to my city.

There is no cure. For HIV, for herpes, for the bad decision of hooking up with a prolific graffiti artist with the time and ability to paint himself onto every surface of your city. You will see him in his signature rounded, puffy letters — almost always in black and white, but sometimes with a flash of raw red, or mucusy green, an occasional slashing sharpness to the letters. Almost always, he turns the sloping tail of slime’s “e” into a smiley face. I do not smile back.

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Peyton Dix is a writer and the co-host of the pop culture podcast Lemme Say This.

One of the greatest burdens of my life is my approachable face. Despite my best efforts (living in New York City for almost a decade), my charmingly round cheeks and friendly disposition make me the kind of person you would choose to sit next to on the bus. This has brought me some of my greatest friendships, many secrets I should not know, and access to a lot of Close Friends Instagram Stories.

Give me the length of a shared cigarette and it might just feel like we went to primary school together. I have that effect on people, but especially on gay men (when I get better at charming lesbians, I’ll let you know). I like to ask questions and even better follow-ups, and since many of the gay men I meet are not in therapy, this seems to strengthen our tether. (A lot of lesbians have acted as a gateway drug for gay men to find professional help.)

Let me be clear, I have many gay guy friends and I would die for every single one of them. I watched Heated Rivalry! I’m an incredible hag! But the more gay guy Close Friends I’ve been added to, the more my mornings have been spent waking up to straight hole on the cell phone I pay Verizon Wireless for every month. I was hitting my capacity for twinks contorted in jockstraps, happy trails wrapped in low-hanging towels, and thigh meat as far as the eye could see. I am an ally, but we did not throw that brick for this. I was inadvertently a fly on the wall in the men’s steam room of an Equinox gym.

I’ve given many hours — even if by accident — to the ground floor of gay men’s social media strategy. They weren’t just posting for attention; they were working toward love…or at least casual sex. I was not the target audience, but I was taking notes. I was changing my tune. It started to click that these men did not just have gall, they had a plan in place. A curated Close Friends story wasn’t trapping, but a call to action. My doom scrolling had transformed into an anthropological study of the upper echelon of dating culture.

The rest of us are doing Close Friends wrong. There are layers to this and rules to abide by. Instagram has become the new Hinge and the Close Friends feature is the new Grindr. Let’s all act accordingly.

Hear me when I say, Close Friends is not the place to post a photo of your cat. Whiskers can make it on main, I promise you. That meal you cooked? Congratulations! But it is not private. There are tiers to secrecy online: Close Friends is a place for crushes first. Burner accounts are for stalking and stupidity. Then you have groupchats for talking the kind of shit that would get you cancelled. Finally, there is the diary (or “journal” if that makes you feel more butch about it), for everything else.

You might be wondering why you should even be taking dating advice from a clearly disgruntled lesbian learning about love through gay men online. But you can trust me because 1. I was a digital media strategist for almost a decade, working for some of the biggest brands in the world and 2. I have never been wrong — except for that one time.

The first step to trapping your crush online is by recognizing that a recurring Instagram Story “like” is not enough to call it reciprocal. This is both the grief and acceptance stage at once. I lived in this prison and participated in the traditional mating ritual of posting some sort of thirst trap —approved by a group chat of women with significant Virgo placements — all for the attention of a hopeful hookup. I’d post and close out and pray hard. I would reopen Instagram hours later, searching desperately for my crush’s name. Sometimes, just being witnessed felt like enough to call it flirting. 23 hours later, with the Story set to expire, my shot at love had come and gone.

Don’t be this girl. Be your gay best friend.

At the bare minimum, it is an algorithmic advantage to add your crush to your Close Friends. Instagram favors proximity on Instagram Stories (grid is a different beast), so the more you engage or the closer you seem to the algorithm, the more likely it is your crush will see your stories (or content?). Gone are the days of will they, won’t they see your sexy mirror selfie. The onlyfansification of Close Friends has made this all a game and there is a way to win (kiss).

But here is where Gay Guy™ goes wrong. While I am pro hoe, my WLW instinct is to emotionally manipulate — I mean yearn! — first. Lust fulfilled is always more fun with a little lead-up, I like to think. It is your body and therefore your choice, but there is a stronger ROI if you build toward a tasteful nude with a couple weeks’ worth of friendly shitposting.

“The rest of us are doing Close Friends wrong. There are layers to this and rules to abide by. Instagram has become the new Hinge and the Close Friends feature is the new Grindr. Let’s all act accordingly.”

Below are some examples of things to post after adding your crush to your Close Friends but before you methodically thirst trap:

• A hot take about a beloved celebrity (nuanced point of view)

• Racy texts from your group chat (popular)

• A reductress meme (funny, feminist)

• The afters (cool)

• Book you’re “randomly loving right now” (smart, curious)

• Any picture of Sean Penn (startling)

These are all things you simply cannot scroll by without saying something. They won’t just “heart” your Story, they will start a rapport. Fun fact: I once posted a gun on Close Friends and landed myself a date. It was not a real gun of course, but I did get a real lesbian to reply to my Story saying, “Why is this kinda hot?” It was not hot and she turned out to be insane, but we kissed on the lips twice.

Once you’ve firmly planted the seed that you’re more interesting than everyone else, you can turn up the heat. There are a few ways to approach this next phase. You could post a hot pic with an accompanying caption that has nothing to do with you very clearly posting because you think you look good. Try something about “looking for recs for a new show to get into (dramedy ideally).” You could post a hot pic under the guise of self-love. Try something about feeling “really embodied right now.” Or, you could confidently post the aforementioned hot pic with reckless abandon. No caption. No context. No gym you’re pretending to go to when really you’re wearing leggings to run errands. The last approach is most utilized by the gay men in my life — and most respected by me. No bells or whistles, just Skims or Hanes.

The same way you can tell when someone silently goes through a breakup online (they post more or way less, quote bell hooks, and share their workouts), you can always tell when someone is posting for a specific person (they have random new interests, take a ton of selfies, and share their workouts). Why not be more brazen about it? Adding a crush to your Close Friends says VIP, it says this is a post, and this post is for you. “It must be so freeing to be that direct,” Sarah Hagi, host of the podcast Scamfluencers and friend of gay guys, tells me over FaceTime as we unpack their posting prowess.

This approach to building a Close Friends community of crushes is the best strategy for flirting, second only to just being straightforward about your feelings. I owe an apology to the gay community for once calling their behavior “whorish” and “exhausting.” I also probably owe an apology for saying a few things earlier in this essay right now. Gay guy Close Friends has not only taught me more about male anatomy than my brief tenure as a straight girl, it has also educated me on alternative approaches to dating. I didn’t see the sweaty abdomens in HD for what they were: an act of love, an offering, an invitation to connect on a deeper and likely only physical level. Who am I to cast judgment when I could hardly muster up the bravery to be a reply guy?

Close Friends Only Fans™ is tested and proven to work. It has brought me four hook-ups, two really good makeouts, countless flirty DMs, and one ex-girlfriend. I can say it has boded well for me up until recently, when I learned my new crush is… offline.

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Sophia June is the co-founder of Language Arts and Nylon’s former culture writer. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Playboy, and others. She is working on her debut novel.

In the vaxxed and waxed summer of 2021, something terrible happened to me. I became obsessed with my crush’s ex-girlfriend.

We were three beers and shots into our first date at a bar that has since burned down when she entered our relationship.

“So, who do you live with?” I asked “Or do you live alone?” He was 31. A girl can hope.

“I,” he said, drawing out the “I” and looking over his bony shoulder. “Live with my ex.” He shrugged his shoulders dramatically, like an actor in a silent film.

“You what?” It occurred to me that they either just broke up or had been broken up for a while. I wasn’t sure which was worse. “When did you break up?”

“A couple of weeks ago,” he said, to which I’d wanted to say: “Why are you here!” Then remembered, and regretted, the part of my profile that said: “First drink is on me if you are emotionally unavailable.”

I wanted to ask if he still loved her, if they still slept in the same bed, if she was prettier than me, if he’d ever let her braid his hair. Instead, I said, “Another shot?”

After he left my apartment the next morning, I immediately found him on Instagram, where I didn’t have to look hard for her. Amongst photos of him wearing ear protection in his woodshop and over-designed, scribbly flyers for his band’s gigs, there she was, with all the casual glamor of a No Agency model. I hovered my thumb over her handle, half-praying her account was private.

It wasn’t.

I scrolled through photos of her tanning on her roof, her bikini folded down to show her tan lines, topless photos with butterfly emojis covering her nipples, staged photoshoots for her lucrative Depop account, photos of her in a bucket hat before they were cool, grainy photographs of license plates.

“He’s def never getting over this girl,” I texted my best friend. “Ziwe follows her.”

I scrolled through more photos. I saw green eyeliner, leopard print mesh, bright red lace bras, and bedazzled astrology tanks interspersed with photos of her and my crush sharing intimate things. A Glossier skincare routine, a lamp they’d constructed out of sea glass, bylines on a magazine story. I was tempted to save some content for later, to not tap this limited well of self-immolation too quickly. As bad as it felt to feel inadequate, I craved the rush. Whenever he mentioned things about her I’d gleaned online, I pretended not to know. I was casually curious, always on the verge of being probing. With my friends, I played off my obsession with a tight five: “Can you believe this is what I’m up against?” But my obsession embarrassed me.

With women, you never know if you want to be them or be with them. (Hello Single White Female…) I thought I wanted to be her so I could be with him.

Or did I just want to be 24?

I, on the other hand, wore floral print and skinny jeans that had to be peeled off like sausage casings. She drank frosted dirty martinis; I only drank draft beers. I’d never even smoked a cigarette and her page was filled with grainy videos of smoke rings, nails wrapped around candy-colored vapes. She was 24 in all the ways that made me feel humiliated for being 28.

“She projected an image of not caring; I projected an image of being a joy to have in class.”

Over brunch, I conferred with a 24-year-old friend, sure she would be able to evaluate how dire the situation was. I shyly pushed my phone across the table for her to examine. After a few moments, she looked up at me. “I’m sorry. He is never going to get over her.”

I once spent an hour trying to find the exact bikini she’d worn to the beach once in 2017. I went where no woman should go: her Depop likes. I start thinking I saw her everywhere, in every dark-haired beauty with gray eyes, freckles, and winged liner, in every black thong underneath every white slip skirt. I saw her in the baristas at Variety Coffee. I tried to see her in the mirror, but never could. Finally, I did see her, at a bar in real life, and devoted my journaling that night to debriefing how normal she seemed in her Doc Martens, which I knew from Depop, were the same size as mine.

Of course, this wasn’t really about him or her, but about me. I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be and how I wanted to move in the world. I was new to New York and newly single. I was still figuring out if I benefitted from parting my hair in the center, if I wanted to stay in my serious media job, who did or did not know who was DJing at Bossa Nova. I lacked the untamed hotness she did. She projected an image of not caring; I projected an image of being a joy to have in class. All of her friends were models and DJs with 42k followers and made money on OnlyFans. She was my guide to a world that I didn’t know why I suddenly wanted to be a part of, or if I even did.

It was the kind of obsession that can only really be called one thing: a crush. Which I realized the moment I saw her on Tinder.

We matched. I got so nervous I sweated through the Hanes boys tank I bought after I saw her post about them. I pored over her photos, which played to all-gender gazes: bandanas, tiny, wire-rimmed sunglasses, strategically placed tanlines, the works. It felt like a beat just dropped to a song I didn’t know was building. I had so much energy, I went on an hour-long walk, buoyed by the idea that I was as hot as her.

Having a crush on her was easier than devoting all my energy on my crush; she was the only one less available than him. Of course, it didn’t help that he was telling me he loved me one day and blaming it on too many Tecate, tequila shots, ketamine, cocaine, Adderall, an insecure attachment style, and capital-T Trauma the next, persistently breaking my confidence over his knee, making me second-guess my own self-worth every time he changed his mind about whether or not he wanted me in his life as a friend, a lover, a fan of his band. I felt like if I studied her, if I could become more like her, then he’d want to be with me.

But when I went to message her, she’d unmatched me. Probably because she figured out who I was, which, in a twisted way, made me feel more validated as a presence in his life.

It wasn’t years later that I finally excavated him from my life that my obsession with her also lifted. I could only excavate him because I figured out those questions her existence made me consider in the first place. I gained confidence when I forged my own style (and made the choice every bisexual faces to switch from gold to silver jewelry), when I danced under lights the color of gender reveal parties bouncing off fog and warehouse windows, when I found a group of my own hot and smart friends, when I bravely embraced being born in the year 1993.

Me and her and her ex, we all like other people now. I like myself now.

I still check her account occasionally, less because I’m curious about what she’s up to, but because it’s a kind of emotional litmus test, like walking by an old apartment because you want to see if where you once lived still feels like it did.

But it never does. It won’t ever feel like that again.

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Well, Sex Happens readers, we made it. On this, the first official morning after of 2026, we look toward the new year with wishes for sexier stories, sneakier links, and more advice from Ivy Wolk. We’re grateful for your loyal readership and can’t wait for more Sex Happens in 2026. In honor of the ubiquitous year-end round-up, our team pulled together our favorite sex, dating, and relationship moments from 2025. Cheers!

Samantha Leach

Robby Hoffman’s Wake Up
I’d always subscribed to my grandfather’s favorite dating creed: “There’s an ass for every seat.” Then I watched Robby Hoffman’s new Netflix special, Wake Up, and my ass slid clean off the chair. Hoffman’s rules are brutally simple: every relationship needs one hot and one smart. “How you divvy it up, I don’t give a fuck.” And…she’s right? “You ever see two hots together? Hollywood. It’s a fucking disaster,” Hoffman continues. Excuse me while I make mental pie charts of every couple I know to see who to place on divorce watch.

Delia Cai

“Remember when your IUD went bad and you tried to leave me?”
This fall, it took all of five seconds for TikTok to figure out that I was deep in the throes of IUD psychosis (my words, NOT a medical term, but also...iykyk). I actually found so much comfort reading the comments on this TikTok, which gently ribbed the way this user’s partner seems to be having flashbacks to ‘nam as he tries to joke about what it was like to be on the other side of birth control side effects. Like, good to know that shit is fun for nobody!!!

Natalie Palamides’ Weer
Everyone told me to run, not walk, to a performance of this one-woman show at A24’s Cherry Lane Theatre this fall, and they were right. Over the course of 90 minutes, Palamides applies a truly impressive commitment (and her formal training as a clown) to depicting a couple going through it by splitting herself — one side is “Mark,” with sagging pants and a little rubbery dick, the other is “Christina,” with long hair and half a bra top. To play both in conversation, Palamides presents either her right or left side to the audience, and switches between by turning her body back and forth, often in rapid-fire succession as Mark and Christina fight, hook up, and chase each other around. How better to portray the absurdity of any long-term relationship?

Layla Halabian

StudTok
At the top of the year, my TikTok algorithm introduced a beautiful subset of the app called StudTok — and I’ve never looked back. Listening to these Black masc lesbians talk about their dating lives has been a thoroughly joyful experience for me. Also, no one is doing nicknames like them.

Club Chalamet escaping the Twitter bubble into the real world
This is very much a one-sided “relationship,” but witnessing Club Chalamet’s star rise has been bizarre as hell. I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, but I can’t deny that Miss Club (how she’s semi-affectionately referred to on Twitter) has a unique command of the English language. Her obsession with Timothée even landed her a profile in a paper of record, where the reporter failed to mention that Miss Club was a Michael Fassbender devotee until 2017, the year he married Alicia Vikander. Interesting. Kylie, you know what needs to be done…

That one boyfriend article
I’m always saying if your boyfriend has no haters, I am dead. That being said, I can’t believe an article about whether or not it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend caused such a ruckus — especially one that argues how heterosexual relationships “feel Republican” and damage women’s auras. What? Anyway, what’s actually embarrassing is denying love, famously the only thing that matters!

Chloe Kinori

Couples Therapy, Season 4
My husband and I have watched every season of Couples Therapy together, Showtime’s incredible reality show starring the impossibly chic Dr. Orna Guralnik. She’ll have you considering putting a little rogue braid in your hair (don’t)! I highly recommend watching with your partner if you can. Every season is complete gold, full of insights we’ve absorbed and discuss regularly. We watched Season 4 together on a flight, most notably this being the season with a polyamorous throuple (the show’s first). There is one completely jaw-dropping admission from the male hinge in the threesome that honestly doesn’t really have anything to do with his relationship dynamics but the producers were obviously like, k this is batshit we have to include it. I consider it required viewing for all of us who love and are loved.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The other thing my husband and I watched that I loved was this mouthful of a limited series starring a painfully reserved Jacob Elordi. Part horrific war drama, part agonizing love affair, there is really something for everyone (boys and girls) here. Watch the disgusting war bits through your hands over your eyes and it’ll be worth it. I was moved to tears thinking about the ending days later. Cosign alert!

Writer, cultural critic, and former Gagosian director Sarah Hoover’s essays on motherhood, identity, and cultural expectations have appeared in Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The Strategist, and Harper’s Bazaar amongst many others. In early 2025, she released her critically acclaimed, unflinching memoir The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood — an instant national bestseller, Belletrist Book Club pick, and Times (UK) Book of the Week. It will be released in paperback on April 21. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two kids.

1. Don’t try to impress an older guy by acting his age. Be totally yourself at all times, of course, but feel extra free to set the bar low in terms of maturity so that you can stay immature for as long as you fucking want. Nothing sucks more than growing up before you’re ready and suddenly becoming light years ahead of your friends just because your boyfriend is older. Everyone has that one friend who starts dating an old guy and suddenly expects everyone else to stop going to bars and start going to seated dinner parties with calligraphied placecards at home. Don’t be her. Get drunk and buy drugs on your first date, mention how your checking account is already negative, and pay for your drink anyway. Use words you learned on TikTok or whatever your social media poison is so he won’t fully understand you. When he falls in love with you anyway because you’re amazing and a catch and better than every girl in the entire world, he won’t expect you to suddenly know what a Roth IRA is.

2. Don’t be weirded out if his sexual proclivities seem dated or strange. He grew up watching different porn than you did. ‘60s or ‘70s or ‘80s porn has trained the smooth brain of the American male to be into things that may not make sense to you. If he was born in the ‘60s, he probably likes a big bush. You do you — I’m not suggesting you acquiesce to his fantasies if they aren’t yours — but don’t be automatically judgmental of his differing cultural touchstones.

3. He is lying to you if he says he can’t get it up cause he’s old and you expect too much sex because you’re young. Healthy dicks work. And real adults take care of all aspects of their health.

4. Make him watch your movies and listen to your music and make sure he understands the value in them. Do the same for him. You deserve to be with someone open minded and willing to learn for you. It’s also a great opportunity for you to learn stuff, too, even if it’s old and your tits are still up to your collarbone.

5. If his old friends (or his super young friends) write you off because you’re a tiny, beautiful baby (or a hot, older vixen), don’t be a raging cunt — at least not at first. Talk shit to your mom, of course, and kill them with kindness since it really is easier, but most importantly, level with your partner. If he can’t have your back around people he loves and trusts, then where is he going to have your back?

6. Do not expect him to want to do the same group activities that you want to do. Spending time together alone is important. Him meeting and being kind to your friends is important. Him going to the club with you every week…that is not important. You have been doing weird new drugs with your friends for how many years, and suddenly you need your boyfriend there to hold your hand while you do them? That is gross. Let the man sleep. If you don’t let him sleep he might succumb to old age disease and die.

7. Do not let him get insecure and try to look younger. He does not need to go to Bradley Cooper’s plastic surgeon, dye his gray hairs, or get scrotum Botox. Remind him that you like him because he is who he is, and make sure you’re getting that same care and acceptance in return.

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Megan Nolan is the author of the novels Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings which have been translated into fourteen languages. She is at work on a book of nonfiction.

It was June and I was sitting in a movie theater with my boyfriend, watching and hating the Celine Song film Materialists. We had been together for three months and I was still learning what he liked and didn’t, and hoped he wouldn’t turn to me afterwards to say how much he’d enjoyed it. I got the idea we were aligned, fortunately, when we started taking breaks to make out at length every three minutes or so.

Soon the film would mortally offend me beyond redemption. Sophie (played, excellently, by Zoe Winters), is a client of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker. After learning that a man she had supposedly been interested in had refused a second date with her, Sophie is crestfallen, and also outraged. “He’s balding…” she says despairingly, “How dare he?” I bristled. A few moments later when offered another date with a man who is 48, Sophie vibrates with annoyance and replies, “48 is almost 50.”

Now she is really taking the piss, I thought, fuming and leaning in to protectively pet David, my beloved bald boyfriend, who was soon to turn 47 but so far watching this disparagement nonchalantly. Over the weeks to come I noticed myself bristling like this again. As I watched the infinite coterie of dating shows and sitcoms with which I cauterise my brain nightly, I kept hearing women say, apologetically sometimes and brassily at others, a variation on: “Just as long as he isn’t bald.” Even in shows where the woman is in love with the bald guy, his baldness is referred to with weary resignation, as with Charlotte and Harry in Sex and the City: “Harry was bald, but I loved him.” Just who did these bitches think they were?

I’m joking, of course. Do not prosecute me in the courtroom of Pick Me. I didn’t and don’t feel any genuine outrage, certainly not on behalf of David, whose astonishingly stable sense of self, and indifference to how people outside his immediate circle perceive him, are part of why I found him so attractive in the first place. (“What are you writing about?” he asked, of this piece, “I’m writing a piece called I Love My Big Bald Boyfriend,” I told him and we laughed, a marked difference in attitude from the man I read about on Reddit, whose girlfriend was asking which Seinfeld episodes have bald jokes in them: “I love having Seinfeld reruns playing in the background when I hang out at home, but I know my SO gets a little bummed when there are jokes about George’s balding/baldness.”)

My new sensitivity to the plight of the bald did set me thinking about non-negotiables, those rules both big and small we hold theoretically about the person we hope to one day share a life with. The bald-guy barrier, along with mandating that a man must be over a particular height, seem to me examples of how impractical most notional criteria are for dating. I’m not referring to things like whether a person wants children or to live in the same country you do, things which would render a partnership impossible if not mutually agreed upon.

“Instead, what I think is that having these abstracted rules — about baldness or height or weight or income bracket — which are so much easier to enforce on dating apps than when encountering people organically where chemistry easily overrides pre-conceived ideas, makes it less likely to fall in real love.”

Nor am I endorsing “settling” — particularly not to women. Actually, women specifically should settle roughly one million percent less than they do. Settling, to me, is not being madly in love with a person who looks different or has a different job than you might have put on your wishlist. Settling is staying with someone who you don’t feel appreciated by, who you don’t feel quite right with, who you are not, in the end, fully convinced by, because you’re afraid to be alone.

Settling is a strange concept to understand because we don’t have the ability to really know how anyone else on earth feels; what if one person perceives the ordinary struggles of any relationship as just that, and another person perceives the same thing as settling? I used to think I was a fussy asshole who would die alone because I couldn’t compromise and accept the limitations of my relationships. I felt okay about it, even, had reconciled myself to a life which would involve sporadic coupling, but which ultimately would be lived alone. I thought that right up until the day I met the person I’m supposed to spend my life with, when I understood immediately, I would thank God I hadn’t in the past been sufficiently convinced that good enough would do.

So, no settling. Instead, what I think is that having these abstracted rules — about baldness or height or weight or income bracket — which are so much easier to enforce on dating apps than when encountering people organically where chemistry easily overrides pre-conceived ideas, makes it less likely to fall in real love. Unlike some women, I don’t have a particular thing for bald men, and David is the only one I’ve been in a relationship with. I may not fetishise baldness but when I mused on this to Daniel lately, the male best friend who I’m really truly not in love with, per my last post, he responded: “True, but then you have to acknowledge there are variant bald men; David is a gorgeous bald man. He was born to be bald. A man whose baldness says VIRILITY.” Going by the averages of who I had found hot to this point in my life, if forced to guess I would have said I was more likely to want to be with a guy who has hair on his head. In reality, this was not true.

There are of course other, more substantial versions of this dynamic. That June in the movie theater, David and I had only seen one or two other films together previously, despite it being a shared, passionate past-time. This was because David is a single father of two children after being widowed, and so our time together was limited and constrained, especially until after I would eventually meet his kids. Back then, when we had six hours together because a sitter was available, we wanted to spend them focusing on each other instead of a screen.

Would I have put David’s autobiographical details on a moodboard for the kind of man I would ideally have ended up with? The emotional weight of a person who had unexpectedly lost a spouse, an experience I have no ability to truly comprehend? A person with children who, for all I knew, might hate or resent me? I would not, frankly. If I was idealizing my future partner I would have probably been thinking about a person as unencumbered as possible, someone I could build the rest of my life with from scratch. In times past, when I was encouraging myself to hold out for a Great Love, I was vaguely imagining a writer or an artist, one who, like me, traveled frequently for work and enjoyed doing so. I also knew that although I loved children, I’ve always been pretty confident I didn’t want to give birth, and assumed this meant I should be with a man who didn’t want kids. Essentially, perhaps, I was imagining a person I could maintain mutual independence alongside — and this is more or less the opposite of the relationship I have found myself in.

David and I could not have maintained any facade of indifference or cool toward one another because there were clearly important logistical facets we had to discuss, and there were young children we had to carefully consider and try our best to protect. Our courtship was wildly different from any other I had ever had — and also wildly different from the kind I would likely have said I wanted for myself if asked in the abstract. The thing is, though, I have had that kind of courtship, and I have had that kind of man. I’ve had the impulsive weekend trip to Copenhagen; the exorbitant endless hedonism of two underemployed creatives newly in love; the wounding exhilaration of being with a guy you respect but kind of fear. I had all those ideas in reality, and they didn’t work out, because none of those people were who I was meant to spend my life with. Even if he is bald.

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Delia Cai is a writer, editor, and novelist living in New York. She writes the world-famous Deez Links newsletter.

At my annual physical last year, my doctor gave me a deadline. For various reasons related to a benign, Cheerio-sized kidney tumor we’d been keeping track of — not quite a red flag, but not exactly green, either — it was time to get off the pill. Ideally, within the next 12 months. Even more ideally: I was to replace my 13-year regimen of Tri-Sprintec with, shudder, a copper IUD.

This was…not amazing news. Like most women my age, I could recite horror story after horror story about mutuals’ experiences with IUDs and the inherent medievalism of inserting a piece of metal inside one’s body. I had only seriously considered getting an IUD once — back when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, and we all got the first inkling that our reproductive rights weren’t as locked in as we’d thought — only to remember that I possessed the pain tolerance of a baby mouse. There was simply no way. And so I’d counted myself lucky all these years to have avoided that particular form of voluntary torture, only to now be faced with the reality of needing one at age 31. Thirty-one! I said something to my doctor along the lines of how it felt like an ancient age to be worrying about an IUD.

“I longed for the sudden, unambiguous goals of simply being 22 and having zero desire to reproduce.”

Then the second shoe dropped. Speaking of which, she said off-handedly. Are you also thinking at all about freezing your eggs? If so, she explained, I might want to consider doing that part first (even though in general, IUDs do not affect egg retrieval).

I remember feeling all the blood rush to my face. Her question wasn’t entirely out-of-hand. Egg-freezing was also a topic she and I had talked about before, but always in a hugely theoretical way-down-the-line kind of way. It was true that I’d watched a few friends go through the process themselves and thought it might be interesting if I ever had an extra ten or twenty grand lying around. But this question posed by my doctor now felt extraordinarily ironic, given the fact that we’d just been talking about preventing pregnancy a few minutes ago. I longed for the sudden, unambiguous goals of simply being 22 and having zero desire to reproduce.

After leaving the exam room, I started spiraling. What I was technically supposed to consider was A) whether I felt ready for an IUD, and B) whether I wanted to look into egg freezing, but to my mind, both of these questions amounted to one giant, blaring question: Did I have my fucking life together? I started doing that awful masochistic female thing where I started thinking about what age I actually wanted to have kids, and how that meant I should have started making a lot more money and meeting my forever and ever soulmate approximately…two or three years ago? At the time, I had been single for years and was also literally waiting to get laid off from my job. I was very, very behind schedule.

Up until that point, entering my 30s hadn’t bothered me at all; I’d been too busy congratulating myself for having an independent life and career that no woman in my family’s history had likely ever enjoyed. It helped, too, that I lived in New York, where barely anyone I knew was trying to settle down before age 35. But now here I was, staring down the barrel at the prospect of having to consider not one, but two invasive measures that basically had opposing effects: one to keep me non-pregnant for as long as possible, and the other to make me pregnant eventually — hopefully at the exact moment I wanted to be.

For weeks after that physical, I was inconsolable. I couldn’t stop fixating on what felt like some kind of biological ultimatum, especially since, inevitably, I started panicking about the state of my love life, which basically poured kerosene over my mental state in general. A new running joke I’d use whenever I explained my dilemma to friends was that they should invent a woman who gets pregnant only when she wants to be! My friends were too nice to roll their eyes, but thankfully, all of their reactions were basically: Yeah. Welcome to the club. It was actually helpful to be reminded that I was not the first 31-year-old single woman to ever live in all of human history and be faced with a lack of total control over her body.

Eventually, I decided that I would allow myself a full year to think over the egg freezing before my IUD deadline. And so I passed all of 2024 and the early part of 2025 reading articles (and, okay, Reddit) and quizzing friends who were undergoing fertility treatments themselves. I found it all interesting, but as the months wore on, I realized I didn’t feel strongly at all about the desire to inject myself with Gonal-f or haul myself to the doctor constantly or to even have a bank of baby material stored up in a facility somewhere. Mostly, I spent a lot of that year thinking less about babies and when I actually thought I could handle raising a family, and more about how I felt about my general ability to control my life.

And that was the rub. As someone in a long-term relationship with anxiety and as such a desire to control All Things In Life, there was something in the back of my brain that knew I didn’t want to subject myself to the emotional roller coaster — to say nothing of the physical one — that the egg freezing process entailed. What if I couldn’t inject myself right? How many rounds would be enough? Should I find a real job at a company that could pay for it? Otherwise, how much of my savings could I spend on it? And what if it didn’t even fucking work later?

Maybe this was just my 31-year-old brain freaking out. After all, several friends in their early 40s warned me that the way I felt now was unhelpfully not going to be how I felt about this later, but for the first time in my adult life, I realized that this is what people meant when they talked about having a gut feeling. By late 2024, I knew that going down the road toward freezing my eggs simply wasn’t right for me, at least not any time soon. Another key late 2024 development: I started dating a man who I could genuinely imagine starting a family with. This should have been a reassuring development — I was technically on track now, no? — but I’d be lying if I said the question of my biological clock wasn’t the subtext of almost every conversation we had about the future, even early on. (ICYWW: It’s very hard to pass yourself off as a chill girlfriend once you’ve lightly inquired about the details of someone’s corporate health insurance, “just to see” what the policy is for dependents and IVF...)

Still, there was something real I could actually control — with a 99+ percent success rate. This past January, I waltzed into my doctor’s office with my decision: I was not going to freeze my eggs (for now) and I was going to get that IUD. We talked for a long time about all of my fears about it; the imagined pain of a one-time insertion, coincidentally, now felt much more manageable after reading fertility literature all year. Then I went to see my gynecologist, who I also talked to for a long time. To her credit, my gyno sniffed out the reasons for my historical IUD-related reluctance much more quickly. When I confessed that I was literally just terrified of the pain, she simply nodded and said that, under relatively new medical guidance, they were finally allowed to prescribe real pain medication. I can give you a Percocet and a Xanax, she said. Would that help? I almost laughed. Maybe we were making progress as a society after all.

Cut to this past September (it turns out it does still take months for your insurance to approve of IUDs), when I sat in the waiting room at the gynecologist’s office, palming my little prescription helpers into my mouth. I waited for something dramatic to happen — ideally, to be lifted on a golden cloud of oblivion — as I was ushered into the exam room and encouraged to lay, half-squatting, half-prone at the end of the table. I was almost excited. I thought, Maybe I wouldn’t feel anything at all! (If you just laughed reading that line, know that I did, too, as I was writing this.)

It wasn’t a stab, or a poke, and definitely not “just a pinch.” It felt exactly the way anyone can imagine it would feel to have one of your internal organs yanked open in broad daylight. I didn’t so much as scream as I did let out two deep, animal moans of shock. I pressed one of my thumbnails into my other palm so hard that little half-moon impressions would be visible for days afterward. The insertion was undoubtedly the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life, as if entire new nerve endings had been fashioned out of thin air and connected to my brain and turned up to 11. But then, as promised, the whole thing was mostly over a minute later.

My boyfriend waited in the exam room with me as I took deep, swooshing breaths. When I tried to get up too quickly and nearly fainted at the front desk while making my follow-up appointment, a veritable army of nurses surrounded me and forced me back in the exam room, where they put damp paper towels on my face and gave me a grape-flavored sucker. (For some reason, they gave my boyfriend a sucker, too, which at the time seemed amazingly unfair.) After an hour, I felt well enough to be bundled up and taken home in a cab, where I spent the rest of the day napping on the couch with a heating pad. In the morning, I felt remarkably normal, save for the vermicelli-esque strings that I could feel if I probed gently inside my usual tampon zone. That was it? Maybe that was it!

Ha. Now that I’m a few weeks into my shiny, new IUD-deputized life, the only lesson I seem to be learning again and again is that making any kind of major change with your body — especially one that eliminates what had been a steady source of hormones for more than a decade is bound to be…complicated. A few days after my insertion, I’d woken up with my anxiety at such a high volume that I remember standing at my sink, brushing my teeth, and being seized with a sudden clarion call from within to move apartments, break off all my relationships, and perhaps restart life in another country.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. I felt like an ant hijacked by a fungus. I couldn’t trust how I felt or what I thought, and this unmoored me even more. By the third morning of this hellscape, I finally had the thought to Google “post-birth control syndrome” — something I recalled reading about in an issue of Cosmo months ago. Mood swings? Check. Insomnia? Check. Heightened anxiety? Check. Ohhhh. Okay.

On Instagram, I dashed off a post about how it felt like WWIII in my head, and my inbox was flooded with messages from friends and mutuals who’d experienced similar crazy-making feelings when they switched birth control methods, particularly if it involved going off the pill. “Wanted to crawl out of my fucking skin,” one DM assured me. “My husband said I was a terror when I came off it,” said another. A friend compiled a list of supplements to try whilst my body rejiggered itself, which was a life-saver — the magnesium glycinate pills I picked up at CVS the next day helped me sleep through the night at last. I asked around how long this hormonal limbo would last, and the results were nearly wildly varied. Some said it took a cycle or two. Others reported six to eight months of not feeling like themselves.

This was, of course, discouraging. Here I thought I was finally doing what was “best” for my body and my autonomy, and it felt like I was being punished for — for what? For ever tinkering with my body in the first place? For wanting to have total (or as close to total) control over when and how I might want to use my body? Had it been stupid of me to think that my generation could have been exempt from such ancient concerns? For all the luxuries and privileges that I enjoyed as a woman in 2025, it appeared that I still wasn’t able to fully escape the biological dictates of a certain kind of body that was equipped with technology that could only offer me a certain level of control. This revelation felt equal parts devastating and humbling, as if I hadn’t read the fine print on life. Maybe we don’t have free will at all! I texted sourly to a friend at one point. It’s all just hormones!

Still, as I write this now on the eve of my first-ever ovulation (I think?) in more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about what the right response is to confronting the paradox of being a modern, supposedly fertile adult female. To possess a body that one tries to discipline, augment, or medicate into submission, to nevertheless experience the sensation, often, of being a stranger or hostage to it despite all of our efforts — or even as a result. It’s always been the business of religion and politics to control women’s bodies at large, but it wasn’t until this past year when I fully grasped the utterly mystifying personal war it can also become for oneself.

For now, I’m still taking it one day at a time. The magnesium helps, as does the heating pad, as does the camaraderie of friends and Instagram strangers who can’t always offer answers that I so desperately crave. Instead, the knowledge that we’re all muddling through this stage of life — plus or minus a few years and a few hormonal shifts — is comfort enough. And while we can’t give each other that enticing illusion of pure control over our bodies, our fertility, and the rest of our lives, I’m starting to understand that the real value of autonomy itself is being able to support each others’ choices and to cheer each other on, through the insomnia and terrible appointments and late hours on WebMD. That is, I still get to call the shots for myself, but I never have to do it alone.

Ella Emhoff is a New York based artist and designer whose work spans knitting, garment construction, and playful textile experimentation. Deeply rooted in craft, she explores how making things by hand can foster connection, creativity, and emotional wellbeing. Through her community knitting club, Ella creates inclusive spaces for people to slow down, learn new skills, and find comfort in collective making. As an advocate for mental health, she champions crafting as a grounding, accessible tool for care and connection—an ethos woven through everything she creates.

I moved in with my first boyfriend way too early. We were high school sweethearts, both on the basketball teams, and had this very chill energy between us. Not to discredit our relationship — because I remember it fondly — but we were just not meant to be. The school we attended was tiny, and most of the people we had known since we were tweens. He was newer and had this maturity and charm about him. We dated for about a year and a half before moving to New York for school.

Then, in our sophomore year of college, we decided to take the leap and move in together, much to my parents’ dismay. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to take that next step in our relationship; we were only 19, and it really just felt logical, given that we were already spending so much time together — classic 19-year-old mistake.

We had a one-bedroom apartment on Suffolk and Delancey with a balcony and a beautiful kitchen. It felt like an opportunity to prove our maturity and prove all the naysayers wrong. Alas, that wasn’t the case. We lasted about one semester before I realized it was actually breaking me down. I wasn’t ready to share so much of my life with someone. Everything about him became annoying.

Video games? Jail.

Not cleaning up? Jail.

His friend from high school living on our couch for a bit? Jail. Jail. JAIL.

It felt less like we were building a life together and more like settling into a roommate dynamic. The fantasy of ending up with the person I met in high school had been so ingrained in me that anything outside of that felt like a failure. But the fact that we lived in a navy blue sheets version of an apartment did help slowly erode that fantasy.

I moved out and into a single room in a 16-person suite in Chelsea. We didn’t break up though. We both knew that that was going to be the next step, but we still tried to push through the awkwardness and make it work. It didn’t, and in the lead-up to our uncoupling, I contracted a terrible kidney infection that I let go on for way too long. (I was walking around Chelsea hunched over like a 90-year-old woman and still thought nothing was wrong.) I had to spend the night at his new apartment, so I didn’t die. He took me to the emergency room the next day and waited for my family to show up. I have this hilarious photo from inside the ambulance of him looking pissed off and my father looking extremely worried. Sometimes, I’ll go back and look at it just for a little giggle.

We broke up very soon after this.

After the breakup, I moved in with my two best friends, Irene and Fifi, in a sweet apartment in Bushwick on Wyckoff Avenue. The epicenter of the type of guy I was trying to hook up with after being with a normal sports guy. It was such an incredibly stark difference from living with boyfriend number one in the city that I almost felt feral. We would dance around all night, stay up gossiping, and coexist like siblings, only with less fighting. It was the first time I was actually living in whatever way I wanted to, with no adult or partner to judge my decisions. It was pure youthful bliss. I wasn’t tied down to anyone; I had been dating around for about two years with no actual intention of finding a boyfriend.

These couple of years were the longest I had (and still have to this day) been single since I started dating. I allowed myself to shed the LA persona I had been holding onto while dating my first boyfriend and fall into the art school scene, where my love of tattoos was appreciated, not vilified. I was hooking up with the artsy skater boys I would find on Tinder and Hinge, living with my friends in Bushwick, and feeling like the world was at my fingertips.

That bliss was interrupted when my step-mother became Joe Biden’s vice president pick. My wild child days were being shrunken down. How was I supposed to continue my era freedom when we were trying to defeat the orange man?

I had to narrow down my roster and understand the ramifications of being as free as I had been in the past. There were actual consequences to my actions that were far beyond myself. That was a heavy burden, and it significantly altered my perspective on future relationships.

I was a 21-year-old fresh out of college, not ready to let this era die. It felt like I needed to grow the fuck up and settle down in a way that was palatable for my family and the world. I know that sounds dramatic, but it really felt like eyes were on us in a way that I had never seen from a vice president’s family before. We were already breaking boundaries that made people uncomfortable, so why add more fuel to the fire?

Once they had won and the inauguration was imminent, I had to ditch my roster and delete the apps altogether. It honestly caused me a lot of stress: How was I going to meet someone in the wild when I now had a team of people following me around and hawk-eyed journalists watching everything we did?

Well, it happened. In the most 2020s way, it could have… through a DM. It was a few days after the inauguration, and I was quarantining in DC before rejoining New York society as America’s second daughter. I had been following him for a while and had developed a pseudo-crush. He asked me out to coffee, which I hilariously thought was a business meeting, and it felt like my prayers were answered. That companionship that I was so scared about losing had just presented itself on a silver platter.

From the outset, our relationship was extremely public, which added a level of pressure that neither of us had anticipated. I mean, how could you? Between paparazzi photos, endless memes, and our constant presence in the public eye, it had felt like we were speedrunning the relationship. It was still COVID, and working from home was king, so we were able to cohabitate in ways that will never again be possible. By the end of our first year together, it felt like we were already playing house, given how much we were seeing each other. Except we were playing his version of house. I think in the year or so of dating before we moved in together, he had slept over at my place less than a handful of times, something that was more frustrating to me than I liked to admit.

Your home and where you live are so deeply a part of who you are; why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that? Maybe it’s because he was older and didn’t want to engage with our immaturity, or perhaps he just hated trekking to Bushwick. Either way, it created a dynamic that further pushed me towards the traditionalist relationship style, and cohabitation was more on the table than ever. There was also a deep sense of embarrassment and stress I felt about my security detail having to wait in their car overnight whenever I spent the night at his place.

My friends Fifi, Isa, and I moved into a ground floor apartment in Greenpoint after we all moved back after lockdown. It was a classic Brooklyn apartment with a barely there kitchen and a basement flooded every time it rained. We tried for months to get management to remove the black mold that was forming like vines crawling up a wall, but when all we got were lame answers or radio silence, we realized our time there needed to come to a close.

So my ex and I took the leap and moved in together. The same people who questioned my decisions the first time around chimed in, and I had to keep telling them, “No, no, no, this time is different.” I had felt my ego grow with the fact that I had already lived with someone; I knew what to look out for.

At least I thought I did.

There were several differences this time around. We both had adult money to buy adult furniture, already quelling my fears of having another boy room, and a similar enough aesthetic where there weren’t many decor disagreements. It was lining up to be a good old time! And it really was for a while. We were no longer playing house, we were living it. It felt like this was the path that I would continue down forever. But as far as paths go, there was a bit of uneven concrete that started to appear in the sidewalk of my life.

“No one wants to be the one single friend in a sea of steady relationships, but is that worth it when you are genuinely not getting what you need? No. No, it’s not.”

I was experiencing severe mental health issues. More issues than I had dealt with in the past, and more than any partner should have to deal with. Maybe that’s just me not wanting to burden others with my problems, but it felt overwhelming. It was hard, and it made me feel so bad that he had to “deal” with it, but I couldn’t help it. He did the best he could managing my issues while also managing the extreme situation my family was in.

It wasn’t just my dwindling mental health that got in the way; some of the patterns that I had seen with my last boyfriend were popping up again. Fighting about cleaning and general household chores was a big one for us. There was also the fact that I loved staying up late and crafting. He was sensitive to light and sound, so I was left knitting in the dark with only my flashlight. It started to feel like I was the problem.

Was I asking for too much?

Was I masking other issues we were having with who was cleaning the bathroom?

Why is cleanliness such an easy thing for couples to fight about?

Many people I have spoken to have encountered this same wall in a relationship after about a year of living together. It’s when the honeymoon phase wears off and you are just left with each other, unfiltered and raw. There’s no separation between your relationship and your home life; you are officially building this life together and building a home together. That’s a lot of pressure, especially for someone like me who can’t keep the layout of her apartment the same for more than four months.

I find myself sacrificing things I need in relationships to conform to the standard I have set for myself. Meet your person, fall in love quickly, date for a year or so, and move in together. That’s about as far as I have gotten every time, and it made me think what part of the plan wasn’t working. Where was I losing myself and falling into the trap that kept leading to breaking up?

I think the real issue is that I never really considered what I wanted from these relationships or what true companionship even meant to me. It’s easy to follow the norm of what everyone is doing around you; no one wants to be the one single friend in a sea of steady relationships, but is that worth it when you are genuinely not getting what you need? No. No, it’s not.

Just as before, it seemed like we weren’t a match; it was more a matter of convenience at this point. Our lives were intertwined; our relationship was extremely public and we had an apartment together. We were essentially roommates who were occasionally affectionate. I think our needs for physical touch were unbalanced, and I became annoying to him. Clingy, probably. The lack of intimacy and my general frustration with our incompatibility came to a head. The relationship ended, and for the first time in my life, I got to live completely alone.

I ended up keeping the apartment and went home to LA for a few weeks or so while he figured out his next steps. I had a studio at the time in Bushwick that I couldn’t justify keeping while also taking on the whole of the rent at my apartment. I said goodbye to my old oasis and moved everything into my new one. My space became a riot of color, reminiscent of my childhood bedrooms. I created a cozy comfort cave to try to avoid any sense of anxiety that I knew was going to pop up.

I suppose one could say I was living alone when I was in the 16-person suite, but I don’t count that. There’s a particular responsibility you need to have over yourself and your actions when you are living alone. There’s no one to question your midnight pita chip snacks, or the mountain of shit you have piled up on your stairs that you promised you’d put away that morning.

It’s just you.

It’s raw.

Then, just a few months later, I met my boyfriend Charlie on Raya. (Yes, I know, I can’t believe it either.)

As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve come to realize that I am a serial monogamist. I feel like that’s due to multiple factors that displayed themselves in my adolescence that I have only really decoded now as an adult: parents’ divorce, extreme self-confidence issues, body dysmorphia, and the fear of being alone.

I never thought that the effects of my parents’ divorce would manifest themselves in this way until my mind wandered there during one of my routine self-therapy sessions while I was knitting. Am I trying to replace the companionship that I didn’t see them have? Am I stuck in this standardized way of being with someone because I grew up outside of the standard? Is there even a standard anymore?

When Charlie and I first got together, we’d both gotten out of long-term relationships — his much longer than mine — but we just clicked. It was one of those things where we both knew that we needed to take time after these relationships to “find our single selves again” not jump into anything, but we couldn’t help it.

It didn’t feel rushed, at least on my end. It just felt natural. I had taken the time in therapy to see what patterns were pushing me to end these relationships, rather than moving forward and hoping for the best. We tried to extend our courting phase for as long as possible, but in the end, we had both stopped seeing other people very quickly and focused our energy on each other.

We were like magnets. Not clingy, more so in the way where we were so drawn to each other and our personalities clicked so well that it felt like a disservice not to see where it went. And boy did we.

Everything felt smooth. It was like we were dancing through life together, even though things around me were still psychotic and in some ways falling apart. He’s the kind of guy that I have always needed, someone to check me on my shit and ground me in reality. He’s been on his journey and he has developed a level of understanding that I have never shared with someone.

We live in a state of bliss, taking our time. We’ve been together for over two years now and have no plan to move in together. And I love that. It’s remarkable that it is even an expectation for us to think about that. Two years is nothing.

We discuss it, for sure, but there’s no timeline. We both love our independence, appreciate having our own spaces, and enjoy the freedom to go and do whatever we want, whether it’s together or apart. We also enjoy the freedom to grow our relationship without the added pressure of following a predetermined path. We are creating a new standard for ourselves.

We have sleepovers all the time, especially at my place (I need to do a better job of going to his more often). We have space in each other’s places for whatever we need, and we live our lives together and separately, and it’s perfect. I have never felt so at ease in a relationship. This is something that’s just for us. No matter how much external pressure there is from watching friends take that next step or how much society wants you to rush into starting your life, we stay strong in what’s best for us for as long as we need.

I never knew I would find someone who would let me knit all night long (with a light on, no less), watch Below Deck, and still wake up the next day with a smile on his face, well rested, with a big ole smooch waiting for me.

It just feels right.

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Cat Cohen is a beautiful comedian, actor, singer & poet based in NYC.

Scientists need to study what happens in the human brain when two people sext before they’ve actually done the deed. What happens to that rush of confidence that leaves the body the second you’re face to face with the babe you just breezily undressed over iMessage? And where does that electricity go once you become accustomed to having sex with that same person over and over again?

The first time I had sex with my now-fiancé, it was September in New York — still warm enough to skip the jacket, cool enough to tie a sweater around your waist. (Quick aside: Who invented that sophisticated gesture of convenience? Literally make a statue of the first person to tie a garment around their waist. Cast that genius in bronze mama!) I was getting off the R train at Union Square to meet my date with the understanding that sex was very much on the table that evening. We’d spent the previous night flirting at a party and then on our phones, but as I approached the bar I felt shy and deeply sober. How would our chemistry hold up now that we’d texted the subtext?

I turned the corner, saw him sitting there with two G&Ts, a baseball cap perched gingerly atop his head. (Why is it so hot to me when a hat is sort of almost falling off the top of a man’s head? I will bother scientists with that question next!) As soon as I sat down at the bar, any awkwardness lifted — we (respectfully) smashed (technical term) into each other, woke up in the same bed, and seven years later, we’re still doing the same thing.

“Call me Emily Dickinson. Dick in son? More like vibrator in moi! Okay, off I go to jail for that one.”

Our chemistry was insane from the jump. We became sexually obsessed with each other quickly and the emotions came later, which is a very modern and fashionable order of operations. Right away we had crazy sex, but eventually we also had the kind of sex that makes you feel loved and seen (I’m a romantic, sue me!). I knew I’d met my match, but didn’t account for the fact that one must re-meet themselves over and over again as the years go by.

I first noticed it in the gray blur of the post-pandemic years. I was getting busier (and more stressed) with work and one day realized I couldn’t remember the last time I craved sex. I had become the type of person I never wanted to be: the cartoonish sitcom wife who was too tired, honey! Someone who was too stressed to have sex. Someone who cannot come unless they have reached inbox zero.

I brought the matter up with my boyfriend who (obviously) had noticed the shift as well. He too had been wanting to say something, but let me take the lead due to his being an iconic feminist ally. I blamed my lack of initiating sex on my stress levels and he pointed out that for him, sex relieves stress. I felt the complete opposite. I only crave sex when I’m not stressed. I knew I always felt better after we had sex — physically calmer, but also more in tune as a couple. But the idea of getting to that zen-like state only added to my stress levels. What if I didn’t get wet fast enough? What if I couldn’t come? What if the door buzzes with a delivery in the middle of things? My packages always get stolen from the lobby!

Thankfully, my lover is as patient as he is horny and after many discussions, we’ve found a few things that have helped. No outfit is complete without accessories and no bedside table is complete without a few vibrators and different types of lube. Folding these ingredients into the batter that is our sex life has greatly improved things. Sometimes we make a cake (go all the way) and sometimes we just lick the batter (fool around with classic hand and mouth stuff). How incredible is this metaphor? Call me Emily Dickinson. Dick in son? More like vibrator in moi! Okay, off I go to jail for that one.

But before I go: The main thing I’ve realized is I don’t owe anyone anything and I get to explore my pleasure and how it changes over time at my own pace. I feel lucky to have a partner who is so sweet and accommodating, but I’m also working on being more kind to myself. There is no rush to solve stress — in fact that often exacerbates the issue. These days, even though my stress levels have bravely not decreased, my lover and I are mostly back in the swing of things. I’m at peace with the ebbs and flows of my sex life — and diligent about always keeping my bedside table fully stocked.

Have an anonymous story you’d like to submit for Sex Happens? Drop your secret pitch here.

“So I recently contracted…is it con-tracted or con-tract-ed? I never know how to pronounce it. Anyways… so I signed a contract with herpes.”

This is my favorite joke I’ve ever written. I did it at a women’s open-mic stand up night in Koreatown, the only time I’ve told jokes live. I used to drive around LA smoking cigarettes in my VW Tiguan, burning holes in the upholstery, repeating my set over and over.

—

When I was 26 I had one of those life-ruining trips to New York. I felt isolated and chaotic, depressed from a perceived rejection from my best friend, who, in my eyes, chose hanging out with her Brooklyn-based boyfriend over spending time with me in the city. The illusion of abandonment pushed me into the arms of a stranger, as it had done many times before. One minute you’re in codependent heaven, marching triumphantly home at dawn over the Brooklyn Bridge arm in arm with your soul sister. The next thing you know you’re coming down off of a terrible night of cocaine, during which you screamed at your best friend and had sex with a random guy. I remember crying to myself in the mirror: What is wrong with me?

That morning I spent our silent cab ride to JFK busily googling on my phone. By the time we were sitting at the gate, I had diagnosed myself: I was a sex and love addict. I knew there was something compulsive happening, some deep drive guided by a secret inadequacy. Something disordered. I’ve always been ambitious and I dove into my new project with my millennial girlbossosity in tow. I immediately found a therapist who specialized in love and sex addiction, sobbed through a SLAA meeting, and bought the book. There I was, a Saturn-return cliché, on the banks of Echo Park Lake crying over its pages with its generic purple design, no words on the cover or spine. I felt so incredibly sorry for myself then, desperately trying to figure out what had happened that would make me act this way. Now I think it’s kind of funny. Distance will do that for you.

My therapist would later define sex and love addiction to me as an “intimacy disorder.” I remember telling her in one of our first sessions how I knew I needed to make a change or something bad was going to happen — I could just feel it. I’ve luckily avoided any sexual violence but I had a sense that I was on a path from which I couldn’t deviate. Herpes was my Final Destination.

“One time I hosted a dinner party in my garage, which is a terrible location when you’re trying to prove to an older man that you are a mature adult he ought to commit to.”

I was being regularly tortured by what some might today call my “situationship,” a label that didn’t exist ten years ago. Back then I would say he was the “guy I was on and off with,” but it never got so serious that you could even really consider it “on.” I spent three years of my life chasing him and countless nights at his apartment, high above the Silverlake Triangle. I could see his apartment window from my work, upon which I’d gaze listlessly. I’d wonder unbecoming questions like, “Does his mom even know my name?”. I’d write poems about him in zines that I’d self-publish, give them to him as gifts. One time I hosted a dinner party in my garage, which is a terrible location when you’re trying to prove to an older man that you are a mature adult he ought to commit to. I was so nervous that he was present with my actual friends that I smoked so many cigarettes he commented on the volume. I don’t even think he tried the food. I never had the upper hand, not for a moment, not even close. I always knew he was avoidant (also an alcoholic, also an asshole), but it was only later that I looked closer at my own behavior, my own closed-offedness, my own inability to be myself or truly intimate with others. I could never imagine him taking care of himself, buying groceries or paying bills. He wasn’t real to me and I’m sure I wasn’t real to him either.

In SLAA, you call these people “qualifiers” — the people who make you act psycho. Your drugs. There are other drugs in SLAA too, which I learned from an intimacy disorder women’s group my therapist pulled together from her roster of clients. We’d meet weekly on Thursday nights, in the after-hours quiet of the Silverlake Psychology building, up a flight of outdoor stairs above Hyperion. The lineup was insane: a British former dominatrix in an emotionally abusive relationship with a loser; a beautiful Kardashian-style screenwriter who always gave blowjobs in cars on first dates; a strong and sensitive set decorator who worked on the lot at one of the big studios, always surrounded by the eyes of male colleagues. Some of my fellow group mates were fantasy addicts or sexual anorexics; one was a lovely, hilarious redheaded virgin who had never been kissed. (Her model-roommate was in Shia LaBeouf’s acting-group cult, a detail I’d be remiss to skip.) Some SLAA-people define themselves as intrigue addicts, those for whom the chase is the real drug. There was a CAA agent who kissed a junior team member she managed at a holiday party. I wonder how the girls would sum me up in a sentence. I defined my pattern to them as feeling rejection or low self worth and desiring the immediate affection of sexual encounters. I wanted to feel close to people and to be comforted, to prove that I had value. And honestly, I derived a lot of confidence from those behaviors. I chainsmoked and strutted Sunset boulevard with the best of ‘em, on top of the world. I had beyond my share of fun, but I’ve always felt that my magical powers of pulling attention could be used for good, or to do bad. I could feel my eyes go black when I slipped into my addiction, fucking for the wrong reasons.

—

After another routine rejection from my qualifier, I went straight to Taix. It was Wednesday night, Social Club, and the bar was packed. By the end of the night there were still crowds but few people I knew. I connected with a guy across the parking lot and asked him for a lighter. We went back to my apartment.

In the week following, I knew something was off. I went to the doctor who told me I had bacterial vaginosis, my body seemingly tweaked off my random fling. But in the days after the visit, it got worse. I had terrible insurance at the time and was dismissed by the doctors I saw who insisted that nothing else could be the matter. I came down with flu-like symptoms, and over the coming days, I lost the sensation to pee (this came back eventually). It was this very bizarre symptom that helped me piece it together on Reddit: I knew I had herpes. A blood test confirmed it. I was ripped apart by the news — and most depressingly, not for my own health. I knew that this was it, the last and final rejection from my qualifier. He valued his own addictions too much to risk them by continuing to have sex with me.

I was right. He wouldn’t. We had hooked up recently so we decided to get tested again, together. I picked him up from work, agonizing over what music to play in the car for the drive to the fancy urgent care I found on La Brea. Afterwards we got a drink at Black Cat, me crying on his shoulder. When the results came back we found out that he had HSV-1 (which typically presents as cold sores) and I had HSV-2. Having one can preclude you from getting the other. His lucky day.

—

I took a break from dating. I spent a year in my therapy group, with the girls I saw every week. I loved how anonymous it felt; we weren’t supposed to hang out or communicate outside of our meetings. In the group I didn’t posture; I told the truth. I could be cold and distant, or full of joy and laughter. I didn’t attempt to make myself desirable or likeable. I dressed ugly and didn’t try. I spoke honestly with the other women, arguing with them about their decisions. I wanted them to be better. They argued with me the same way. At the end of the year, I knew I loved them all, and that they loved me, too. Through it I had discovered a glimmer of real intimacy: to show yourself plainly and know that you’ll be loved anyways.

I slowly reentered the dating world. I dated a friend of a friend, then a musician, then a guy I had hooked up with in college. I wouldn’t do more than make out or I’d refrain from having sex with them as long as possible, or as long as could be perceived as normal (like two dates). When I told them I had herpes, no one gave me a hard time about it at all. I took Valtrex, we used condoms. Life went on. I’ve only had three outbreaks since being diagnosed.

Life with herpes is (for me) not a huge deal. I get a very specific kind of weird, sensitive nerve pain before an outbreak and that’s all I need to feel before knowing I need to take meds for a few days. I gleefully dole out Valtrex to friends who have cold sores, and I love seeing a bottle of L-Lysine in someone’s cabinet. I’m proud to be a resource. There’s freedom in being on the other side of what I used to think was the worst outcome possible.

And I had been changed. Because I knew I had information to disclose, I only put myself in situations where I had a feeling the guy would be kind. Sometimes I wonder why it took an STI for me to be more protective of myself, but I’m glad for the nudge all the same. I treaded lighter, I made better choices, I kept myself safer. Basically: I chose nicer guys. I slowed down and dated with my eyes more open. And then I met my husband.

When I met him, I was ready. Ready to be in love, ready to be vulnerable, ready to tell the truth. I had told friends I wanted to be set up, and he had just moved from San Francisco. We were introduced by friends from the Bay and were instantly inseparable. This isn’t an essay about my husband, it’s not a big enough container, but I will say: I knew I was safe, and that I had made it. I got pregnant right away, just a few months after dating, which in my late 20s in LA felt dangerous and bohemian. The joke was on us: It’s one of the most normal things you can do.

There was no well of joy or misery untapped in my 20s. I spent those years hovering above real life, aglow. A decade later, I have grounded. Looking back at those last moments on my own, I knew I was ready to be a mother. I could feel the bodily imperative, and I was impatient for it to come. I’ve always known I was destined for my own loving family the same way we’re all destined for suffering. I was out in the bars trying to find them. Can you blame me? Where else was I supposed to look?

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Peyton Dix is a writer and the co-host of the pop culture podcast Lemme Say This.

I spent over a decade of my life in a ballet studio. It started the way it always does with little girls whose mothers wanted them to grow up straight. (PSA: Ballet actually teaches your daughters about scissoring sooner than you think!)

I was five-years-old in head-to-toe pink with a perfectly slicked-back bun held tightly together by an unearned tiara. This was just play. This was just fun. This was kind of drag when you think about it. That year, dance was something to do, like playing dress up or making your Barbies kiss each other. But a few years later, I joined a formal academy and fell into something real. Dance quickly became my whole life; it was practically a part-time gig. I spent a minimum of 20 hours a week (including summers) learning every discipline under the sun. My parents spent [redacted] dollars on endless pairs of replacement tights, lost leotards, and new pointe shoes to accommodate my relentlessly developing feet.

I never wanted dance to become a full-time job. I thought of myself as a writer who happened to have great turnout. Plus, my tits were too big for me to make it (I’m bragging now, but not then… not at all). After college, I put my piques and pirouettes to bed. I moved to New York. I became a writer, and I started scissoring full-time. The latter led me to many long nights, a few great friends, one big love, an occasional yeast infection, and, more recently, a really bad breakup. A lesbian breakup will have you doing anything: Pilates! Painting! Praying! Texting your dad back!

I spent the first half of that breakup year devoid of desire. When I thought I was ready, I attempted to frequent my regular spots, queer stomping grounds, lesbian watering holes, if you will, and thought the spark of something new might wake me up to myself. If flirting were an Olympic sport, I’d be Simone Biles. I’m a Taurus sun with a Libra moon; Venus is often all over me. I put my best carabiner forward and tried to find my rhythm again, but not even the most toxic-presenting masc dyke could get me to bat my lashes. I couldn’t connect, at least not like that. Only my period panties saw the light of day as I army crawled my way back to myself with yes, pilates, painting, praying, and texting my dad back a few chapters of The Artist’s Way.

I wound up alone at Mark Morris Studios, a far cry from the former aspiring prima, just an Adam Sandler understudy with a low, messy bun. It was me, the aux, my thoughts, the trauma in my hips, and my little book of morning pages that kept calling me back to a love lost. I owe Julia Cameron my life, but she also owes me 10 percent for how often I pitch this creative work book to anyone who will listen.

I danced, and it wasn’t clean. A triple used to feel like child’s play, batmas would hit my temple as easily as breathing, yet there I was stumbling all over myself, contracting, releasing, turning without spotting properly, and letting my weight fall any which way. I was off my foot, but in my body. I watched myself in the paneled mirrors, slowly letting my head go, my back arch, my shoulders drop, my toes curl. I let my knees fucking have it — I was reminded quickly that I am 31 now, not 13.

I danced clumsily and collapsed into the arms of an old self. I danced in the dark. I danced hard — breathless and heavy from going full out. I could taste the salt of my sweat as it fell into my open, panting mouth. I danced until I no longer looked for myself in the mirror. I didn’t need to see what I looked like. I could finally feel my body in space again — what it was doing, where it was going next. I felt certain, sexy, and sure. My legs were long, sharp. My chest was full, proud. My t-shirt clung to my damp skin, and I thought to myself, This is what Cassie probably felt like in the Me & U music video.

I danced the dopamine back into my brain. The body keeps the score, and I was finally getting numbers back up on the board. I knew this was a feeling to share. I wanted to flaunt around with my strong calves and my gut feelings. I wanted to flirt and fuck and pay it forward — how sweet all this embodiment was. Anyone with a ballet background would never equate it to an SSRI, but it’s a close second. It was all so liberating, hopeful, and awfully erotic. I’m being so serious when I say there is something akin to a religious experience that happens when you thrash around to “Fame Is a Gun” by Addison Rae.

I took this new body (no Nicki Minaj!) out of the studio and back into the streets. I found myself flirting with intention again, with my hips forward and my eyes wide, lashes up to bat like Babe Ruth. The first hookup I had since my last microdose of divorce was in the back seat of a car with a new crush. It was the perfect re-entry into intimacy: so high school, so horny, so fucking stupid and sexy. I let my mind drift off, and my tongue dance around in their mouth. I could feel myself letting my head go, letting my back arch, letting my shoulders drop, my toes curl. I could feel the full extension of my feet crammed against the door of a foggy Honda Civic.

I could feel my body in space again — what it was doing, where it was going next. Sex was fresh with feeling, no fear. I was out and about, and all the walls whispered Ice Cube’s “You can do it, put your back into it.” So I did.

“I’m being so serious when I say there is something akin to a religious experience that happens when you thrash around to ‘Fame Is a Gun’ by Addison Rae.”

I was dancing in the studio. I was dancing alone. I was dancing in class. I was dancing in clubs, single-handedly working to bring back the lost art of the bump and the grind. Dance brought me right back into myself, tucked my Taurus Venus into bed with a forehead kiss. If I learned anything from 10 years of ballet and a close reading of Miranda July’s All Fours, sometimes dancing is its own version of intimacy. Dance is testing, learning, and trying again until your core is tight and your arms are extended, and you finally start to know yourself and your body better.

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Delia Cai is a writer, editor, and novelist living in New York. She writes the world-famous Deez Links newsletter.

Here is the real, actual problem with the state of dating: If you’re single, we as a society have all but decided that it’s a you problem, and as such, it’s your individual responsibility to solve it, and yours alone. For those of us who are safely coupled up — for now, and I do mean that threateningly — who’ve grabbed the proverbial last chopper out of the dating hellscape or at least survived our state-mandated years on Hinge without sustaining significant mental damage, we’re too busy congratulating ourselves to try to help everyone still stuck in the trenches. Good luck over there, we coo with obvious relief from thinly held higher ground. Hope you make it out!

This is bad for everyone, because that means the only third parties who actually are invested in helping out those who are single and looking are too often obsessed with tackling the problem en masse. Hence the multizillion-dollar industry of dating apps, dating influencers, speed dating franchises, TikTok get-your-ex-back influencers selling their $9.99 manifestation packages, and all manner of AI freakery. These hucksters are only interested in lucratively scalable solutions that supposedly “fix dating” “for all” but really just create newly elaborate cast nets that trap everyone into some lowest common denominator of the notification chase. Pity the plight of the modern Carrie Bradshaw, armed to the teeth with all manner of apps and services and viral branded mixers, and yet overwhelmed by the burden of their own Sisyphean responsibility to put oneself out there, again and again and again.

But what if it didn’t have to fall entirely on your own shoulders? What if your friends and other loved ones actually helped to improve the situation?? What if, and now here’s a radical thought, they started setting you up on dates???

Let me now address said friends and loved ones, particularly the ones lounging on the Edenic banks of coupledom, who have thus far considered the maximum fulfillment of their platonic companionate duty as simply “being supportive” and laughing (a little too loudly) when regaled with one’s latest humiliating ghosting, breadcrumbing, orbiting escapade. Listen up! Your single bestie’s problems should be of personal concern to you! You have a role to play in the proverbial village! It’s time to get involved! (You think you’re safe from the clutches of Super Likes and first date natter forever? You are not!)

Now just one minute, you might say. Consider whether I, Delia, have maybe become a little too Materialists-pilled, just because Dakota Johnson looked really good in her girlboss sheath dress once. After all, everyone talks about arranging set-ups like they talk about going to the drive-in or sharing an egg cream at the soda fountain, but the reality is different! Things can go wrong! It comes off as meddlesome! And God, wouldn’t it be the worst sin to introduce an ounce of awkwardness into the friend group?

To these critiques, I say you are being a coward and not nearly as brave as your single friends, who are out here risking their hearts and literal electrocution by Dyson hairdrying their curls during a thunderstorm so as not to be late for penny pitchers with “Frank From Tinder (Not the DJ).” If they can put themselves out there, you can most certainly go out on a limb and try to help.

To be fair, I myself only became set-up-pilled back in 2018, when I was hanging out with a co-worker named Caira, who was telling me about your typical bad date. I remember thinking: What gives? Caira is such a catch, she’s in her thirties, eats healthy, and loves tennis! This descriptor, while selling her short as an angel of a friend, also happened to match up with a guy named Sam, whom I used to work with. And so the plot thickened. I carefully chose a photo from Caira’s Instagram, got in touch with Sam through a mutual, and asked if he was interested in a set-up. He waffled until he saw her photo. And it gives me no end of delight to report that Caira and Sam met for drinks later that week, and that it has now been seven years, and they live together in Brooklyn with a very cute vizsla.

THAT COULD BE YOU. THAT COULD BE YOUR WORK FRIEND. All it took was a little observation and consideration on my end, to say nothing of the general trust and open-mindedness from the couple in question.

“Listen up! Your single bestie’s problems should be of personal concern to you! You have a role to play in the proverbial village! It’s time to get involved!”

Since the wild success of Caira and Sam, I’ve been hooked. At first, I was looking for set-up candidates for my friends as an act of selfishness; I wanted to set my friends up so that they’d think of people to set me up with, too, duh. But even after I went off the market, I realized that playing amateur matchmaker was quite fun in its own right. I got to know my friends and their predilections better, and I also generally had a better time making small talk at parties and gatherings, where I’d scout mutuals and new connections for potential compatibility with the single friends I kept listed on a Notes app. To make it more about me, I’m proud to report a 41 percent success rate in these post-pandemic years — that is, five reportedly great first dates out of 12 set-ups, including one relationship that lasted a couple of months. Match Group, Inc. wishes she could.

To me, a successful set-up doesn’t have to ascend to Caira-and-Sam levels of fairytalia; it just has to be a pleasant enough experience for both people involved to say they’re willing to meet up again on their own account. After all these years, I’m also happy to report that the perfect formula to a good set-up does exist, and I am here to tell you exactly how to do it:

STEP 1: Make sure both candidates are open to it, obviously. Set-ups aren’t for everyone, but if someone you care about is open enough to the idea, trust that they’ve got their shit in order enough to not totally embarrass you. That’s the unspoken social contract involved with set-ups, in that the cardinal rule is Be A Respectful Adult Or We Will Talk About You Forever. Let’s call our theoretical pair of candidates Jane and John. Depending on your relationship with Jane and John individually, you might ask each what they’re looking for. Invite them to be as specific and superficial as possible about what they do and don’t like in a partner.

Listen closely in between the lines to figure out what’s actually super important: Does Jane really want a guy with tattoos, or does she just appreciate a generally creative, semi-rebellious mind? Does John really, really, really double-down on wanting a partner who also grew up in Pennsylvania? That’s actually quite workable, because guess who you’ll think of every time you meet an eligible bachelorette from Philly?

STEP 2: Identify at least one shared interest they have, whether it’s an obvious one (i.e. matching a movie buff with a former child actor) or a more personality-based one (my most successful recent set-up was between two people who both had insane charisma and conversation skills. Zing!), and talk each candidate up to each other: I know someone who I think you’d love talking about Chinese literature with. Dude, I met a guy who works in the same niche industry as you. I think you’d have a lot in common.

STEP 3: You now have an intellectual reason to set them up, but obviously, most people still want to see a pic. In my experience (which heavily features straight couples), you should share photos very sparingly. Usually, I’d give a female friend a guy’s full name or his Instagram if she asked for it, whereas I preferred to give male friends a single photo (usually off Instagram, with the handle cropped out). TL;DR, you don’t want to give anyone too much fodder to start over-analyzing compatibility in their heads. The idea is that everyone is aiming to have a nice date; soulmate talk is for muuuuch later. If, during this step, you find that one or both parties aren’t feeling the attraction, you can stop right there and simply tell the other person, “Hey, so I just chatted with John, and it turns out he’s out of town for a while. Let me find someone else for you!” Keep it moving; you can’t convince anyone of physical attraction, after all.

STEP 4: If both parties are down, get their phone numbers, and liaise with the candidates separately about a potential date time. It’s both a kind of white glove service but also a personal insurance against anyone bailing — it’s easy for Jane and John to bail on a stranger they don’t know, but it’s much less easy to bail on a date that you, the matchmaker, set up for them. This, to me, is the greatest edge that set-ups have over going out with complete strangers you met online: There is a presumption of accountability, or at least social obligation, to your mutual matchmaking friend to not be a jerk.

STEP 5: Once you figure out a good date, time and location that works for both parties, drop Jane and John into a group chat together, with a note like: Jane and John, I think it’s time you met. Your first date is 8 pm on Thursday at Swan Room. (Mark the date on your own calendar, so that later in the night or the next morning, you can send them both a cheeky text to see how it went — which, unless either party confides more in you, should be the extent of your post-date inquiries. After all, you’re not here to meddle…)

It’s that easy! It’s that fun! I trust that you will now all go forth and amass a robust Notes app list and start really, actually listening to your friends when they talk about non-negotiables and celebrity crushes. Start making some introductions! Get creative identifying shared interests! After all, the benefits are incredible for everyone involved. John and Jane both get a nice planned date hand-wrapped and delivered to their door — plus conversational fodder to bring to you the next time you’re catching up.

Meanwhile, you get the satisfaction of being a brilliant judge of character, as well as potential god-tier status as The One Who Made It Happen at a wedding sometime in the future. It’s only the romantic happiness of your beloved friends at stake. Why wouldn’t you want to be part of the adventure?

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Tish Weinstock is a London-based writer and consultant. Graduating from Oxford University in 2012 with a degree in History of Art, she has worked at style bibles i-D, Dazed & Confused, and British Vogue, where she remains a contributing editor. She is the author of I'm Sick *Coughs* substack and wrote her first book, How To Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style, in 2024, which has been featured in New York Times, Vogue, WWD, and more.

I was getting undressed one morning when my husband looked up from his laptop and deadpanned the following: “If you shaved your pubes, you’d go down a jean size.” He’s not wrong. When it comes to pubic landscaping, I’ve always been pretty “less is more.” Less work, more hair. I like to think of my lady garden in terms of Burkean ideals of sublime nature; the kind of wild, wanton forest an 18th-century romantic poet might get lost in. Not the polite manicured lawns and landing strips of all my friends.

Despite various pleas throughout our relationship and eventual marriage, I refused to acquiesce to Tom’s demands for a tidy bush, citing my feminist sisters and harmful societal norms as my reasoning. But, in all honesty, IDGAF about feminism where vaginal maintenance is concerned. It isn’t about aesthetic preference, either. The real reason I refuse to get a wax is that I don't like experiencing discomfort for even a minute, let alone half an hour. And you expect me to do this, what, every month? On top of everything else? I could get laser, but why should I spend thousands of pounds on a course of treatments when I’m not the one who has to look at it?

To be clear: It’s not the money I’m adverse to; I just feel like I’m not getting enough return on my investment. I’d rather spend money on treatments for my face (like having salmon sperm injected into my dermis or having my outermost layer of skin basically blasted off by plasma) because, unlike my vagina, my face is permanently on display. It’s not like we have a term for vagina card, do we? Sure, I could shave, but the regrowth is messy and itchy, and I don't want my vagina to look like it has dermatitis. Basically, when it comes to intimate grooming, it's either painful, expensive, or time-consuming, and I don’t feel like I’m personally getting anything out of it. It’s one more thing to think about in the long and arduous task of being a woman. I did all of that when I was young and childless (how do you think I ensnared Tom in the first place?), but now I just don’t have it in me. So, I am hairy, hear me roar.

“I like to think of my lady garden in terms of Burkean ideals of sublime nature; the kind of wild, wanton forest an 18th-century romantic poet might get lost in.”

And yet, on this particular occasion, Tom’s statement seemed to strike a chord. We were about to go on our summer vacation, which means having to squeeze myself into a swimsuit. Touching cloth with my mid-30s, I’m already starting to lose the battle with gravity, where certain areas of my body are concerned. I may be skinny, but I'm also soft, saggy, and cellulite-y. Did I want to be a hairy monster on top of that? No, I did not. Plus, I wanted to do something nice for my husband for a change. Because maybe then he’d do something nice for me in return, like buy me a present or look after the kids while I swan around fashion week. A win-win. So I booked an appointment for a Brazilian via the beauty app @ruuby, jumped into the shower, and attempted a half-baked douche. Cue: The summer I turned pretty. Fast-forward a few hours and I was being spatchcocked like a chicken on a chopping board as a nice lady called Meera poured burning hot wax all over my muff.

"You’re growing them,” she said, gazing at the foliage below, before holding me down with a strength that felt incongruous to her diminutive size.

Despite having two rugrats, during this half an hour of unabashed torture, I feared for my vagina in a way I never knew was possible. And then she started on my asshole. See, this is why I don’t get waxes. The whole thing was agony.

“It’s because you’re not used to it,” said Meera.

“I’m not sure I want to get used to it,” I replied.

By the time it was all over, I was red and raw. Ow! She put some cooling gel on the afflicted area, and I lay in the fetal position as I waited for the stinging to subside. After five minutes, I looked again. A part of me felt disgusted; something about hot pink naked flesh. While the other part felt…excited. For the first time in ages, I was supple, smooth, and snatched. I sent a picture to my husband, who was thrilled, if not aroused. Now, who else could I show?

For the next week or so, I was thriving. It’s like that extra ounce of confidence you get when you have a great blowout. What had I been doing all this time? I thought back to all the summers I’d felt the hot pangs of shame whenever I slipped into a swimsuit, with my sideburns peeking out. But now, slithering into the pool at the Chateau Marmont, with my collagen-laden Erewhon smoothie in hand and without a flyaway in sight, I felt flawless. I took some celebratory selfies in some freebie Philo bikinis I'd been sent and marvelled at my transition into the ultimate LA girl, a Gimaguas-clad siren who’d finally shed her outer layer of scales. Who cares that my kids were practically drowning in the deep end? I couldn’t stop staring at my crotch, and I could have sworn that other lounge lizards at the pool were staring at it, too. I was also having a lot more sex, which, for the sake of my children, I'll leave at that. But all good things come to an end. By the time we got back to England, the first lot of alfalfa sprouts were starting to poke through. Fuck.

The thing about childbirth is that, despite swearing it off as soon as you’ve given birth, by the time you’re ready for another one, you’ve forgotten the immense pain you went through the first time, which is more than I can say for waxing. The pain is just too fresh. That’s not to say I won’t try it again. Far from it. I used to think that intimate grooming was only about catering to the male desire, without getting anything in return. But the whole experience has appealed to my vanity in a way it never has before. I felt hot and sexy, which is enough to entice me into doing it again. Where there was something unexpected and punk about being a hairy monster in my youth, it feels even more unexpected to keep things bang tidy as I hurtle into middle age. I could do with the extra help. However, it might just have to be a seasonal thing. Or who knows, maybe I’ll try laser next.

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Justine Harman is a National Magazine Award nominated journalist and the creator of several podcasts.

Explicit sex in writing usually embarrasses me. As an overstimulated mother of three with limited time for reading, I usually choose more nutritious, nonfiction reads that take me months to finish. Rarely do I intentionally dip my toe into a new book seeking some new combination of "cunt" and "ass." This was not always the case. As an adolescent, I would run my copies of Judy Blume's Summer Sisters and R. L. Stine novels ragged for just a whiff of over-the-pants action. But here's the thing: Even with an almost exclusive diet of autobiographies about the golden age of media, the sex still manages to find me. What am I talking about? Hidden dick, of course. Dick hidden deep down inside a book I thought was about dramaturgy, an unexpected setback, or working for Anthony Bourdain at the height of his influence. Because, at the end of the day, the stories I like are about adults. And, eventually, someone's gonna get laid. Herewith, six wildly imperfect examples of recently discovered hidden dick, which I guess we could also call cliterature. Up to you, dear reader.

#1: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

$30 at McNally Jackson

Every review of Ann Patchett's gloriously small (and big!) family fable describes it like a "warm hug." But few have touched upon when Lara and Duke — a future farmer's wife and Brad Pitt type, respectively — bone for the very first time. "There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end," Lara says of the affair, which takes place during a regional production of Our Town in the Catskills, "nor did it occur to me to care." Trust me — shit's hot.

#2: Care and Feeding by Laurie Woolever

$21.31 on ThriftBooks

While many addiction memoirs include sex, I wasn't expecting to get any from this remarkably honest memoir from Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain's former assistant. While navigating the mostly male world of competitive cheffing in the '00s, unhappily married Woolever sought out booze, bud, and eventually, a male sex worker who provides an "erotic massage" while she's in Tokyo with Bourdain. "Prostitution is illegal in Japan, but only when narrowly defined as the exchange of money for penis-and-vagina contact," she writes. “Everything else that consenting adults might like to do, such as hand stuff, slips through a loophole." Though she keeps the details vague, Woolever confesses to experiencing "some straightforward pleasure," during the encounter. Sounds like hand stuff to me!

#3: The Idea of You by Robinne Lee

$17.99 at Skylight Books

OK, so this happens to be a largely dick forward piece of writing, but have you listened to the audio book?! I did — during a family trip to the Jersey Shore where I spent every waking minute yearning to get back to author Robinne Lee, who voices the book for an unforgettable 11 hours and 55 minutes. Try getting through sentences like "I was so wet it was hard to discern where my panties ended and I began" without blushing. Then try doing it on a Tommy Bahama beach chair three feet from your in-laws. *Hey, Pop Pop.*

#4: All Fours by Miranda July

$19 at Stories Books

Obviously, All Fours had us all collectively dicksmacked last summer, but I've gotta say that this specific part has stuck with me long since we all left the motel room in Monrovia. "Then slowly I moved all the way down to the band on his underpants, which I thought would be boxers but which were white and tight and made me lose my mind a little. I unbuttoned his jeans and he only said Fuck under his breath. His big, hard shape was barely contained."

#5: Inside Out by Demi Moore

$14.95 at Powell’s Books

I guess I always imagined Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher had a fuckton of sex, but her 2019 memoir reveals the fact that they opened their marriage to a third — twice — which I did not know. "Ashton was growing less and less present. He focused on other things: his work; his growing involvement in the tech world; his fantasy football league...So when he expressed his fantasy of bringing a third person into our bed, I didn't say no,"' Moore writes. "There were two different people we opened our relationship to, and they didn't have bad intentions; they held it in the right space." I'm not saying it was a salve for the marriage. I'm not saying these folks didn't hold it in the right space. I'm just saying I didn't expect threesomes.

#6: The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

$18 at Strand Books

In Bret Easton Ellis' very loosely autobiographical banger — which I declare here the unofficial book of this dystopic L.A. summer — the dick isn't so much hidden as it was supposed to be gay! Here's just one eye-popping example of Easton Ellis' boner-straight erotica: "I remember she smelled of rose oil that night as I sucked her stiffening nipples while she kept guiding my hand along her clit, strumming it, her legs spread as wide as possible, the vulva open and hot, and she would push my hand there, which I would finger roughly before she moved it back to her clitoris." Now go take a cold shower, you perv.

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Sophie Kemp is the author of the novel Paradise Logic.

This was Brooklyn at the end of the 2010s. And by that I mean I was at a Pitchfork party at Kinfolk on Wythe and N. 11th, and Sky Ferreira was there. I was 22, almost 23. At this point in my life I was an assistant at Vogue. I was wearing a dress I originally purchased for my senior prom from an ebay seller in Hong Kong. I had been wearing it all day, since I got to work and had the very glamorous task of orchestrating an office move for my boss. I remember unpacking a giant watercolor painting of Walter Benjamin then tacking it up on her wall, literally with a thumb tack.

What I’m trying to say is that I was young, dumb, and trying to have fun. I got a drink from the open bar and made eye contact with Sky. Then I got another drink. And then another. I’m pretty sure Sky’s music was playing. I went to the bathroom with my friends where we all huddled in one stall and none of us did any drugs, mostly because we were so new to New York that we wouldn’t even know how to find them. I pulled my phone out of my purse and texted my boyfriend. We had been dating, at this point, for about four months. Do you see where this is going? I think I said something like: lol what r u doing tn.

Sometimes, it happens. One minute you are living in one kind of Girls episode, then the next, you’re living in a different Girls episode. You leave your glamorous magazine party and take the G train to your terrible apartment in Kensington, Brooklyn. Your boyfriend meets you there and you’re a little drunk. You have sex. It’s fun. You get up to go to the bathroom after and just as you’re sitting down a tiny piece of latex flutters into the bowl. You do a self exam and find out, actually there is a fair amount of that latex condom inside of you. Then you pee and it’s not pee. Also, in this totally hypothetical scenario, you’re not on any birth control. You whimper something to your boyfriend, and into the night he goes, all the way to Flatbush, to a 24/7 Walgreens. He pays for it, obviously.

I didn’t feel amazing the next day. But I also didn’t feel terrible. The morning-after pill is a form of hormonal contraceptive, and hormonal contraceptives have never exactly been my best friend. (It’s why I had to take the morning-after pill to begin with!) But I got through it. My boyfriend was extra sweet to me. I went to the Condé Nast cafeteria and got whatever I wanted for lunch. I let myself be a little bit of a diva. I took it easy in the evening and stayed in and watched TV. It wasn’t a big deal. My life went back to normal. I went to more magazine parties and had little cocktails with my friends and went out to dinner with my boyfriend. I was glad I wasn’t going to have a baby.

The next time I took the pill was early on in a new relationship. Same deal as the time before. My barrier method unexpectedly failed. It was July of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. My roommates didn’t want me to have anyone over because of Covid. I didn’t want to have to sneak around in my own home. We decided to get a hotel room in what is essentially the worst part of industrial Gowanus. We went to a dive bar before and were the only people there. We sat outside and drank terrible beer while looking out at Fourth Avenue. It felt cool to be breaking the rules, to be acting out just a little bit. It felt less cool when the condom broke a few hours later. But again, it was fine. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t like I was in a movie and threw up or was writhing from pain on the floor. I felt some minor physical discomfort. I took it easy.

One minute you are living in one kind of Girls episode, then the next, you’re living in a different Girls episode.

There was a third time shortly after that, same boyfriend. I began to realize my problem is that I needed to use lube. Not that I was using mysteriously defective condoms. I needed a little extra help, like a zillion other people. Sex is something you spend your whole life learning how to do. In my early 20s I might have thought I was some kind of world-class slut, but I also was immature and did not know that some people need to use lube during sex. I thought that was just for anal. I thought that was for girls who weren’t me.

I haven’t taken the morning-after pill ever since I had my earth-shattering revelation about lube. I don’t regret anything. I’m glad I’ve had the experience of taking the morning-after pill three times. It never felt like a big deal. If I have to take it again, it won’t feel like a big deal. And that’s because it isn’t a big deal. Each time I took the pill it was a personal choice about my personal health. I’ve always known I wanted to have children, but I also have always known I want to have them on my own terms. I knew when I wasn’t about to have children when I was a 22-year-old assistant making minimum wage in a bed-bug-infested hovel above a Hasidic laundromat. I also wasn’t about to have children in the middle of the pandemic with someone I had been on four dates with. That was not in the cards for me. (To fast forward a little bit: We ended up dating for two years, amicably split up, and are now close friends.)

If I want my life to be like a shitty Girls episode, let it be of the corny magazine party variety, not the impregnated by a surf instructor variety. People should be able to get pregnant on their own terms. I’m grateful for the three times I took the morning-after pill. I wouldn’t have done it any other way. Men have to pay for that kind of thing.

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Cazzie David is a 30-year-old girl (NOT woman) who has been told by up to two psychics that she has lived many lifetimes, and that only this current lifetime is that of a nepo baby (the other lifetimes were very respectable). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller No One Asked For This, a regular contributor to Air Mail, and has written for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle Magazine, and more. Her debut feature, I Love You Forever, which she co-wrote and directed, premiered at SXSW and is available for streaming. You can pre-order her next essay collection, Delusions: Of Grandeur, of Romance, of Progress, now.

If you are pushing 30 and have just entered the perpetual bad dream that is the wedding circuit, you have my utmost sympathies. You are about to have to sacrifice your time, your vacation days, your money, and your mental and physical health, all in order to sit and watch your friend cosplay as royalty for one to three days as you slowly age out of your youth. If you are not willing to simply RSVP “no” because the cost of doing so may be the friendship itself — or resentment you can’t deal with, especially if you, like me, prefer to dole out resentment rather than receive it — here are a few helpful tips and tricks to make it out roughly unscathed through the wedding festivities.

• Two (2) protein bars to sustain you from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. if you are a rational person who is scared of eating seafood that’s been cooked en masse.

• Comfortable shoes, which means nothing higher than a kitten heel. Sure, your outfit might look less good than it would with a heel, but no one ever looks down at your feet and flats will surely look better than walking around like barefoot children. For those who don’t own or are unwilling to wear comfortable shoes, bring band aids and/or flip flops.

• One (1) sweatshirt that can be comfortably worn once the elderly have gone home, everyone else is sufficiently drunk, and the bride’s eyeliner has started to smudge a little bit.

• A copy of The Temptation to Exist by Emile Cioran to read in the bathroom if things are getting particularly unbearable.

• Non-toxic bug spray for outdoor weddings to douse your body with once you’ve been bit so many times you no longer care that you’re about to ruin the floral, fairy vibes with a heavy, medicinal odor. (In my opinion, weddings should be treated more along the lines of going camping than going to a party, so feel free to go crazy at REI while you’re at it.)

• A parasol for sunny ceremonies. (In general I think we should bring the parasol back; not sure why they ever went extinct!)

• Two (2) packets of electrolytes after sweating from sitting in the sun for hours. One packet is for you. The other is in case someone sees you pulling the packet of electrolytes out of your bag and asks if they can have some. You will probably feel too uncomfortable to say no, and in order to avoid feeling actual rage towards this person after noticing she only took two sips, you bring an extra.

• One (1) pack of gum because if and when you pull it out the person who is speaking to you (a drunk close face talker) will ask for a piece and you definitely want them to have one.

• Discreet ear plugs to put in during the inevitable succession of the worst songs in the entire world (“I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, “Shout!” by the Isley Brothers, and so on)...

• Crutches and a sprain wrap bandage to wear peeking out of your kitten heel as an excuse to get out of dancing to the aforementioned worst songs in the world. Other guests always seem to believe the only reason a person could be seated while others are dancing is because they’re simply too demure to dance without being physically yanked out of their chair. A broken bone is the only solution.

• Two (2) Zofran or antacid for the “signature cocktail” induced nausea and an extra for the two a.m. shuttle ride down a treacherous mountain road in the middle of nowhere.

• A Post-it note with the words “they’re exaggerating” written on it to periodically glance at throughout the vows that slowly make you feel like you’ll never find love, or if you have, that your relationship isn’t good enough because you weren’t 100% sure your partner was “the one” within seconds of meeting them. Alternatively, if you happen to know deep down in your bones that the idea of the “the one” is a total farce, you can use this Post-it note to cover your mouth while you try not to laugh (scream).

• Tissues for when you are inevitably, nonetheless, unmasked as the hopeless romantic that you are and get choked up as the bride goes on to spew more platitudes about finding “her person,” and how special it was to finally feel that “spark,” even though you know this “spark” was more likely than not the result of a huge red flag flapping in the wind.

• A mantra to repeat to yourself in order to feel less like a sheep, in spite of the fact that you have been shepherded around for one to three days and forced to continuously, enthusiastically and quite literally applaud this (probably) banal if not utterly doomed union for that amount of time. “I am not a sheep,” might do the trick.

• A photo of yourself in your normal life being normal to remind yourself that it is in fact odd behavior to dress up as a virgin princess. This is especially necessary if and when you find yourself drifting off into a fantasy land where you are now the virgin, princess bride, inconveniencing and maybe even punishing everyone you know in the name of your true (probably soon-to-be divorced if you look at the statistics, no offense) love.

• Gratitude that we, as a society, have at least decided to leave the wedding hashtag behind. Things are pretty bad, but they could always be worse.

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Natasha Stagg writes the blog Selling Out. Her second novel, Grand Rapids, is available for presale now and publishing in late September of 2025.

In middle school, we had a crush on Garrett (all names are changed, just in case), a skateboarder who was smarter than the rest of us, which he made clear with running commentary throughout the day. I remember him as more than the class clown; he was an astute narrator of the absurd boredom we felt. At one point, he was made the host of our school-wide televised morning announcements, a live-only, fifteen-minute, daily show I wished was recorded and rewatchable.

An instance of his twelve-year-old humor I can recall, perhaps because I could rewatch it later, was when he took a DV camcorder out of my hands and, pointing it at a manhole cover, cried, “Leonardo, get me out of here,” handed it back to me, and walked away.

This was before everyone in the world had a personal video camera, and so borrowing one as part of a homework assignment was exhilarating. Kids ran up to the lens, opening their mouths over it or swearing about the teachers they disliked, then jumped back on a railing to grind down it using their Soap shoes. I was not accustomed to attention from boys, paralyzed by the possibility of having something to which they were drawn. Suddenly, Garrett — the ultimate boy — had grabbed the camera from me, frustrated by how I was wasting its capabilities, and seemingly without thinking, created a dramatic storyline in a split second.

Watching my own chaotic footage later, this was the only moment with any comedy or control. I was embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t even understood the scene until it was playing on a screen. There was a Ninja Turtle trapped under there. It had tension, conflict, character. It didn’t need to be planned out or rehearsed. It didn’t even need actors. I understood, from seeing him perform every day, that this was a throwaway idea, far beneath anything he’d turn in himself.

As an adult, I came back to my hometown after living away for some years, and so did Garrett. My friends had not kept track of his life. He’d seemed to have disappeared, at a time when that was getting more difficult to do, due to social media. I ran into him at a free outdoor concert. I was, strangely, alone, and so was he. We caught up and he remembered me, but only vaguely, I could tell. There was something stilted in the way he spoke, like a ‘50s movie character who has been lobotomized.

“You and Kyle always sat together on the school bus,” I said, to jog his memory.

“No, I didn’t meet Kyle until high school. That was high school.”

“I didn’t go to your high school,” I said. “Kyle didn’t either.”

The lapse felt significant. “You and Kyle were inseparable,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t know Kyle in middle school,” he insisted.

I’d kept in touch with Kyle over the years, and later, told him about this interaction. His response was, “That’s so Garrett. Doesn’t even remember me.” Kyle didn’t want to dwell on it. When Garrett moved away, he said, there was no warning. He was just gone, and then, once they’d all forgotten him, he was back.

I wish I could say how I ended up convincing Garrett to come home with me that night, after the concert had failed to hold our attention. I was in my early twenties, when living alone had first inflated my confidence. I had no qualms with asking someone if they would like to get in my car and leave to end up at my weird little bungalow — a former guest house, accessible only by alleyway, with no TV, wine, or snacks to offer, only myself as entertainment — at any time of day or night. Even if I had work in the morning, I’d invite over whole bands who were on tour and friends closing out the bar, telling them to pick up a 12 pack from the 24-hour gas station on the way. I drove drunk basically every evening, but so did everyone I knew.

Garrett poked around my house as if the point of this visit was to assess how my life had turned out, as if he had any idea what it had been like before. He picked up a framed photo on a shelf and unintentionally let it slip from his hand. It bounced off a rug and improbably hit the wall in a way that made the glass shatter. There were tiny shards everywhere. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“That was so weird,” I said, incredulous of the physics, not the slip. Then I noticed that Garrett didn’t move to clean up the mess. A wave of middle school humiliation washed over me. He could walk out the door, as he’d walked on after shoving my camera back in my hands, or dropped onto a skateboard as he got off the bus each afternoon.

“Sorry,” he repeated, with a lowered gaze. His hand, now empty, was still poised in a pinch, the other holding a beer. I wondered how this could be the same person I’d obsessed over as a pre-teen and thought, for a moment, that maybe it wasn’t.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Look at this place. It’s a mess.” I walked to the bed and sat on it. He sat next to me. I kissed him and we kissed for a while. His body felt focused, content. The next step was obvious to me, but either it was not to him, or he was no longer interested. More likely, I believe, he was overstimulated, shaken by my accusation that he did not accurately recall his own past, the change of scenery from booming amps to stoney silence, the broken glass. Maybe he felt he should have remembered more about me, too. I wouldn’t expect anyone to do that, though. As a kid, I was exceptionally shy, feeling that I’d missed a lesson on how to be as fun as everyone else. I had wished to become invisible and simply see things play out, to watch life as if it was on TV. Garrett had wanted to be the TV. Now, he was the shy one. Our kissing became steady breathing and soon he was asleep. When I woke up, he was gone.

My friends, some of whom had gone to my middle school, often met at a deli on weekend mornings to discuss the evenings we’d individually had. Over coffee and orange juice and coke and sandwiches in the outdoor dining area, I told them about mine. They were less puzzled than amused.

The full circularity of our childhood crush being so easily seduced — so caught off guard that he backed into a wall and broke something — was like a badly written rom-com. That wasn’t exactly how things had gone, but I didn’t argue. They decided that he must have been so flustered, he couldn’t get it up. A classic girlfriends’ segue to their own dramas: You intimidated him.

“I wondered how this could be the same person I’d obsessed over as a pre-teen and thought, for a moment, that maybe it wasn’t.”

Maybe I agreed, but that sounded too simplistic. Probably a year before this night, I took a guy home from a party and had sex with him. He slept over and in the early morning, jolted awake, waking me up, too, and knocking over a glass of water, letting it roll off the side table, and shatter. He didn’t clean up his mess, either. Instead, he left, assuming or hoping I was still asleep, not bothering to check. I wondered if he thought I’d blame myself for the damage, if he imagined me stepping out of bed and into a pile of glass, if he felt any remorse or embarrassment at all.

Because I’m writing about this now, I can’t not relate those boys’ decisions to leave objects they’d smashed on my floor to the commonly implied metaphor of the term “shatter.” We’re more accustomed to it describing emotional, rather than physical, wreckage. These men didn’t break my heart, but they did enact a tangible carelessness that reflected some version of how I felt about myself before growing up. Attempting to sweep and vacuum all those shards, which were scattered in a way that they’d cut me later when I was least expecting it, I wanted again to be invisible, to have not even tried. And whenever I ran into the other guy after that, he pretended he’d never met me.

I did still feel a tenderness toward Garrett, though, who was clearly going through something that night. Maybe his long disappearance was explained by a stint at some facility or reprogramming camp. Maybe he was accidentally or secretly on hallucinogenic drugs. I didn’t hear from or see him again. It sounds too cinematic to be true, but the last time I tried looking him up, he was posting skateboard videos from Japan, having fallen in love and moved there.

I’d be remiss to not mention that in the sixth grade, Garrett made an unnecessarily realistic diorama for a class assignment. It was a box of delicately suspended translucent plastic cutouts tinted every color. With tiny clay figures, it showed his favorite scene in movie history (so far): the one in Bladerunner (1982) wherein Rick Deckard, a former detective hired to extinguish humanoid “replicants” shoots at seductress Zhora as she runs through the glass of neon-lit store windows. She and his bullets shatter pane after pane, letting shards rain down, their reflections creating a sultry image set to jazz. In slow motion, she falls and finally dies, or, in the story’s terms, is “retired.” The twist? Rick might be a replicant himself, but unaware. I rewatched the scene just now, and it is drawn out, focusing intermittently on the reflections and refractions the pieces project, causing a kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic interlude in a mostly noirish mood. Again, matching these shatters and shards with those that happened in my old house is way too heavy-handed, but that certain memories stand out must, in retrospect, shape this crush (that word: also what happens to fragile glass).

Garrett, age 12, chose this Bladerunner moment as iconic of his own interests for a reason, be it deep-seated or unforetold. He recreated those frames in three-dimensional miniature, within the confines of a shoebox, and carefully transported the whole thing to school on our bus. If I’m being honest, I never even saw the diorama. My sister was the one in his class, but I remember her describing it to me in detail and picturing everything, including the students’ shocked faces, none of which had seen or heard of this movie that had apparently so moved Garrett.

A kid building such a monument is almost as melancholy as — or, because it’s real, more melancholy than — the idea of an artificially intelligent being unknowingly hunting his own kind. For me, that’s all reflected in the scene when I rewatch it. That, and that same kid throwing his voice to entertain the rest of us, as a turtle trapped underground.

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Photo: Tonje Thilesen

Danielle Prescod is the author of The Rules of Fortune and Token Black Girl, a fifteen-year veteran of the beauty and fashion industry, and a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. With Chrissy Rutherford, Danielle cofounded 2BG Consulting, which aids fashion and beauty brands and influencers on their anti-racism journeys. She dedicates her time to researching how feminism and social justice intersect with pop culture.

I’m sitting across from a thirty-something year old man who works at the youth shelter that I volunteer with. We’re both interested in community advocacy, obviously. I’m not attracted to him outright, but he sent me a like on Hinge and he’s at least taller than me. I allow myself to consider the potential. Then, he gets up from the table, confidently strides over to the counter of the coffee shop we’re in, and proceeds to order lunch and a drink…for himself and only himself.

When he returns to our table — holding a number on a stand to delineate where his order should go — I’m stunned. I ask him why he did that and he responds by saying that he “doesn’t buy anything for a woman that he’s not romantically involved with.” It’s a somewhat baffling boundary to set…on a date. No matter. I also get up and order myself a matcha and sit at another table while he waits for his lunch and I call my mom. We never speak again.

Then there’s the third date with a Creole man who uses our tenuous familiarity with one another to reveal two crucial things that he’s previously kept secret. The first is that he lied about his age (he’s ten years older than what his dating profile said). The second? He has six kids. Yes, six. Afterwards, he offered to drive me home, only for us to wind up doing a drug deal in a Dollar Tree parking lot. (He said he had to do something “real quick” before instructing me to remain in the car.) After several unanswered "Good Morning, beautiful" texts, we never speak again.

If this sample set of stories surprises you, how long have you been married? Because a single girl would be able to one up me in 30 seconds or less. I spent the better part of two years chronicling the misadventures of my dating life on TikTok where, if you really dig, you can find the videos of these interactions and more. I actually really recommend the coffee shop one. I say all of this to give myself credibility in being able to make the declaration that the dating landscape has never been more bleak.

The buck of blame has been passed around as to what exactly is responsible for the decline of romantic satisfaction amongst singles. From hook up culture, to the pandemic, to the economy, to our increased reliance on (and growing dissatisfaction with) the apps. While it’s still possible to meet a partner on an app — I eventually met mine on Bumble — the journey is not enjoyable and many people are preferring to just opt out entirely. (This is why people were pretending to like run clubs for a brief amount of time before the charade became too much.)

The interference of the internet has played a pivotal role in destroying modern dating, and thus, our hope in finding love. The evidence is everywhere: Ghosting. Situationships. Love-Bombing. Catfishing. These terms highlight a disconnect in the ways that people think about relationships that is a direct result of our use of technology. But if we are to believe that dating apps have had a hand in the demise of love, then I think it’s a fair assumption that ChatGPT — the latest technological advancement to encroach on modern love — might just torpedo the rest of the good that is left.

Which is why I was surprised to see that Craig Conover, of all people, recently went on a podcast and declared: “ChatGPT is, like, the best therapist in the world… It remembers everything about you, and I also talked to it throughout my relationship. It knows my love language. I used to ask it for advice for everything, and so it’s helped me through this breakup.”

Now, Craig Conover is likely not the barometer that most people would prefer to use for determining whether something is a good or bad fit for their lives — at least I hope not. He is a Bravolebrity, a podcaster, and a pillow entrepreneur (yes, really). Until last winter, he was coupled up with Paige DeSorbo, another Bravolebrity, podcaster, and pajama entrepreneur (yes, really). So yes…this would be the breakup that he turned to ChatGPT to help him through.

ChatGPT essentially functions by learning behaviors from humans. As Conover points out, it studies you and remembers things. The more that people use it, the smarter it becomes. But because it is not and can never be human, it is unlikely to be “the best therapist in the world.” It can approximate emotions. It can proof-read texts and partially decipher meaning from them, but it knows nothing about love because it cannot be in love.

How is ChatGPT going to give credible blowjob advice when it’s never felt a dick, you know? You might be old enough to remember that this kind of guidance used to come from print magazines. At least a Cosmo article was written by a person.

Yet, none of this has stopped tech developers from thinking that generative AI can actually be used for companionship or sex, making the suggestion that it be used for therapy seem benign. A prompt to a chatbot is not going to provide a shortcut to healing anything, definitely not a break up. AI can help add some new concepts to your consciousness, but it cannot make you understand how to use them in praxis. So why on earth would anyone be ok with allowing OpenAI inside their most intimate thoughts and feelings? You know what they say: Men will do anything but therapy.

To bring it back to Craig for a hot second, the relationship he was trying to salvage by using ChatGPT ended — but that doesn’t mean a certain sect of men who make hating women their entire personalities won’t follow Craig right on over ChatGPT. Which is what makes his endorsement so scary.

“How is ChatGPT going to give credible blowjob advice when it’s never felt a dick, you know?”

To these incels, Conover represents the “Chad” archetype: a man who excels in life and achieves financial success, all while embodying the physical ideal. Those who forget that things like humor and values matter when it comes to compatibility ignore that women generally prefer a guy who is smart, thoughtful, and kind, and not just hot. ChatGPT is used by these guys — which means that it’s also informed by them. And let’s not forget the people building the tools in the first place. Demographics suggest that men are over indexed in the field and dominate with 78% of the jobs, so it’s tech professionals creating these algorithms and training the AI — the Bot Daddies, if you will — that it’s mirroring. And they mostly suck.

So since The Last of Us is on hiatus, I have a scary scenario for you. Imagine, the entirety of the Joe Rogan podcast listenership starts using ChatGPT after hearing a “Chad” endorse it. Guess who ChatGPT will start to sound like?

When it comes to matters of the heart, you kind of need a heart — one that beats and breaks, in order to understand love. It’s why we have love songs and sad movies. The things that make us feel are made by those authentically trying to answer the questions of life, even as they fumble through it. When I first started dating my boyfriend, he would physically shake every time he saw me. Whether from nerves or excitement, we’ll never really know. But I could feel something in those vibrations and I swear it locked my essence to his. To be a real lover, you need love letters, inside jokes, and to painfully sit with the pulsating anxiety that comes with determining if someone likes you back. Love is skin to skin contact, interlaced fingers, tongues touching.

Almost everything replaced by AI and automation sucks. It sucks to do self-checkout at a grocery store. It really sucks to call UPS or Fedex. It sucks to ask a screen for your size in a dressing room. If finding someone that you want to hump forever sucks right now, it doesn’t have to. We can still turn this ship around — as long as we don’t expect ChatGPT to do it for us. Real love is analog.

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Megan Nolan is the author of the novels Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings which have been translated into fourteen languages. She is at work on a book of nonfiction.

Not long before we matched on a dating app, my boyfriend saw my Instagram profile through our mutual friends. He thought I was cute and considered asking me out, but then saw that my first pinned post showed a carousel of a dozen pictures of me with a good-looking guy — most of them with our arms around each other, grinning with delirious joy. The caption reads: “Two years ago today I met my best friend.” My boyfriend, reasonably enough, assumed this was a corny way of referring to my romantic partner.

“Even after I knew he was just your friend, I didn’t really get it,” he told me. “But as soon as I met him, I understood.”

Daniel is my best friend, and there is less than zero romantic or sexual desire between us. He’s Classic Hollywood handsome, and the best-read, smartest person I’ve ever met — miles funnier than any comedian. He is also one of the world’s great buffoons. It’s not uncommon for Daniel to squirt hot dog mustard all over himself and shrug as he hurls the ruined shirt into the trash. Despite his radiant intelligence, his functionality is such that a group of women in an office he once worked at collectively bought him a coat because they feared he would otherwise obliviously freeze to death.

One night, when we were hanging out in his bedroom after an evening out in the city, he opened his window to show me a nest of mourning doves. A bird then flew into his room where it circulated with increasing alarm while I cowered, screaming in the corner, until Daniel eventually caught it in his hands and released it. Afterward, he lit a cigarette and continued the conversation as though nothing had happened. Life has never been more slapstick, more vaudeville, since I have known this ridiculous, perfect man.

Most people who get to know us end up understanding the essentially familial bond we now share. It’s one which does involve physicality, but it’s the kind of physicality that sees me pour a bottle of water down the back of his shirt when we are walking in the park on a hot day or him putting me in a headlock to retrieve a vape I have stolen from his pocket. Despite the nature of the friendship now, the fact remains that we initially met on Tinder. So whenever I write or post about our mutual devotion, there are people eager to inform me that I am mistaken and at least one of us must secretly pine for the other. No pine, I tell them, no yearn. No long, dark nights of the soul, nor what-ifs or if-onlys.

I met a lot of my current male friends through dating apps. Before I moved to New York full-time, I was often in-and-out on three-month excursions, during which I would date around and keep in touch afterwards. Not because I expected to ever be in a serious relationship with them, but because I liked the men and wanted to keep them in my life. In a few cases, this meant occasionally sleeping with each other over the years, but mostly the dalliances smoothed out into purely platonic friendships whose only downside became the comically imbalanced gender ratio of my parties.

“People [are] eager to inform me that I am mistaken and at least one of us must secretly pine for the other. No pine, I tell them, no yearn.”

Once, a few years back, I threw a thing in the basement of the Thai restaurant Lovely Day in New York and invited everyone I knew. I glanced around me at one point, delighted to see the hot bartender I had a brief winter fling with was now making out with a virtual stranger I’d invited after she sent me a photograph of her reading my novel in the bath. Everywhere I looked, attractive men I was fond of bounded around being cute or annoying or funny. I was later informed that some girls I didn’t really know but thought were cool had become intrigued by me as a result, one of them asking our mutual friend: “Who is this woman? I heard she had a party where there were like 70 hot guys…”

Daniel and I went on our first date to The Library in the East Village, made out, and went out again a few times after that before we agreed to be friends instead. He graciously never corrects me when I tell people who ask that we both decided immediately there was no physical connection and moved straight to being pals. The truth is, though, that I never felt the spark but I pushed for us to keep dating even after this was clear to us both. When we kissed it felt labored and effortful and, frankly, like trying to make out with a cousin. But I couldn’t imagine, having met him, a world in which we didn’t talk every day. Even at the age of 33 I still didn’t understand that there was an alternative to romantic connection which would guarantee me this access to a stranger who so excited and delighted me.

Luckily for me, Daniel did have the imagination — or maybe, more accurately, the knowledge of his own capacity for friendship — to know that we didn’t need sex or romance to be intrinsically bound. I was a little testy at first, fearing that when he found a girl he did want to date I would lose the intensity of the friendship, but it soon became clear that we shared something totally separate from and untouched by the vagaries of our romantic lives.

One ex of mine did have qualms about Daniel. Not so much the closeness as our ability to egg each other on into nights that conclude at 5 am. That person thought Daniel was a bad influence on me, but I kept explaining that in fact we influence each other: making bargains, begging for an extra twenty minutes so we can get to the bottom of something we are frantically discussing, or just to keep laughing for another little while. My boyfriend now seems to intuitively get the whole deal, which is an important indicator to me that we are comfortable together. Last week I mentioned Daniel in passing to him and he stopped, chuckled, and said, “Daniel, what a great guy,” with a kind of fond appreciation in his voice which made me feel even more loved and understood by him.

Two and a half years since I first met Daniel, we have the kind of relationship that makes you want to make art about it. (Literally, in my case. The next novel I am writing is concerned with how platonic opposite gender friendships survive into later adulthood.) We live 90 seconds away from each other, and convene pretty much every afternoon in the coffee shop around the corner, where he bellows non-verbally upon seeing me — alarming the other clientele and causing me to shush him, although I am smiling too much for it to be very convincing. We find each other so funny, and fun, and interesting that basically nothing in a life which has the other in it can be all bad. I once described my feelings about Daniel as being the friend-equivalent of falling madly in love. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had fallen madly in love. It just wasn’t the romantic kind.

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