How to Make Long Distance Dating Sexy and Keep Things H.O.T. in Your L.D.R.

Long distance relationships can be romantic, exciting, and totally hot. They can also sometimes totally suck and it can feel like you’re missing out on things. I get it! I’m with you! It’s hard to feel so far from the people you care about. This shit is not easy. But! We choose these relationships anyway, for our varied reasons, and gosh darnit we are gonna have some sexy fun while we’re here! Luckily we live in the digital age, where we can share more of ourselves with our long distance dates than ever before. There are some things to keep in mind though, before you dive right into sending your sweetie the hot nudez you just took.

+ No LDR looks the same. Every relationship’s journey has been different and every person differs and what might work for one relationship might not work for yours. That’s okay! Don’t stress if a particular thing here doesn’t apply to or work for you!
+ Negotiate everything with your partner, and keep them in the loop of what you want to do and what you want your LDR sex life to look like. Even from a loved one, unsolicited nudes can be a lot to take in when you aren’t expecting them! Be aware of your partners needs and boundaries.
+ Consent consent consent!

With that said, even beyond the avenues named here in this very guide, there are so many options for ways to keep things sexy! Consider these your starting points, a place to start the conversation and the exploration for your long distance relationship.

Use Your Words

Words can be so powerful, and SO sexy. Written or spoken or read, words can have such an impact, and form a huge component of any LDR. They’re a great option in addition to sending photos and video, or if you and your partner aren’t in a place where you’re comfy with visual content. There are so many ways to verbally connect with your partner (after all, you’re probably texting and on the phone all the time in non-sexual contexts already!), but here are some ideas to start.

Phone sex & sexting

These are what people often think of in terms of maintaining intimacy in a long distance relationship. They look different — you can sext under your desk at your day job all day long, and then curl up with the phone at your ear at night — but they follow similar narratives. You’re likely talking about sex you’ve had before (“remember how you did [redacted] last weekend? I’m still thinking about it…”), or sex you could be having (“I wish you were here, I’d [redacted]”), or sex you want to have (next time I see you I can’t wait to…). You can share fantasies, let your partner know how hot they are and everything you want to do to them, or tell them in great detail how fantastic the sex you’ve already had is, and how much remembering it turns you on (a combination sext and compliment!). If you and your long-distance sweetie have yet to connect in real life to this degree, you can use sexting and phone sex as your platform to get to know what you’re both into. It can be a great way to feel out words or names you both like, favorite fantasies and turn-ons, and the overall sexual dynamic between you two. Feeling nervous about how to get things started? Understandable! Lucky for you, Autostraddle has a whole guide on 10 tips for better sexting!

Written letters

Who said the written word is dead? By far one of the most lovely surprises I have ever received in the mail was a handwritten letter with smutty words describing the details of a past hookup in a crush’s hand writing. It’s romantic! It’s hot! The act of writing the words down feels intimate and personal, plus now your sweetie has your actual written words to carry with them and look back on, like a diary of your relationship.

Reading erotica/fan fiction to each other

Listen, coming up with your own words can be really difficult at times! It can feel like there’s a lot of pressure to be wonderful at words.  Luckily, so many people have written hot words that you can read or share with your partner. Having your partner listen to you read passages or articles or erotica that made you think of them, or vice versa, can even ease you into phone sex. Even sending links to pieces you enjoyed, saying “this made me think of you,” or “I’d love to do this with you” is a nice small but sexy gesture, and those small gestures matter.

Leaving voice recordings

Texting technology is increasingly multimedia, and that means in addition to sending sexy pictures or emoji, audio is an option too. Leaving a voice recording — be it a voicemail, voice memo, voxer, or other voice recording device/app — has all the perks of phone sex, while giving your partner the option to listen to your voice over and over again. It also eases off some of the pressure of phone sex knowing that someone is listening on the other end RIGHT THEN; if you don’t like how something sounds or change your mind about something you’re experimenting with, you can re-record. If phone sex and the idea of coming up with sexy words on the spot makes you shy, try writing your words down before like a script!Practice it a few times if you need! Give yourself the space to get comfortable while also giving your lover a wonderful gift. If you’d rather not have to worry about a script, recording your moans while masturbating is plenty hot on its own; hearing you say her name while you’re coming is a great way to make your partner blush as she’s checking her voicemail after a work meeting.

Let’s Get Visual

The visual aspect of an LDR is of great importance, and worth putting a lot of thought into. Sharing your body with someone in real life is one thing, but sharing permanent media featuring your body that you ultimately have no control over once its been sent is a really vulnerable and different experience! You’re sharing yourself with someone you trust, but also phones get lost or hacked, or laptops get shared with friends and roommates. Do you want your face to be featured? Just your body? No body at all, only your face? A straight close up of your genitals? Do you want to be touching yourself or teasing yourself or just making cute faces while you seductively pull your shirt down? What is your partner comfortable receiving? Once you know where you and your partner stand, you not only have a clearer idea of what your next moves are, but also now have had a conversation about what you want from and with each other. Communication is amazing!

Send nudes?

Nudes are truly a gift. There are so many lists of tips for taking them; almost all of them boil down to using natural lighting, exploring different angles, and practicing a LOT. Thirst traps are not nudes, but that doesn’t mean Kayla’s exhaustive guide to thirst traps isn’t relevant. Get creative, get artsy, tell a story through your nudes! Incorporate them in sexting, send them as a little “thinking of you” through the day, have fun with it! Practice and test things out with various cameras and angles, ask a trusted friend if they can review before you send them to give feedback. Think about your own favorite body parts or angles, and the things about your body you know drive your partner wild. At the same time, don’t feel obligated to take nudes you don’t want to for the sake of a partner. And definitely, 100% do not send unsolicited nudes ever! Pre-negotiate with a partner your boundaries around sending and receiving nudes prior to sending anything.

Video star

Recording a sexy video isn’t always easy, and it takes work to find your rhythm. Are you using a phone camera, a computer, a DSLR, a full production team? And what does a sexy video even mean to you? To your partner? Think about the premise of your sexy video; start with something that authentically makes you feel sexy and confident, not just something you think looks sexy when other people do it. Do a cute dance, a striptease if you want. Take a video just of the lower half of your face while you’re touching yourself and whispering their name. What about a slow motion video of you spanking yourself? Or send an entire scene from start to finish of you masturbating, use multiple cameras! There are so! many! options for what a sexy video can be! Just a quick video of a not-explicitly-sexual thing you know turns your partner on, like putting on lipstick or playing with a belt, can have them thinking about you all day. Half the fun is making them, knowing that this is for your person, and that you are creating something for them to enjoy.

FaceTime sex

It’s an art, having to perform live, and even more so while naked in front of a camera with a sweetie on the other end watching. Much like everything on this list, there are so many options for how this can look and it’s so specific to your relationship! FaceTime sex can mean you’re speaking your sexy thoughts to each other and only focusing on your face, maybe touching yourselves or maybe not. It can be a striptease, or full body shots of you masturbating — maybe simultaneously, maybe one at a time. It can be kinky, romantic, silly, messy, whatever you want! Performance anxiety is very real though, and not feeling ready or comfortable to bare all, live on screen, is understandable. Communicating with each other about what would feel good to you while having FaceTime sex is very important, so that no one ends up feeling uncomfortable with the arrangement. It might be something you want to build up to after exchanging other media or phone sex. But having a partner right there in front of you live in real time, getting themselves off to just the thought of you being there, can be incredibly connective and incredibly hot!

Watch porn together

Watching porn together is a sexy, fun way to explore what you’re both into and enjoy something together while far apart. Trade links throughout the day and pick out ones you enjoy, ones you can see yourselves in, ones you can’t see yourself in at all but find very very hot, and share with your partner why that is. This can be a nice option if you aren’t quite in the place to be wanting to do the performing yourself, or if you already do a lot of joint watching of movies or shows in your relationship it could be a natural choice. In general, it’s also just a really hot segue into bigger conversations. Have you heard of Crash Pad? You should check out Crash Pad.

Toys for Good Girls and Bois

One of the hardest things about LDRs is that you can’t have your hands on and in your sweetie whenever you want — but you can send them a sex toy to use in your absence, which is like the next best thing.

Send wish lists

Sex toys can be very expensive! Not everyone can have the means to afford splurging on sex toys all the time, especially while also trying to afford travel to see your sweetie in real life! Try finding a sex shop you like and build a wishlist of products together. This can be a fun way to open the floor to wider conversations of what you want to do to each other/ with each other with these things, and also lets you have a list to pull from to surprise each other. You can even use the wishlist to refer back to as gift ideas for future celebrations.

Send sex toys

If you find yourself in a place where you can purchase some sweet gifts for your sweetie, consider sending them the gift that keeps on giving. Something to keep in mind with sex toys is that it is very hard to be able to know for sure if something works for someone up until you try it. Talk to your partner prior, and if they’re new to sex toys or unsure what they might like, Autostraddle is here to help with the handy guide on how to buy a vibrator, a harness and a dildo to strap on with. Ultimately though, it is all about learning together, which is so hot! Plus it gives you something to have and look forward to using together once you do get to spend time together in real life.

Send an app-compatible vibrator

The future is now! Did you know there are so many app-compatible vibrators on the market? Vibrators that you can operate from any distance on your phone? Imagine the possibilities! There are a lot of variations of an app-compatible toy, but most notably is We-Vibe’s entire line of vibrators that are app-compatible and all vary in their shape and style, giving you and your partner a variety of options to choose which might work best for you. One anonymous reviewer just tried out the We-Vibe Ditto with their long-distance partner and had great things to say. Fun!

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Ultimately, every long distance relationship is on its own path and started differently. Some folks have been together for a while before they became long distance, some have only ever been long distance, some are part-time long distance; it all varies! And that, among many other factors, changes what might work for you! But feel it out together, be as honest and direct as possible, and you’ll find your way. Have fun, be weird, keep the sexy magic alive!

Are you going through it too? Share in the comments how you keep things ~sexy~ in your long distance relationships of past or present!

Your Girlfriend’s Family Is Racist and You Should Probably Get the Hell Out of There

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

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Q:

How much do I need to engage with my serious girlfriend’s racist immediate family members? She is close with them, and I’ve spent time with them in the past (big holidays, etc.) since my own parents are lowkey, but put simply I no longer have the energy or inclination to do so, even though I love my gf. I chose her, not them. I have no love for them! She knows how I feel about this but it seems to weigh much more heavily on me than her. I’m also a queer POC whereas she & her whole family are very white.

A:

Friend, I am going to say something to you that is hard, but I’m going to say it with love. And I don’t mean love in an artificial way, I mean love like bell hooks defines in Teaching Community: “as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.” So I want you to read what I say knowing that even though I don’t know you, I care about you, I am committed to your well being, and to you knowing yourself and your worth. I feel responsible for you because as queer people of color, one of us is not free until we all are free. I respect you. And I trust you to do what you need to do with this advice. Maybe it will be helpful, maybe you will toss it out and ignore it. Both are totally fine actions, I just want you to know that it’s coming from love and not meant to hurt you.

You have to break up with her. Shorty, you’ve got to break up with her! You write, “She knows how I feel about this but it seems to weigh much more heavily on me than her.” If you’ve told her that her family’s racism bothers you so much that you “no longer have the energy or inclination” to spend time with them, and it’s still not a big deal to her, that should be a red flag. It’s not like this is her racist grandma who she only writes birthday cards to, this is her immediate family, and clearly they matter to her more than you. Get her out of your life NOW!

This is hard to take in! This is so so so so so hard to take in. Because she has pretty hair, or she smells good, or she’s got great goals and aspirations, or the sex is good, but she’s got to fucking go. You chose her, but in some very important ways, she did not choose you. I’m not going to say that a person who has close relationships with racists is a racist, but I will say that her family’s racist ideology played a formative role in her life. In some way, she is okay with that, if she doesn’t think it’s worth it to confront their racism. She is choosing them, and when things get hard, can you trust that the racism she grew up around won’t enter into your relationship? Even if she says she’ll never use [insert racial slur here], are you always going to be anxious when you get into disagreements that she might? What does that do to a relationship? Is that honestly a relationship you want to be in?

Listen pal, you and I know both know that a large part of what makes whiteness so insidious is that white people don’t see whiteness. When people of color call out racial oppression, we’re making a big deal out of nothing because whiteness isn’t seen as something used oppressively, it’s just seen as normal, no big deal. And because we live in a society where whiteness is the norm, sometimes, if we’re not being mindful, we can forget that whiteness is there. Like, of course, you’re not always going to think about how whiteness makes your girlfriend access wider privileges than you all the time, you’re in love! You shouldn’t have to think about it all the time.

But whiteness becomes glaringly visible when it’s used against you, and I don’t want that to happen to you. You don’t deserve to be partly loved by someone who thinks its okay to be in community with racists. You deserve to be wholly loved by a girl who loves you and your brownness and your badass hair and all the other great things about you. I believe you will find that girl or non-binary babe or whoever you want it to be, but my good, good, friend, this girl is not her. You need to break up with her. She’s gotta go. You’re worth 100 of her. Take that knowledge, and make this brave step for yourself. You deserve it.

Starstruck: Find Out What Your Crush’s Mars Sign Says About Your Compatibility (and Their Sex Drive)

We’ve talked about how to interpret the placement of your Moon sign, your Mercury, and Venus, planet of love — now it’s time to talk about Mars. Mars, the planet of action, helps us assert ourselves. It helps us go after what we want. Mars is our individuality. I want. I need. I desire.

Mars is our daring, our energy, our drive.

To oversimplify, Mars is also how we fight and how we fuck. It’s where we expend yang energy. It’s how we chase, how we pursue, how we instigate.

In our culture, if Venus is undervalued and neglected, Mars is often perverted: by toxic and hyper-performative masculinity and machismo, by a culture of gun violence, of rape and sexual violence, of colonialism, of an (in)justice system. Mars is the god of war, and we see their energy everywhere, in every news cycle. Destruction — Tower energy of the Tarot, if you will — is a vital component to any cyclical process, but war and destruction and tearing down without respect for human dignity, or the dignity of the self, lays waste to what it touches, leaving trauma in its wake.

What is Mars if it is all fight with no dignity?

Mars is where we dig deep in order to fight for ourselves and for those (and what) we love and value.

Mars is where we find our courage.

A note on compatibility: When it comes to synastry, what we really look for is Mars matching with a partner’s Venus sign. The most potent synastry comes when your Mars and your partner(s)’ Venus is in the same sign, but having Venus and Mars in the same element (e.g. both fire – Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) is also pretty smoking! Reason being: Mars is yang, Venus is yin. Mars is sex drive; Venus is love and romance and wooing. And we all have both in our chart, with different expressions and strengths.

Remember that ultimately, this series on compatibility is about empowering you to better understand your needs as well as those of your partner(s). Any particular grouping of self-aware, emotionally engaged, conscientious, communicative people can make a go of it. Astrology isn’t a didactic ideology to be used to batter us into the idea that we can’t or shouldn’t partner with certain kinds of people “because” they’re a certain sign; rather, it should be used to help us better get to the root of our own self-expression.

Aries Mars

Mars is happy in Aries, the ruler of the fire signs. Aries is the warrior in the front lines. Mars in Aries is decisive, impulsive, aggressive. You know what you want, and you’re going to get it – no matter the cost. Just remember to respect people’s boundaries. While folks appreciate your passion and forthrightness, checking in is vital.

How you channel energy: You’re take charge, take no prisoners. You have a thought, or a feeling, and you’re out there, going for it.

How you ask someone out: A little less conversation, a little more action. You’re bold, dominant, and no bullshit. You can’t stand not having it all out in the open. You’re ready to risk it all.

Let’s talk about sex: You can’t get enough, and you’ve got the stamina for it. It can be challenging to find folks who can keep up with you. For you, sex is recharge: it helps you connect to your body, helps you connect to other people. However, it’s not necessarily intrinsically tied up with your emotions.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janet Mock, Angelina Jolie

Taurus Mars

You might be slow to anger, or arousal, but you know what others may not — you’ve got stamina for days and are sensuous as hell. You’re also extraordinarily stubborn in the boardroom and bedroom so, you know. Buckle up.

How you channel energy: Thinking it through. You’re thoughtful, and you like to have a plan for how you approach a situation — whether it’s a conflict at work or a romantic prospect.

How you ask someone out: You can be direct (Taurus is earth energy, after all), but you also know that slow and steady wins the race. Think the tortoise and the hare. If you hold your ground, you know you’ve got a fighting chance. The key is to actually make an effort, Taurus.

Let’s talk about sex: Your patience and sheer tenacity works to your advantage in the bedroom. You’re an expert at seduction, at creating a sensory, multi-layered experience. Taurus is ruled by Venus — and it shows.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Ellen Page, Queen Latifah

Gemini Mars

Was that debate flirtatious or for someone’s evisceration? It can be so hard to tell. Words are your weapons, and your seduction tactic. You require variety and stimulation; boredom — in any arena of life — is anathema.

How you channel energy: Words are what you wield. They’re what you reach for when wooing; they’re what you reach for when you need a weapon. You cut to the quick with a well-placed line.

How you ask someone out: Woof, but are you charming and witty. You instinctively know how to read the room. Whether it’s using a line from someone’s favorite movie or doing it up with clever word play, you’ll find a way to turn their head. (The key, of course, is that you don’t always do so well with people who can’t get on your wavelength.)

Let’s talk about sex: Dirty talk? Yes, please. Communication in bed is probably something you like giving and/or receiving.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Sara Ramirez, Samira Wiley

Cancer Mars

The key to unlocking your sex drive? Your emotions. You’re deeply protective and far more sensitive than you’re comfortable letting on. You can also hold a grudge like nobody’s business. You love deeply; you hurt deeply. You don’t let shit go. You’re in it — no matter what it is — for the long haul.

How you channel energy: By taking care of those around you.

How you ask someone out: You prefer to let things unfold slowly, over time. You trust your intuition about people, and you don’t feel a rush to move things along. You would rather take an indirect approach.

Let’s talk about sex: You can do casual sex, of course, but for you, the best sex comes within partnership – real partnership. In order to truly be intimate with someone, you have to let the drawbridge down – and that can take a while. That’s okay, babe. Don’t rush it. You know that the mind-blowing passion is worth the wait.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Hayley Kiyoko, Tilda Swinton

Leo Mars

You’re confident as hell, and you know that’s sexy as hell. You’re invariably a high achiever, because you’re always on — and you, unlike so many others, delight in being “on.” For you, all the world’s a stage, and you know exactly what strings to pull to get what you want.

How you channel energy: By performing. With you, the challenge is asking what you really want, and where your motivations are really coming from. You can charm your way in and out of any fight or flirtation, but what will really serve you?

How you ask someone out: Do you want to ask them out, or do you want them to ask you out? You can go either way, and you can arrange the production so that it happens either way, too. And you know it. And that’s hot.

Let’s talk about sex: Let’s be real: you like to be worshipped. But you also have a playful side that’s rarely appreciated, and partners who can tap into this side of you — and who themselves can rock with that — are key to helping you let loose.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kate Moennig, Kehlani

Virgo Mars

Your cool, intellectual exterior belies your proclivity for strategy (and predilection for kink). You know, better than most, that the devil is in the details, and you know how to play your cards close to your chest. You’re hard to read, and nigh impossible to predict.

How you channel energy: Planning. Wellness practices. And probably a not insignificant dose of organization and cleaning.

How you ask someone out: Grand gestures? Not your thing. You make your move thoughtfully and quietly — but powerfully.

Let’s talk about sex: For you, it’s all in the attention to the small things that so often go unnoticed and neglected. That small sigh, that quick brush against a thigh. You’re keenly aware of your lover’s body in a way that they probably have never experienced before. Oh — and you’re going to do anything you can to elicit those responses. (Anything.)

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tessa Thompson, Evan Rachel Wood

Libra Mars

Mars can have a tough time in Libra, which craves harmony and balance. But you’re a natural diplomat, and you’ll charm the pants (or skirt) right off someone. You fight fair, and you take you time deliberating, in both fight and flirtation.

How you channel energy: By keeping the peace. This doesn’t mean you aren’t willing to take a stand for what’s right — far from it. But you believe in establishing harmony in your life. Keeping a level head. Pleasing conversation. Beautiful surroundings. Establishing balance.

How you ask someone out: Let’s be real: you prefer to be asked out. Or you arrange the situation in such a way so that they ask you out. You’re so charming, this isn’t that hard.

Let’s talk about sex: Aesthetics are foreplay. You enjoy beautiful surroundings and a sensuous lead-up – a good dinner where you’re all well dressed; a romantic bedroom setting with candles. It’s the little things.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janelle Monae, Kate McKinnon

Scorpio Mars

Ruled by Mars, Scorpio — like Aries — is where Mars finds its height. But whereas Mars in Aries is the warrior on the front lines, a bit rash and impulsive (if extraordinarily powerful and fearless), Mars in Scorpio is the spy. All strategy, all stealth. Mars in Scorpio will wait you out. Out think you. Out play you. Outlast you. As Theresa Reed says, never go to war with a Mars in Scorpio — you’ll lose. If wronged, you never forget. And you’ll take years to get even.

Oh, and when it comes to sex, nobody does it better.

How you channel energy: You’re single-minded in your passions and pursuits. Productive, obsessive, possessive — you know how to get what you want.

How you ask someone out: You are the type to drop hints and work your way up to the actual ask, but the key for you is to remember: be direct, and don’t waste your time on those who can’t meet you on your level.

Let’s talk about sex: When it comes to the bedroom, no one matches your intensity. Also? You’re up for anything. Basically, you’re an ideal playmate — if you let your walls down and are willing to be really vulnerable.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Laverne Cox, Lena Waithe

Sagittarius Mars

Sagittarius energy always wants to roam, and paired with Mars, this makes for an extraordinarily active person, whether with fitness, sex, mentally, career wise — you’re the person who, like the Hamilton song goes, is never satisfied. You’re always on the hunt for the next adventure; the challenge is to enjoy the present conquest, the present hill.

How you channel energy: You need to spread your wings. Like Gemini, your opposite sign, you require freedom and variety in romantic adventure.

How you ask someone out: Bluntly. I want you, do you want me? If so, great. If not, you go your way and I go mine. This is a very take no prisoners, no hard feelings placement. You’re very blunt and very public – but not in a showman Leo or Aries type way; it’s just a very honest, why would we hide this? way. The celeb doppelganger couples are great examples of committed couples with this placement.

Let’s talk about sex: You’re an adventurous, playful spirit with a lot of passion who is honest as hell and up for anything. It’s important to you to find partners who can match your energy – and who value it.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Holland Taylor & Sarah Paulson, Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi

Capricorn Mars

When you decide you want something (or someone), you are unyielding. This means, of course, that you dominate whatever field you’re in. Your biggest turn-on is success — your own as well as that of others.

How you channel energy: Productively and obsessively. In earthy Capricorn, the sign that wants to build, Mars, the planet of action, is exalted. Like Mars in Scorpio, you have a tendency towards fixation and workaholism, and you require partners and playmates who understand this side of you. Of course, when that energy is focused on them, more’s the pleasure.

How you ask someone out: Directly. You have approximately zero time for bullshit. You’re busy.

Let’s talk about sex: When you’re in the mood, or in a new relationship, you can go all day, all night, anytime, anywhere. But when you’re focused on work, you can also go without. You love sex, but it’s really about what’s occupying your mental energy at the moment.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tig Notaro, Sue Perkins

Aquarius Mars

Think Professor X. You’re already ten steps ahead of everyone else, literally and figuratively. That fight with your partner they just now saw coming? You had it in your head ten minutes ago. You’re already on to the makeup sex.

Also? You need freedom, love fighting for a cause, and adore a good challenge.

How you channel energy: Intellectual stimulation. Curiosity. Social engagement.

How you ask someone out: You are an expert at playing it cool, at asking folks out without seeming too emotionally invested. (You’re also probably pretty comfortable at sliding into folks’ DMs.) But why are you so detached, babe? What do you have to lose by showing your hand every once in a while?

Let’s talk about sex: Experimental and open-minded — that’s you. Sex is about exploration, and you’re all about discovering what turns your partner on. Every evening (and morning) presents the opportunity to learn something new.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Rachel Maddow, Kristen Stewart

Pisces Mars

You’re the definition of “lover, not a fighter.” Sensitive to conflict and deeply romantic in bed, you’re the person who could, very honestly, say that all you want is world peace. You can be prone to escapism, but at your best, you’re dreamy and magnetic. The ultimate romantic.

How you channel energy: Through touch, through just being. You’ve got an otherworldly touch to you. You’re uncomfortable with conflict, in part because you take in the energy around you, and you can feel others’ anger on a deep level. Cultivating boundaries and learning to articulate what you need will help.

How you ask someone out: With a glance. With touch. With energy. With words, of course, but you’re all about the nonverbals. You know how to project yourself across a room.

Let’s talk about sex: You’re into deep, soulful intimacy, even with casual partners. You don’t ever not give all of yourself — and that’s sexy as hell.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Stephanie Beatriz, Lea DeLaria.

Here’s How to Do It Yourself

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

How to Navigate Polyamory as a Non-Primary Partner

You’re gay. You’re poly. You start dating this dyke and the two of you really like each other. You’re sprung and you just want to live your fantasies of U-Hauling to heaven and back with her or adopting a pit bull rescue together. But this cannot be, for she has a primary partner.

Queer non-monogamy, while having many perks, can also be really frustrating sometimes, especially when you are looking for love and don’t have a primary partner of your own. It’s hard to not feel less important when you know someone else gets to spend more time with your love interest than you do. I get it. I was a member of the “always a side piece, never a main piece” brigade for much of my early adult years. It’s a difficult spot to be in, so I’m here with advice on how to navigate polyamory as a non-primary partner.

Polyamory can take many forms. Maybe you’re casually dating an older butch4butch couple, or you’re hooking up with a stud in an open relationship. Or you might be engaging in a serious romance with a femme who’s married and has several other partners. Because there’s such a wide variety of poly configurations you could exist within, I’ll try to stick to the fundamentals of how to embody Good Poly rather than Bad Poly.

Try to go in without expectations

(and if you can’t stow your expectations, be direct!)

This statement is applicable to many things in life, but it’s very important to surviving as a sidechick. Removing expectations from your romance is in the interest of everybody in the poly pocket.

There’s a concept known as The Relationship Escalator that illustrates the expectation of progress within a monogamous relationship. Basically, it’s the idea that as romance grows between people, commitment levels will naturally escalate with it. The main issue with The Relationship Escalator is that it treats romantic relationships the same way one might treat a corporate job: you start at an entry-level position (e.g. casual dates) and assume that if you work hard enough, you will end up at a higher position (#1 favorite girlfriend).

This concept doesn’t really translate to a non-monogamous relationship. When you begin to date someone who’s already dating other people, you can’t expect to be promoted. Try to let go of your expectations of what the relationship could be or should be, and just enjoy being together.

Sometimes you can’t get rid of your expectations because they’re actually just your needs and desires, and that’s okay! As always, your best strategy is to directly communicate what you expect and need in a relationship, giving them the opportunity to decide if they can meet your expectations.

Be receptive to their boundaries

Your date and their partner have rules for what they each can and can’t do with other people. These can range from restrictions like “no sleepovers” and “no sex marks” to just needing to check in with each other. It’s crucial to respect these boundaries and be honest about whether you can work within those boundaries.

It can feel unfairly limiting to adhere to rules set by someone outside your relationship, but remember that someone in your relationship (your date) agreed to those boundaries. Treat them with the same respect as your date’s personal boundaries, because that’s what they are.

You can still advocate for your needs and even ask if the rules can be negotiated, but don’t push it. Directly communicating boundaries and needs helps you make compromises without feeling compromised.

Set boundaries for yourself

When you’re swooning over some cutie, it can be so tempting to make decisions with your heart over your brain. Thanks to NRE, or New Relationship Energy, infatuation is overflowing from your little gay body and you want to do everything with this person even if it might hurt, and nothing else matters. In poly, it’s really essential to check these urges. I’m girl-crazy with mostly godawful impulse control, so I set boundaries for myself to keep from getting carried away by romantic thoughts.

Don’t make big life decisions based purely off that NRE, like moving or changing your whole schedule. Make sure the decisions you make are for yourself and that you protect your heart.

Accept that you’re going to be jealous sometimes

It’s going to happen and it’s totally natural. The important thing is to work through your jealousy with a therapist, or a friend, instead of projecting it onto your boo or relying solely on them to help you process. While it is important to be real about your feelings with a date, remember that these feelings are your responsibility to work through.

Don’t compare yourself to their partner

Avoid the pitfall of comparing yourself to their primary. Yes, sometimes your date may have a very specific type and you’ll notice you share more than a passing resemblance to their other boo (I’m very guilty of this), but you are different people with a different history. One reason people prefer to have a non-monogamous love life is because their needs and desires go beyond what one person can meet, so they’ll date very different people who fulfill very different needs.

Your date likes you for you. They didn’t choose you because you’re just a lesser version of the partner they already have. Comparing yourself is useless and will only make you feel worse.

Get to know their partner

This is probably the scariest part. You probably heard about your metamour (the partner of your partner) before meeting them and maybe you’ve built up an intimidating image of them in your head. Put your assumptions and fears to the side and make a genuine attempt to get to know them. The idea of meeting your metamour can be very daunting, but doing so usually makes things much easier for you and your partner.

Some primaries don’t like meeting their partner’s other dates, though (I once had a primary that refused to meet other dates), which is also fine. I believe that since you share a love interest, it’s in your best interest to get along. If you can be friends, be friends!

Don’t have opinions about your partner’s other relationships

Meeting metamours helps you build your own opinion of them, but what if the opinion you build is “wow, she’s kind of a jackass?” If your girlfriend’s primary is rude or unkind to you, it’s important to tell her. If you see your date being mistreated, address the issue and check in with her. Beyond that, it isn’t your place to tell her how to handle her other relationships.

Criticizing your partner’s other relationships is a slippery slope. What may appear toxic to you could just be a loving relationship outside what you are familiar with. You have to trust that your boo knows what they’re doing with their life. Your intentions may be well-meaning, but your opinion can be skewed by personal bias. If you think they’re in a bad situation, the best thing to do is to listen to them, check in with them, and ask them what they want for themselves.

I’ve had a few partners who I knew were in a toxic situation with their primary, and I’ve had partners see me in similarly bad relationships. We listened to each other vent about our dyke-y dilemmas and offered support, but knew we couldn’t give advice beyond what was asked. Sometimes I’ve downright hated my metamours because of things my partner told me about them, but I behaved civilly towards them out of respect for my partner. Support them however you can, just don’t try to rescue them.

Be friends

Spend time with your boo where you’re doing things that aren’t romantic or sexual.

It’s useful to practice being friendly without being amorous, especially if you spend time together while their primary partner is around. Also, it’s just nice getting to know someone as a friend while you’re getting to know them as a date. Speaking from personal experience, my best long-term relationships have often started as casual dates and hookups with friends and down the line we realized we loved each other. I still have solid relationships with most of those people now, because we built that friend foundation and know there’s more to our bond than just attraction.

Take care of you

Never fundamentally value someone else’s needs above your own. It can be so fun and frankly intoxicating to share romance with a beautiful babe, and it can be really easy to forget your own personal needs when you’re caught up in the throes of gay love. It’s perfectly reasonable to prioritize your flourishing romance, but don’t make it your top priority, because in all likelihood, your love interest may not be able to reciprocate that level of attention when they have other partners.

Remember who you are as an individual and nurture that. Remember that the more secure and happy you are in yourself, the more comfortable you will be in your love life. Do nice and nurturing things for you that don’t involve her.

Some recommendations:

• Cook yourself a cute dinner
• Make art
• Take your meds
• Masturbate
• See Tori Amos in concert
• Go to therapy
• Prioritize time with platonic friends
• Look at memes
• Admire your butt
• Pet a dog/cat/succulent/bowl of quinoa
• Masturbate some more

Do you actually want to be poly?

Why are you engaging in polyamory? Is it because you feel romantic or sexual attraction for multiple people at once? Is it because the girl you like happens to be poly and you just want to be with her? Is it because every queer you know is non-monogamous and you fear you’ll be alone if you don’t go with the pack?

I can’t tell you if any of these reasons will make it worth it for you, but I can say that I’ve come to consider it a major red flag when I see someone living as poly only because they believe they have no other options, which just isn’t true. There are plenty of monogamous queers out there, even if they seem a little harder to find. You aren’t likely to enjoy a lifestyle if you enter it out of a sense of social obligation or fear, so be honest with yourself.

Being good at poly takes a lot of work. Like all dating (and really all life), it’s a learning experience that very few people are instantly great at. Having patience with yourself and respect for your partner makes the experience a lot more manageable and goes a long way towards having the best relationship you can. Also, much of this advice is applicable to monogamous relationships; the need for it just becomes far more apparent when framed through polyamory, which can be a bit more complex.

I know when you’ve been a sidechick, it can feel like you’ll never be someone’s main squeeze. I lived that life for so long I built up a complex about it. It won’t be forever, and in the meantime: prioritize yourself, learn to be comfortable alone, and appreciate the romance you have for what it is.

8 Self-Help Books about Lesbian Relationships

This month in Ask Your Friendly Neighborhood Lesbrarian we’re answering an email question that’s a little different: non-fiction! Specifically, non-fiction / self-help books about relationships between queer women:

Hi there, Casey!
My name is Maureen, and as a fan of Autostraddle, I’ve been reading your lists of books featuring queer characters for some time. I was hoping you might have something to suggest pertaining to non-fiction relationship/self-help books for queer partnerships! Ironically, my partner and I both work at Barnes & Noble, but I haven’t been able to find much of anything on queer marriages/relationships/etc through our ordering system, nor online. I’d just love to read something without his & her pronouns, you know? Anywho, thanks for any suggestions you might be able to give! And by the way, thank you so incredibly much for creating your lists; they’ve helped me give so many suggestions to so many families and individuals!
Appreciatively,
Maureen

I think you’re likely not alone in your quest for queer relationship self-help books, Maureen! And it is very reasonable to want to some relationship self-help without having to go through mentally changing the pronouns and lamenting that issues specific to relationships between women aren’t addressed. I definitely had a tough time as well finding these, but here are the fruits of my labor: eight non-fiction books about lesbian/queer women relationships, partnerships, marriage, and dating!

Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls who Dig Girl by Lindsay King-Miller

You might be familiar with Lindsay King-Miller’s advice column of the same name as the book that ran in The Hairpin for years. Even if you’ve already gobbled up all that advice, though, you’ve gotta read this book: it’s based on the column but has entirely new content! The self-help in Ask a Queer Chick isn’t all about relationships — King-Miller also discuses other key queer life stuff like getting your first alternative lifestyle haircut and coming out — but she does spend a significant amount of time on relationships and dating, from the very beginnings of finding girls to go on dates with to getting married. Her tone throughout is refreshingly down-to-earth and funny. Bisexual and trans women readers will also appreciate sections that addresses issues specific to them!

Conscious Lesbian Dating and Love by Ruth Schwartz and Michelle Murrain

This guidebook, subtitled “A Roadmap to Finding the Right Partner and Creating the Relationship of Your Dreams,” is unique. The main focus for Schwartz and Murrain is mindfulness and conscious decision making in all stages of your relationship, from looking for a partner to creating the kind of relationship that works for both of you as you grow together. They emphasis that building a great relationship is work: work that you can do through being thoughtful and deliberate about the choices you make and the actions you take. Drawing insights from multiple fields — neuroscience, spirituality, and psychology —Schwartz and Murrain also add their own personal experiences. Check out their website, which has additional resources like videos.

Lesbian Couples: A Guide to Healthy Relationships by D. Merilee Clunis and G. Dorsey Green

As far as non-fiction books about lesbian relationships go, Lesbian Couples is a classic: it was first published in 1988, and then reissued in 2004. Although many things have changed, you will probably be surprised at how much is still relevant. Clunis and Green are two lesbian therapists with decades of experience, which they put to use in the book covering an impressively broad array of topics. It makes an effort to highlight intersecting identities that are likely to affect your relationship like race, class, age, and ability. It also addresses how recovery from alcohol and/or drug abuse and sexual assault can play a role, as well as other topics such as butch-femme dynamics, trans identity, bisexuality, (non)monogamy, BDSM, elder care, and raising children. The wide range, however, means that no one issue is explored in extensive detail.

Sexual Intimacy for Women: A Guide for Same-Sex Couples by Glenda Corwin

For advice on sexual intimacy in long-term lesbian relationships, this book by sex therapist Glenda Corwin is exactly what you want. But to avoid any confusion: this isn’t a book of sexy times tips and tricks to impress your girlfriend or wife. Instead, it’s distinctly focused on the emotional, physical, and psychological aspects of lesbian relationships with the goal of increasing sexual intimacy. Corwin addresses issues like orgasm, body image, identity, aging, and parenthood and their connections to (sexual) intimacy. Of course, the dreaded LBD — lesbian bed death — is discussed in detail. A few caveats: there is some language in Sexual Intimacy for Women that invalidates asexuality and the section on sexual abuse/assault would be more helpful if it were expanded.

Lipstick and Dipstick’s Essential Guide to Lesbian Relationships by Gina Daggett and Kathy Belge

You might know this butch-femme couple from their long-running relationship advice column for Curve Magazine. Anyone wanting relationship self-help with a heavy dose of humor, Lipstick and Dipstick certainly deliver plenty of that, as well as insights from their own long-term relationship. They cover the full lifespan of relationships, including finding a date, U-hauling, dealing with exes (and other emotional baggage), breaking up, and more. For sure, Lipstick and Dipstick don’t provide the expertise of counselors/therapists or writers with backgrounds in psychology. But for a book that seems to have been written with the intent of being as entertaining as it is informative, it certainly succeeds. The authors’ personal experiences on different sides of the gender spectrum are especially a nice touch.

Lesbian Marriage: A Love and Sex Forever Kit by Kim Chernin and Ruth Stendhal

Finally, a relationship book specifically for all the lesbians who’ve tied the knot! This tool kit by two experienced counselors who are also a couple is a quick, short reference guide. There are handy lists of do’s and don’t’s as well as some activities and exercises to share with your partner. They focus on 12 major challenges that all lesbian couples face, like “You always, I never—Grudges and Bed Death” and “The Ravenous Beast—Sex after Menopause?” Their advice is frank and funny. And parts of the book are designed like a comic strip, which gives it a wonderful Dykes to Watch Out For feel. If the idea of picking up a 400-page tome on lesbian relationships is off-putting, try this playful guide that really cuts to the chase.

Working It Out: A Lesbian Relationship Primer by Frances S. Fuchs

Working It Out is the most interactive book on this list. Written by an experienced lesbian counselor, it’s a workbook full of exercises to do on your own, with a partner, or even in a group of couples. Fuchs covers topics including communication skills, challenges of coming and being out, arguments, and more. The book moves chronologically through a relationship, with the first chapters dedicated to early relationship stages and personal skills that are necessary in those initial phases to make relationships strong. Later chapters focus on cycles of long-term relationships, providing a map so you can see where you and your partner may be in these patterns. Fuchs’s advice is above all else practical, focusing on concrete steps to take to work on specific issues.

True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships by Renate Stendhal

Another easy-to-read, short book on relationships by Renate Stendhal, except this focuses on sex. If you’re really concerned about lesbian bed death — either that it’s currently happening to you and your partner or you’re worried it’s going to in the future — Stendhal provides the most comprehensive look at it. In particular, Stendhal challenges those myths that women are “too close” to maintain sexual desire in long-term relationships. Her overall argument, in fact, is that making yourself vulnerable and being open and honest with your partner is the best way to keep that sexual spark aflame. She accomplishes this using many examples from real-life couples she’s counseled as well examples from her personal life and plenty of insights from queer women writers like Jewelle Gomez, who writes the book’s foreword.

Can’t get enough of lesbian relationship / self-help books? Check out this list on Goodreads of Lesbian Self-Help Books. If nothing else, you’ll probably have a good laugh at some of the hilariously bad 90s book covers. Have any recommendations for books about queer partnerships? Add them in the comments! And keep your lesbrarian questions coming to stepaniukcasey [at] gmail.com!

Starstruck: Here’s What Venus, Planet of Love, Says About Your Astrological Compatibility

Welcome to the latest installment in our series on astrological compatibility for queers! If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the Moon and Mercury articles first!

Of all the planets, Venus is perhaps the most instantly intuitive and recognizable. Venus is the goddess of love, attraction, relationships. She rules beauty and art and aesthetics — the things that make this world lovely. She shows up in museums the world over, a muse who inspires.

But what does that mean for you? Venus is whatever you personally do in your life to attract and inspire your lover(s), those you want to impress. Venus craves a response. Venus is passion. Venus is also receptivity, receiving. Venus wants to woo and be wooed. Venus is romance.

Venus is asking your partner to tie your tie, and putting on a garter belt and stockings just as they’re leaving for work to maybe make them stay a few extra minutes, and putting on an old thing they got you ages ago that will make them weepy because oh my god, how do you still have it?

Venus is call and response.

In traditional astrology, Venus and Mars were often shoehorned into traditional heteronormative gender roles, with Venus being “more” important for women and Mars being “more” important for men, in that Venus was the receptive source of desire and Mars was the active pursuer, the dominant sexual partner.

For queers, of course, we know that we can deconstruct the shit out of this. First of all, everyone has Venus and Mars in their chart: yin and yang, receptive and active energies. How Venus and Mars work for you, and how you express them, will be individual, depending on your sign, on the planets’ placement within your chart (what “house” they are in), as well as other planets aspecting (or acting on) your own personal Venus and Mars. Add on to that your own personal bevy of romantic and sexual experiences, desires, wants, needs, goals, and you’ve got your own unique cocktail for how you do sex and/or relationship.

tl;dr We contain multitudes, let’s not be reductive.

A note on compatibility: when it comes to synastry, what we really look for is Venus matching with a partner’s Mars sign (Mars is the next and final article in the series). Your Venus and your person’s Mars being in the same sign makes for the most potent chemistry, but having Venus and Mars in the same element (e.g. both water — Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) is also pretty smoking. Reason being: Venus is the more receptive. Venus expresses love, but Venus really likes to be wooed. Mars is the active agent, the pursuer, the sex drive. And we all have both!

However, remember that this isn’t a necessary thing! After all, (rumored) couples like Janelle and Tessa don’t have this synastry. Janelle and Tessa have a fire Venus, water Venus, earth Mars, and air Mars. Which is to say: not obvious Venus/Mars compatibility at all. Casual reminder to not sweat it too hard, and rather to focus on learning about your partner(s)’s stuff in order to better understand them.

Aries Venus

Think Wonder Woman. Beyonce in the “Don’t Hurt Yourself” video. Furiosa in Mad Men. The last scene of Carol. Tasha riding her motorcycle off the base in The L Word.

A Venus in Aries’ motto in love might as well be, “Just do it.” You always know how you feel and don’t know why others don’t. You’re direct, flirty, feisty, and hopelessly addicted to the pursuit. (You might be a tad impulsive, sometimes.) You aren’t afraid to go after what you want, to pursue, to allow yourself to be pursued. Matters of the heart always involve risk. You understand this, intrinsically, and it doesn’t frighten you.

How you show love: Energetically. You like shared, spontaneous activities that get your heart pumping. You don’t overthink it.

How you want to be wooed: Bold and adventurous grand gestures. You know your heart and aren’t afraid to show it, and you need – nay, require – folks who will show up as fiercely as you do. However, you can get bored easily, so you also need folks who are interesting, ambitious, and who can keep you on your toes and juggle that need you have for your own space. It’s all a balancing act.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janet Mock, Rachel Maddow

Taurus Venus

Your love languages are luxury and long-term commitment. Creatures of habit, Venus in Taurus folks are deeply connected to your bodies, to desire, to what you want – and when you figure out what and who you want, you dig the fuck in. You’re bullish, stubborn. Venus is at home in Taurus and luxuriates in the slow, sensuous earthiness. You know how to show up every day and do the work of tending, of building something beautiful.

As a Venus in Taurus recently told me about her 5+ year partnership: “The sex I had last night. I swear to god, the sex gets better and better every day.”

How you show love: The fine art of tending. Tending looks different, depending on the stage of a relationship. This could look like building a nest together; it could look like tending to the body of the one you care for – whether for sexual pleasure, and/or for someone’s health. It always looks like nourishment through food. Venus in Taurus expresses care through the physical.

How you want to be wooed: You don’t need the trappings of romance; you’re looking for substance. You want someone who is direct and committed and knows how to communicate that.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Hayley Kiyoko, Lena Waithe

Gemini Venus

Oh, Venus in Gemini. You light up a room with an effervescent ease and wit. Think Jack Dawson charming the pants off all those stuffy first class folks in Titanic. You can put enough grease on any conversation to ease what was struggling; you have that particular gift of helping folks feel at home in their own skin without sacrificing your own integrity. You are always wholly yourself. Of course, you also run into the problem of being read as flirtatious in situations where you don’t intend to be. In truth, variety is just the spice of life. You enjoy meeting different people, and it takes a lot to hold your attention for long. At the end of the day, you need people in your life who are secure in themselves (and in your affections) – and who aren’t the jealous type. Clear communication is one of your non-negotiables.

How you show love: Because you so enjoy variety, when you bestow your attention on someone for an extended period of time, that’s a sign. For you, affection (given and received) is also verbal, so communicating interest directly through language is important.

How you want to be wooed: Clever and intelligent conversation. Witty banter. A trip to the bookstore.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Laverne Cox, Jasika Nicole

Cancer Venus

Security is everything to Venus in Cancers; you are private when it comes to matters of the heart. You want the other person to show their cards first. Meanwhile, you’ll cook for them, care for them, remember every little thing they’ve ever mentioned in conversation. But you need to feel emotionally secure before taking any next steps. It takes you a while to come out of your shell.

Also? Family is important to you, whether natal or chosen, and it’s important for you that your partner(s) blend well with your people. That’s always in the back of your mind.

How you show love: By taking care of your people. Nourishing them. You have a knack for sensing their needs, and filling them.

How you want to be wooed: Consistently, but not necessarily directly. You take time to reveal yourself, and you need folks who get that you’re the slow burn type. Being asked to make a yes or no decision right away probably isn’t going to go over very well. But a slow dance? Yes, that’s more your style.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Angelina Jolie, Jane Lynch

Leo Venus

Did someone say grand gesture? Romantic. Ride or die. Loyal AF. Experts at making your person feel like your one and only. Generous to a fault. That’s you, Venus in Leo, riding in on a white horse with a bouquet of red roses and a speech that will command the attention of everyone in the vicinity. You’re the person who announces to the world that you and your beloved vibrate on the same frequency, if you know what I mean.

How you show love: You’ve got a big heart and aren’t afraid to wear it on your sleeve. Shouting from the rooftops for all to hear? That’s you. You’re loud and proud, whether that means flowery social media posts, lots of PDA, fancy dinners out on the town, or treating your person to their favorite things.

How you want to be wooed: Anyone who is willing to go over the top for you – especially when it’s out of their comfort zone – is golden. You’re a sucker for a grand gesture, but you aren’t used to getting as good as you give. You’re also loyal to a fault, so demonstrations of commitment go a long way.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Tessa Thompson, Sue Perkins

Virgo Venus

Your penchant for noticing the little things serves you well in life – and in the bedroom. A little on the kinky side, you’re earthy and find pleasure in attention to detail. You’re not over the top – this is not the sign for grand gestures, flowery language, or long emotional conversations that go until the wee hours of the morning. You tend toward the pragmatic. If we’re talking love languages, you’re Acts of Service, all the way. You want to build something together. Help folks get their life together.

How you show love: Compared to some other signs, you’re reserved and subdued in your affections. You’re the person who reminds them to make an appointment, or who goes out and buys Drano for their always-flooding bathtub.

How you want to be wooed: A shared Google Calendar. Being put together. Sharp fashion. A clean living space. Good cologne and perfume.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Sara Ramirez, Demi Lovato

Libra Venus

When it comes to parties and fashion, no one does it better. You’re ruled by Venus, which brings an extra touch of beauty and charm to everything you do, but the catch is that you require substance with style. If someone doesn’t have their shit together internally as well as externally, don’t even bother. You want someone who can match you, who wants to rule the collective roost and look good doing it. For you, partnership is everything.

You also value harmony. Picking a fight, or arguing for the sake of hot makeup sex? Not your thing. You prefer a peaceful environment, to be in a sanguine agreement with your partner(s).

How you show love: You’re a classic romantic. Whereas Venus in Leo is over the top and Venus in Pisces wants to U-Haul, you’re the consummate rom com hero(ine). Thoughtful, tasteful, just enough. Always the right gesture at the right time.

How you want to be wooed: When it comes to romance, mutual, shared passions are a must – with a romantic cherry on top, like someone planning a day for you and then picking you up in a rented convertible.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Amandla Stenberg, Shailene Woodley

Scorpio Venus

Venus in Scorpio is all intensity, all the time. Extraordinarily private, it takes a lot to win your trust. You’re slow to share, slow to peel back the layers and reveal yourself. But once you feel safe with someone, you put all your cards on the table. Totally committed: sexually, emotionally, spiritually. That kind of single-minded focus draws people to you like a moth to a flame.

This kind of energy can easily feed into that green-eyed monster, jealousy. A key for you in relationship is being with folks who are gut-honest about how they feel about you. Plain and simple.

How you show love: Quietly, thoughtfully. Over the top social media posts? Not your style. You’re more behind the scenes: love letters, long drives, sex all night – and calling in sick to work the next day, so you can do it all again. You’re all about investing that quality time.

How you want to be wooed: While wanting someone to just “get” you is a common desire, when it comes to Scorpio energy, you need someone who matches your intensity and has an intuitive sense for how and when to push. They have to be able to really see you, see your wounds, and not flinch, not press too hard, but not shrink away, either: just stand with you, naked in vulnerability. That. That’s what does you in.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Janelle Monae, Jodie Foster

Sagittarius Venus

Freedom is a must. Love looks like trusting you to do your own thing and come back around for more. More than any other sign, you are 100% down for long distance relationships. You need the space to roam, literally or figuratively or both. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t want your person/people to not be loyal, or to not check in – you crave communication, after all. Sagittarius energy is no bold, forthright, let’s get this shit out there and talk about it. Being able to trust that someone can level with you is everything. After all, you are further empowered in your freedom and independence when you have the emotional support and security in strong, healthy relationship.

How you show love: By planning an absolutely killer trip, complete with adventurous sex — and then by encouraging your boo to go off and do their own thing. Love is embracing each other’s individuality and exploring each other’s worlds.

How you want to be wooed: Expansion is really the key here: sexual adventures, or exploring your local surroundings. Conversation and flirtation that goes beyond the everyday. Smart live entertainment that inspires debate. Thoughtful gestures that push you both/all towards the limit.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kate McKinnon, Tilda Swinton

Capricorn Venus

There’s no flash here, just consistency and a plan for the future with killer follow-through. You’re the person whose understated, self-controlled demeanor belies a deep well of emotion that shows itself in concrete, actionable plans. You want a relationship you can grow with and grow into – and you want people who are as committed to self-improvement as you are. To you, the idea that relationships are work is not frightening. It’s just part of the process.

How you show love: By providing structure for the people you love. Helping them fix what’s broken. Helping them organize their life. Being consistent and showing the fuck up.

How you want to be wooed: Let’s be real: you get off on competence, which doesn’t just mean book smarts. You love when someone shows they care about something, have put in the effort to become an expert. And when someone shows that they’ve put in the time and energy to understanding you? That’s everything.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Elliot Page, Jamie Clayton

Aquarius Venus

You’re the ultimate unconventional rule breakers who say “fuck off” to social expectations around love, sex, and relationships. While some astrologers call you the most likely to be in an open or polyamorous relationship, the truth is, you just want the space to construct the relationship that best suits yours and your partner(s)’s needs. You value your independence and don’t invite people into your space lightly.

How you show love: You come off as aloof, but when you’re interested in someone, you pay attention and seek common ground through intellectual connection. You’re the person who watches the TV show your person casually mentioned, who sends over a book recommendation you think they should check out.

How you want to be wooed: You often prefer to be friends first, and this carries over into the relationship: you want to be treated like you’re someone who matters – who is valued, prioritized, thought of and considered in the little things. You find it easy to cut and run at the first sign of waning interest (after all, your time is valuable), so follow-through and consideration are non-negotiables in any kind of partnership.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Ellen DeGeneres, Stephanie Beatriz

Pisces Venus

You are the ultimate romantics. Sensitive, intuitive. You care with your whole heart. You crave oneness: merging, losing yourselves in each other, two (or more) become one.

For you, trust is the ultimate currency of care. Learning to discern in love, and to discern who to trust, is a lifelong journey, because once you trust, you trust. You’re compassionate, gentle, and giving, and it’s vital for you to be with folks who invest in you emotionally and spiritually just as much as you invest in them.

How you show love: While in some ways you’re prone to the trappings of romantics, the truth is that you’re the kind of person who will do anything for the people you love – hence, why discernment is so important. And why it’s important for you to know what you want and need. It’s easy for you to bend, to adapt, to their needs.

How you want to be wooed: You want to be cherished. No matter the calcification on top, you’ve got a tender heart, and you need to be nurtured.

Celeb Doppelgangers: Kristen Stewart, Samira Wiley

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Here’s How to Do It Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

You Can Leave Your Partner Who Scares You

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

Q:

I’ve been dating this person for four years who is genuinely the light of my life but has some anger management issues. They would never hurt me, and they have never even gotten angry over anything even relating to me, but sometimes (once every few months) when they’re mad or crazy anxious, they spiral and can’t stop fuming. They’ll raise their voice, and they’ve thrown stuff and gone crazy punching doors and walls. They’ve punched a hole in the wall before. And even though they would never, ever turn that anger towards me, it still terrifies me just witnessing it. They are aware of it, but I don’t think they’ll ever go to therapy about it. They don’t really want to even though they acknowledge it’s a problem. They always feel guilty about it afterwards and even get unbearably sad over the fact that they’ve scared me, but I just feel at a loss of what to do. I don’t think it’s ever going to change, and I think because they would never turn it at me or any other human, they feel like it’s not something they necessarily *need* to change because they are only ever physically hurting themself, and they see themself as expendable and pretty worthless (which is a whole other problem). What do I do? It’s not a deal breaker or anything, but it definitely makes me anxious, sad, and scared when it happens, and I know it isn’t healthy for them.

A:

First of all, I’m so glad you wrote in about this and reached out! I can absolutely believe that it’s making you anxious, sad and scared, and you shouldn’t be alone while you’re figuring this out. Second, while usually I try not to be directive in advice posts, this is an occasion on which I wanna tell you that what you do in this situation is leave this relationship as quickly as is reasonable for you to do so. I know that isn’t what you want to hear, and I understand why, but also I think you know this isn’t sustainable or healthy, and from experience I’m guessing that after four years with this person you’ve already tried everything else and more.

Having anger issues is human and doesn’t on its own make someone an unacceptable partner, but a stated refusal to work on them even though they know it hurts and scares their partner does. I know you’ve said it’s just once every few months, which I know feels like not often or serious enough to leave; I know you said it’s not a dealbreaker. I wonder how often it would have to happen for you to feel like it was serious; I wonder if, before getting into this relationship, you would have said that punching through the wall or breaking things was a dealbreaker, and what position (a behavior you’re hopeful your partner will never reach) you’ve now moved that goalpost to. I hope you’ll stick with me for a minute and let me explain why I think this is what’s necessary.

Your partner isn’t able to cope with their emotions in safe or healthy ways

I know you feel confident your partner won’t hurt you physically — for the sake of this piece, let’s say that’s true, as I definitely hope it is! Even if your partner’s behavior never escalates past what they’re doing right now, there are a few things here that are already well outside the realm of what’s healthy. Your partner doesn’t have any healthy or functional skills to deal with strong negative emotions in a normal adult way as is evidenced by their violent tantrums — and they are violent, as they’re at the very least causing property damage. (Either that, or they’re choosing not to use those skills, which isn’t better.) Your partner also doesn’t have the capability to be accountable or responsible for their actions even when the moment of intense emotion is over, as evidenced by the fact that they “feel guilty about it afterwards and even get unbearably sad over the fact that they’ve scared me” — but they don’t actually show this in an attempt at changed behavior or adjusting their behavior to address your needs and feelings, which is what someone does when they feel genuine remorse.

Your partner doesn’t have the skills they need to handle their own intense feelings, which means they definitely don’t have the skills to support you in dealing with yours, which means you’re effectively on your own in this partnership. Even when they aren’t in crisis and during the months where everything is fine, I suspect this is part of your dynamic, even when they’re sweet and loving. I imagine that feels very lonely, even before your partners’ outbursts. I also suspect that even when they aren’t having a tantrum, your partner can easily feel insecure or sensitive, and you find yourself having to tiptoe around that and around their sense of themself as “expendable and worthless.”

I’m guessing that in addition to feeling anxious, sad and scared, you feel very tired all the time from the energy of making so much space for your partner’s emotional reactions, and then their emotions about those emotions and their emotions about your emotions and you know, there’s a theme here. You shouldn’t have to feel this way, and you don’t have to feel this way forever.

This isn’t a safe environment for you

I also want to point out some of the specific language you’ve used here — how anxious and sad you are, and how your partner knows they scare you. To be blunt, in a safe and healthy relationship or home life, you don’t feel scared. You might feel upset, worried, uncertain, or anxious, but you don’t feel scared. Even though what I hear you saying is that you’re scared for your partner’s wellbeing rather than your own, that doesn’t mean it’s different or normal.

A lot of the behavior you’re describing — throwing things, punching walls and doors, damaging parts of the apartment — falls under a larger umbrella of behavior that isn’t technically violent toward a specific person but is still violent in nature, and harmful for you to be around. It includes other things that may be harder to name or pin down but probably also make you afraid and at a loss for what to do — driving intentionally dangerously or at dangerous speeds, picking fights or provoking strangers in a self-destructive way, breaking things or slamming doors, self-harming substance abuse (especially performatively in front of you, and/or announced as being as a direct result of how upset they are or how much they hate themselves), and more things that make you feel panicky or sick to your stomach in the moment but that you don’t think of as being intentionally harmful or about you in any way. Although you don’t experience this as violence towards you, all these things are classed as “intimidation” behavior — like you say, your partner knows this terrifies you and does it anyway. If they really can’t process their emotions in any other way, they could still, as an example, leave the house first or give you a heads up that they need space and that you should go out and get a coffee or something until they’ve calmed down. They don’t.

I hear you saying “they would never hurt me” — I want you to think about the other relationships in your life and whether you’ve ever had that specific thought about them. I’m betting you haven’t, because it hasn’t been a question you’ve needed to ask yourself. If you’ve had to ask the question, even subconsciously, and come up with an answer for it, you need to go.

The thing is that even if your partner’s outbursts aren’t directed toward you or about you, you’re the audience for them, and it’s obviously impacting you. Even if you don’t think your partner would ever harm you physically, the truth is this behavior is harming you emotionally and psychologically already. Are you having trouble focusing elsewhere in your life because you’re so tired from dealing with them and trying to support/soothe them? Are you finding your anxiety increasing or cropping up in other areas of your life because this is making you jumpy and unsure of yourself? Are you less close with other people in your life because you’re tired of talking about your partner and their emotional problems but also it’s the biggest thing going on in your life and so not talking about it means not talking about much of anything honest at all? Are you lethargic or having trouble sleeping or eating? Do you find yourself spending your free moments worrying and fretting about how to make things better for your partner or convince them to get help? How much time and energy do you feel you have for your own interests, passions, hobbies and friends at this point? When you think about your future with your partner, how do you feel? Is there any excitement there, or does it just make you feel tired and anxious?

Furthermore, there’s no way for this to not impact the way that you’re able to interact with your partner. Even if they’ve never done this in response to you specifically, I can’t imagine that you don’t carefully self-monitor for how you interact with them so as not to set them off or trigger their self-loathing; maybe you worry over whether something in their outside life is going to go wrong and so you spend your whole evening cleaning the apartment or fixing their favorite meal because you’re so focused on trying to soothe them. When your dynamic with someone is shaped wholly around trying to maintain their emotional stability because they aren’t willing or able to do it themselves, it’s legitimately impossible to advocate for your own wants and needs, or after a while to even know what they are anymore. The fear of someone you love harming themselves — which is the implication of your partner’s vocal self-loathing combined with their externally violent tendencies — is, for many people, at least as effective a controlling tactic as threatening to harm the other partner, and I don’t think you’ve had space to reckon with the toll this has taken on you and the effect it’s had on your decision-making.

Your partner isn’t going to change

You know this. You’re very clear on this. Your partner, even, has been clear on this, which preemptively absolves them from accountability. Your partner doesn’t want to change or to get better; I could take guesses at their reasoning for this, but to be honest it doesn’t matter all that much. Self-loathing is very real, but some people choose to work on it and some people don’t, and your partner is choosing not to. It’s been four years; if your relationship was a person, it would be walking and talking, about to enter kindergarten. I’m guessing it’s gotten harder over time, not easier, and I have to tell you that trend is going to continue.

Again, based on experience and instinct I’d guess that you’ve already tried everything you feel like is possible before you’d write to a stranger, and I’m also guessing that you’re a capable and resourceful person. You know, I think, that your own agency and options as far as improving things are very limited. They’re their own person, and the choices they make are their own. As a bottom line, you’re aware that this isn’t sustainable, that you can’t fix it on your own, and that your partner isn’t going to. There isn’t really a way forward here.

I can’t give you a solution for what to do; the person who needs to be taking responsibility for the doing here is your partner, but we both know they aren’t going to, and no matter how much we grieve that, it isn’t going to change. The best and most loving thing I can give you, then, is permission and a blessing to call it. You’ve done what you can, and loved as hard as you can, and those things were very real and always will be but you can’t fix this, and it’s hurting you and you need to leave. There’s a part of you that knows this, which is why, I think, you’ve reached out. I understand how sad this is, and how much you don’t want to hear this. I’m sorry. If I thought there was another way, I would give it to you, but there isn’t.

I cannot overstate how much I hope you leave this relationship as soon as you are reasonably and safely able to do so, even though I’m aware of how difficult that is! Regardless, I hope in addition to writing to us you’re communicative to people who care about you in your life about how you’re feeling about issues with your partner, and that you’re honest and transparent with them — I know how easy it is to stop mentioning it because you feel boring or are worried they’re judging you or you want to protect your partner or honestly you’re just tired of thinking about it, but having those outside perspectives and insights is really crucial.

I’d also really encourage you to read Why Does He Do That, which I’m aware has a very gendered title and jacket copy but is really indispensable for relationships with any gender where anger is a major concern (there are also a lot of free PDF copies floating around just a google away).

Take care, writer, I’m rooting for you.

Starstruck: What to Know About Your Mercury Sign for Astrological Compatibility

Welcome to the latest installment in our series on astrological compatibility for queers! If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading the Moon article first! I will make the same disclaimer here I made in that article, which is to say that you are a person with agency who has free will and who ultimately has to take responsibility for your life and your choices. Astrology provides you with information, but it in no way governs who you end up with. Ultimately, you make your own choices and live your own life and can make a relationship work with good communication. Boom. To find out your Mercury sign along with the rest of your chart, you can use a number of free online resources; I personally recommend astro.com!

So, Mercury! What even is Mercury? you ask. Mythology buffs will recall that Mercury, or Hermes, is the messenger of the gods, which gives you an idea of what this planet rules: ideas, communication, thoughts, self-expression, the written word; how we move through the world when it comes to expressing ourselves with language on a day-to-day basis.

Communication, of course, is the bedrock of any relationship — romantic, sexual, platonic. And yet! Mercury often gets totally overlooked when it comes to synastry, or the astrology of relationships. There are ample resources about the moon (emotions, habits, instincts), Venus (how you woo/like to be wooed), and Mars (fucking and conflict), and obviously those things are super important. But communication (both verbal and non-verbal)! It’s the nuts and bolts of how relationships are built. When psychological researcher and relationship expert John Gottman talks about “emotional bids” as a foundational component of successful relationships, he’s talking about communication. So buckle in, folks; let’s talk about how we process.

Aries Mercury

I am that I am. No one embodies that more than folks with Aries energy, and Mercury in Aries is no exception. What you think and what you say is who you are, is a direct reflection of your character, your identity, your core beliefs. Your thinking is dynamic, sharp, innovative. You’re the fire-starter of the fire Mercurys: you ignite inspiration wherever you go.

How you process: Talk first, think later. You move quickly. You’re decisive. You just know, in your gut, how to approach a situation. Trust you gut. You learn through risk, through adventure, and you’re looking for partners who can roll with you.

The communication you crave: Direct honesty. You’re a no-bullshit straight shooter and you wish that others would be, too. Sometimes this gets interpreted as being challenging or competitive – warrior-like, if you will – but you just say what you mean and mean what you say. You don’t dance around matters of the heart.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Gemini, Libra
Be challenged by: Cancer, Capricorn

Taurus Mercury

You take pride in your word; once given, it’s a promise. You’re slow to commit to an idea or belief, but once you’re there, it’s hard to change your mind. Stubborn, some call you. You’re methodical, measured. You take your time. You’re not charmed by quick wits; you lean back in a leather-bound chair, quiet, thoughtful. You play the long game.

How you process: You do best with concepts that you can put into practice, that you can see and touch and taste, that you can really work through with your hands. You want to work it out for yourself in an environment where you can savor the texture of a word, an idea. (Which is to say, dates should always involve good food.)

The communication you crave: Folks who offer a pragmatic solution they’ve taken the time to think over and tailor to your tastes. Who don’t rush you for a response. Who put some beauty, a touch of Venus, into their efforts.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Cancer, Scorpio
Be challenged by: Aquarius, Leo

Gemini Mercury

Mercury is at home in Gemini, where it can fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Mercury in Gemini natives are the fast-talking, quick thinking, clever conversationalists who are motivated by curiosity above all else. You appreciate ideas and debate for their own sake, understanding that many things can be true at the same time. You don’t necessarily personally identify with every idea you may hold in a particular moment, like some other signs do. You do best when you find other folks who can meet you on this level — and who can keep up.

How you process: By. Talking. It. Out. You need to talk out your feelings to know what you’re feeling.

The communication you crave: Witty conversationalists whose minds work as quickly as yours. Folks who can fly with you, dancing from topic to topic. Who don’t just get your need for intellectual variety and stimulation, but who share it, and who delight in your ingenuity.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Aries, Sagittarius
Be challenged by: Pisces, Virgo

Cancer Mercury

Mercury in Cancer folk, more than any other sign, notice the non-verbals: what is not said aloud. You see below the surface, immediately picking up on the disconnect between people’s body language and what they’re trying to talk themselves into. You ask your people how they’re doing, how they’re really doing. You’re the group mom, the group dad, the caretaker.

How you process: Quietly. Privately. In the shower; in the bathtub. In the safety of your own home or chosen environment, with food, with comfort. You need space and time, but you also need folks who will care for you as you care for them, who show up for you when you call.

The communication you crave: Words and non-verbals that feed your soul. Words as nutrition for the heart. You’re slow to reveal yourself, but you still take in everything that’s coming at you. Folks who speak and touch and move with awareness and sensitivity: these are the people with whom you feel most at home.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Learn something from: Capricorn, Taurus
Be challenged by: Aries, Libra

Leo Mercury

You’re the consummate storyteller. Mercury in Leo has a flair for the dramatic; you know not only how to command the room, but also how to direct it — how to shine the light on anyone with something interesting to share. You don’t get enough credit for being one of the best (and loudest) cheerleaders of those you love. Fiercely loyal, you have no problem advocating on others’ behalf, especially those in your circle who aren’t as comfortable with a microphone as you are.

How you process: It’s cliché to say with an audience, but: with an audience. You want to be with your trusted folks, who can bear witness to what’s going on — and who can validate it.

The communication you crave: Directness, delivered with empathy. You’re an entertainer at your core, but you most value those rare people who can see through your layers and challenge you while still holding space for your vulnerability. These are the people who make your heart sing.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Libra, Aquarius
Be challenged by: Taurus, Scorpio

Virgo Mercury

Mercury is at home in Virgo, where it uses its deft intellect to organize, to master the technicalities of ideas. Your goal is always to simplify, to get to the point. No beating around the bush, no fanciful fluff. You are at your best when bringing projects to life that have a tangible result, where you have the opportunity to be exact and precise in your thinking and execution. Of course, communicating about emotions is not always so precise.

How you process: Compartmentalization. Pro/con lists. Calendars. Writing it all down. Methodically working through. Taking a walk in nature.

The communication you crave: Practical language. This isn’t to say non-emotional language; you just value concrete words and definitions you can wrap your mind around. Also? You want to share a task, to take a walk together, to accomplish something while doing the work of communication.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Scorpio, Pisces
Be challenged by: Gemini, Sagittarius

Libra Mercury

Mercury in Libra is the diplomat, the keeper of the peace. You can appreciate and embody multiple viewpoints even in the span of one conversation and delight in debate for its own sake. You value fairness and have an even-keeled way of presenting things, even when discussing a topic you care deeply about. However, your mild(er) manners aren’t necessarily indicative of the passion you can tap into.

How you process: Through conversation with others. Talking it out always helps you determine what you think — however, more than any other sign of the zodiac, you value finding the right words, saying it precisely the right way. You want to take others’ views into account, and you want to communicate your point and minimize friction, but it is vital to remember that you are the leading person of your own life.

The communication you crave: Conversation that promotes harmony and appreciation between those involved. Elegance. Lyric. Beauty.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Aries, Leo
Be challenged by: Cancer, Capricorn

Scorpio Mercury

You don’t have to try to see people’s ulterior motives: you just do. Scorpio energy is kin with the underworld, the abject, the mysterious, and in Mercury’s realm, is adept at ferreting out secrets. This can sometimes bring a touch of paranoia (sometimes, folks really do mean well, but you never quite know what to do with the earnest and good hearted, even when you are one of them). Your humor can be dark, sarcastic, biting. At the end of the day, you just want people to stop putting on airs and be real. You’re like a surgeon: your language can cut so as to heal.

How you process: You need the space to get away from the constant flood, to allow yourself the time to integrate information. Set up a morning routine that helps to ground you, that offers you a sacred space to return to each day that is just for you, and you alone.

The communication you crave: Deep, intimate connections that easily vacillate between soul-heavy, shared interests, and sharp humor.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Learn something from: Capricorn, Taurus
Be challenged by: Aquarius, Leo

Sagittarius Mercury

Mercury in Sagittarius is most at home in your library, in your lab. Even when traveling, or on retreat, you are not truly at rest: your mind is soaking up everything around you. You collect words like others collect hobbies and things; you are ever in search of new and better ways to express yourself to those around you. Of all the fire signs, you speak with the most conviction, that what you believe now, in the present moment, is the absolute and unswayed Truth — which, with time, you come to understand is not always the case.

How you process: Through learning — about yourself, about others. Jay-Z, a Mercury in Sagittarius native, said “I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day.”

The communication you crave: Like all fire Mercurys, you crave directness, but whereas Mercury in Aries wants directness with blunt honesty and Mercury in Leo wants directness with empathy, you want directness with context: to understand how someone else’s life experience brought them to where they are. How did they arrive at their Truth? What informs their language and expression? And you, in turn, want to be able to explain yourself to others, want someone who wants to understand your Truth.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Learn something from: Aquarius, Gemini
Be challenged by: Virgo, Pisces

Capricorn Mercury

Above all, Mercury in Capricorn natives are deliberate. Efficient, productive, and capable, you understand how to make the most of your ideas: how to translate thought into result, word into action. You consider someone’s word to be honor binding, and you have little use for frivolity and flirtation that isn’t going anywhere. When you flirt, you flirt with intention. You’re methodical and no-frills in your approach — and you understand how to get what you want.

How you process: Working on a project. Like Mercury in Virgos, you like your pro/con lists, but you would rather have a shorter list and get shit crossed off. You want to do something about your emotions.

The communication you crave: A cool-headed, concise, precise conversation that clearly communicates needs, wants, and actionable next steps. Clear definitions and action points are paramount. You don’t do mind games.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo
Learn something from: Cancer, Scorpio
Be challenged by: Aries, Libra

Aquarius Mercury

Mercury in Aquarius folks are less concerned with being charming conversationalists and more concerned with contributing new and worthy ideas to their friend group and society at large — and, on occasion, calling people’s bluff. You enjoy challenging encounters that stir the pot: you aren’t as confrontational as the fire signs, but you enjoy digging into the way people think. Where are folks’ unconscious biases? You want to know. You’re an astute observer of people’s thought processes, and the fact that you’re usually a few steps ahead of the conversation helps you steer the course.

How you process: First: solitude. Research, journaling. Getting your ducks in a row. Talking it out comes after you’ve organized your thoughts.

The communication you crave: In all things, you are committed to progress: to intellectual progress, to social movement, to personal evolution. You want relationships that are grounded in purpose and to be with people who see beneath Aquarian detachment to the vulnerable heart at your core.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Aquarius, Gemini, Libra
Learn something from: Leo, Sagittarius
Be challenged by: Taurus, Scorpio

Pisces Mercury

You’re an associative thinker who delights in dreams, the subconscious, and the intangible. More than any other Mercury sign, you take in all the information in your environment: non-verbal cues, the music that’s playing, the energy of the people around you. You know that words are only part of the picture. Mind, you can be a warm and thoughtful conversationalist, and you’re also a good listener, but sometimes have to quietly withdraw from the world altogether, which people don’t always understand. Introspection and contemplation are keywords for your communication style.

How you process: Baths, showers, and springwater soaks can help clear your mind, but how you synthesize this information is a challenge. Sleep, and let your subconscious do the connective work. Read poetry, listen to beautiful music.

The communication you crave: Heart-led, empathetic demonstrations of love. Tender energy matters more than precise language.

Compatibility

On your wavelength: Cancer, Pisces, Scorpio
Learn something from: Taurus, Virgo
Be challenged by: Gemini, Sagittarius

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Here’s How to Do It Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

Starstruck: What Your Moon Sign Says About Your Romantic Compatibility

When it comes to astrology much is made of romantic compatibility, especially with sun signs. But humans are complex! As our queer forefather Walt Whitman, lover of Oscar Wilde, once said, we contain multitudes. And our charts contain multitudes! Your sun sign is only one part of you. When it comes to romantic and sexual partners, there are many other parts we should be paying attention to when it comes to overall energetic compatibility.

The moon, for example, governs your emotions, habits, and instincts. When it comes to relationships, this is important! Your moon is how you are emotional. It’s how you express your tender little queer heart!

In this new series, we are going to be talking about compatibility with planets that aren’t your sun. We’ll be focusing on the Moon (how you do emotions), Mercury (how you communicate), Venus (how you woo and like to be wooed), and Mars (sex drive). Starting with moon sign compatibility!

I’ve been studying astrology for several years, as well as doing the practical side of reading birth charts. Personally, astrology has helped me learn how to better understand parts of myself – and empathize with others – in ways I never thought possible. I think that it can explain a lot about people, but it rarely explains (or predicts) everything.

At the same time, as someone who left fundamentalist Christianity and who uses astrology and tarot as tools of self-empowerment, I feel a need to make a fucking gigantic disclaimer, which is this:

You are a person with agency who has free will and who ultimately has to take responsibility for your life and your choices. Your astrology provides you with information, but it in no way governs who you end up with.

Even as I write this, Tessa Thompson has come out publicly and said that she and Janelle Monae VIBRATE ON THE SAME FREQUENCY. swoon. And y’all, I’ve looked at their birth charts. They are not the kinds of charts that scream soulmates. They aren’t even the kinds of charts that scream, “oh, obviously these people would end up together.”

Let’s be real: two or more mature and well-adjusted people with good communication and boundaries and a shared commitment to mental and emotional wellness (whatever that looks like for you!) can make a go of a relationship! There are no rules! You literally make your energy work for yourselves as you go — you just have to understand who you are, how you work, and what you need. People like Janelle and Tessa prove that you in no way have to have “ideal” synastry (the term for astrological compatibility) to pop out of vulva pants and inspire queers the world over.

Of course, I also obviously think that understanding both your energy as well as that of your partner(s) and/or love interest(s) is rad and helpful. Astrology helps me live a more self-aware life on a daily basis, and I hope that in learning about your moon sign and moon sign compatibility, it can help you, too.

Great! Disclaimer over. Before we dive in, here’s a quick explanation of one component of these descriptions, which is the “compatibility” section (keep in mind: these are moon signs, not sun signs). This is mostly for fun, because as established, free-will. That said, here is what the sections mean:

Most Compatible – You work with emotions similarly, because you share the same element (fire, air, water, or earth). When it comes to communicating, empathizing with, and understanding each other’s feelings and motivations, you just “get” each other.
Meet Your Match – These folks work with emotions in a way that is different than you, elementally, but share similar emotional themes and goals in a way that makes you go yes. There will be some challenges, but with good communication, you can really learn and grow together.
Take a Risk – You are the relationship no one in your life saw coming. Y’all are wired very differently, but who’s to say that friction doesn’t make things hot as hell and super interesting? Everything is a growth opportunity!

Now! Let’s talk about your badass moon signs!

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Aries Moon

An Aries moon is intense, but holds a fierce independence. You want to be able to do your own thing (some might call you impulsive), but you’re still extremely dedicated to your causes, your relationships, your interests, to that which feeds you, to that which you love. You care a lot (like, a lot), and you want to do everything right now. Who’s coming along for the ride? You’ll do it if no one else will. Your life’s work? Really seeing things through for the long-haul.

What turns you on: Courage. People who are unafraid to wear their heart on their sleeve, who fearlessly do their own thing, who are unafraid to be the outsider, who are willing to take a risk for love. You’re attracted to independence – you’re an emotionally independent person, and you require similar qualities in the people (platonic and romantic) you surround yourself with. Ultimately, you need someone (or multiple someones) who can keep up – and who is cool splitting off to do their own thing.

What you want: Inspiration. To rent a car with someone and plan a road trip on the fly.

What you need: Your own space. Books like A Room of One’s Own were written for Aries moons. You move quickly and are decisive, but this doesn’t mean you want to U-Haul. Far from it.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Passivity. People who don’t care.

Aries Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Aquarius
Take A Risk: Virgo, Scorpio

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Taurus Moon

The most sensually grounded of the earth signs, Taurus moons express their emotions through their body & environment. A Taurus moon wants to nap it out, eat it out, fuck it out. But Taurus is also the stubborn bull that moves pretty slowly – you can’t rush this energy through anything. You Taurus folks process your emotions in your own time; you are the sign that sows seeds, that teaches us to grow, that most cherishes your own inner stability. You need to physically feel your way through something, processing it through the body, whether through physically working out, laughing, crying. Your life’s work is understanding how to let it all move through you in your own time.What turns you on: The slow burn.

What you want: The finer things – which doesn’t have to mean “expensive” or “luxury” (unless, of course, you want them to). Good food at hole in the wall restaurants. Unexpected, unique ambiance. Candlelight. Good smells that evoke a sweet place and time. Your sign is ruled by Venus, who elevates anything she touches.

What you need: To accept that you don’t need to match everyone else’s (fast) pace – your speed is just fine. Stop challenging yourself to be that spontaneous person and feeling guilty. You have so many gifts to offer. What you need, Taurus moon babes, is someone who matches and enjoys your pace – which is leisurely, luxurious, and downright sensuous.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Being rushed.

Taurus Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Leo, Scorpio
Take A Risk: Aries, Sagittarius

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Gemini

You Gemini moons, children of Mercury, are charmed folk who can talk and flirt your way into anything and make the other person think it was their idea. Adaptable and curious, people have to work to keep your attention (you want to bestow it on everyone! There are so many people to talk to!). You process your feels by talking things out – but the real question at the end of the day is, what are you feeling? You can easily charm and distract with your wit, so making sure you are deeply grounding your language in your gut, in the mess of emotions and instincts, is your life’s work.

What turns you on: A quick wit and a dry charm. Facility with language, if you will.

What you want: Intellectual feeding. Someone who wants to learn from you. Someone you can learn from.

What you need: To learn to sit in the discomfort when you don’t have the words for what you’re feeling. It’s important to you to have people in your life – romantic partners and otherwise – who also have a love of language, who are willing to sit in that morass with you and talk it through. Hold onto those people, and let the rest go.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Being called flirtatious when you’re just expressing yourself. (Explicitly clarifying situations and intentions will help a lot here.)

Gemini Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Virgo, Sagittarius
Take a risk: Taurus, Pisces

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Cancer

The moon is at home in Cancer. The moon feels deeply here. Shifts with the tides. Is strong. Emotional is too easy a word; we all have emotions, and the moon rules our emotions, always. It’s not that you are more emotional than other moon signs: it’s that your sign understands how to honor and protect and wield emotions in a profound way. Cancer is the crab; the hard shell, the soft underbelly. It’s not about being more or less, it’s about a deep knowledge, understanding, intuition. Cancer wants to be able to take off its shell, its burdens, and lay down with its love(s) in tenderness, in solidarity, in total union and familiarity. The bridge between the shell and the underbelly: this is your life’s work.

What turns you on: Hygge.

What you want: To nurture, nourish, and care for others, especially through the means available through a home: food (cooking, going out), cleaning, gardening, child and elder care. Care is your comfort zone, and you’re a homebody at heart. Given the right food, company, and comforts, you could easily not leave your house for days.

What you need: To understand what home is, for you. This may not be a physical place. This may not be certain people. How do you carry home within yourself?

Biggest Pet Peeve: A lack of gratitude and gentleness. People who don’t reciprocate the care you give to them.

Cancer Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Virgo, Capricorn
Take a risk: Libra, Aquarius

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Leo

Leo is the lion, the ruler: the kings and queens of the zodiac. For Leo moons, your life’s work is learning to claim and own and occupy and revel in your space in that uniquely performative Leo way that ultimately gives permission to the people around you to revel in their own space. Leo energy inspires others to live their own best lives. And yes, you are fed and nurtured by appreciation. Yes, you’ve got a flare for the theatrical. What others sometimes read as stereotypical Leo arrogance can, in fact, be the manifestation of insecurity. Remember that you are worthy, that you deserve to own your own space, that you absolutely deserve to have people in your life who shower you with love and tenderness.

What turns you on: Unmitigated, unadulterated self-expression. Fearless creativity unfolding on a stage.

What you want: Playfulness. Leo moons have a light heart, and finding loyal mates who appreciate you and who can play just as hard as you? That’s the winning combo.

What you need: Opportunities to build your confidence. Venues that feel comfortable, where you can risk and fail splendidly, with supportive partners and community. What is going to help you build that self-expression that is so vital for your Leo energy, that is going to help you play with your inner performer?

Biggest Pet Peeve: Energy that seeks to shame and belittle that which is bold and inspiring.

Leo Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Cancer, Aquarius
Take a risk: Scorpio, Pisces

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Virgo

Virgos are known for their love of organization, but at the heart of it is a desire to control their environment. When it comes to emotions with Virgo moons, this is challenging! You are an excellent social secretary for your friend group and family, the person everyone goes to for advice – but when was the last time you directed all that fixing energy inward? Your life’s work is turning that desire to understand, to organize, to control inward rather than outward. When you focus on cultivating a sense of self-awareness, sitting with discomfort, sitting in the mess of emotions, resisting the urge to sort them out right away, letting them take their time: there is extraordinary growth and harvest to be had.

What turns you on: Someone who has their shit together. In spite of your discomfort with emotional mess, the external pieces of your life usually run like a well-oiled machine. You’re organized AF. You cannot be the organizer of someone else’s life.

What you want: To be heard. To have someone else explicitly acknowledge and value the nitty-gritty in what you’re saying.

What you need: Folks who show up for you the way you show up for them. What does that look like? Being punctual, courteous, considerate, thoughtful. You are more pragmatic than showy, but the occasional romantic gesture goes a long way. With you, Virgo, it’s the little things.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who have no follow-through.

Virgo Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Pisces
Take a risk: Aries, Leo

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Libra

Charming and diplomatic, Libra moons are the consummate lawyers of the emotional zodiac: able to see and argue all sides to an issue. While Libra is a partnership-oriented sign, always seeking harmony in relationships (romantic and platonic), you struggle with indecisiveness. Your head often wars with your heart, and you end up talking yourself out of the good stuff because you don’t trust it. But why don’t you trust your gut, babe? The tarot card for Libra is Justice, represented by the scales. You can think of the scales as the head and the heart, and a Libra moon is never not weighing the two. Here’s the god’s honest truth: you know how to listen to your head – maybe a little too much. Your life’s work is learning to let your heart weigh in.

What turns you on: A challenge – which is to say, someone who doesn’t just keep up with you, but pushes you, debates you – and, of course, does all of this while respecting your boundaries and actually listening to what you’re saying.

What you want: Someone who is so intoxicating that your inner critic can’t help but shut up.

What you need: To learn how to trust your gut and get out of your own head when it comes to your feelings. You can be so dedicated to keeping the peace that you overlook your gut and the things that you really want in the interest of the greater good.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who disrespect you, or the people and beliefs you value.

Libra Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Aries, Capricorn
Take a risk: Taurus, Cancer

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Scorpio

Scorpio moons are deep emotional wells. Scorpio revels in the transformative, in those liminal moments between life and death, between foreplay and sex and orgasm, between society and the abject. Scorpio is comfortable in the dark, in decay. So when it comes to the moon – to the emotional realm – well. Scorpio moons are comfortable with your own company. Secretive isn’t quite the right word; you have strong boundaries – fortress-like walls, if you will – and you drop the drawbridge for very few. Scorpio moons are intense, and the intensity isn’t for everyone. You’re like black licorice; you’re an acquired taste (and you like that). But for those who can run with you, who share your desire to know – really know – the depths and mysteries, the nooks and crannies of what makes this world (and you) work. Well. There is the promise of a lot of passion, a lot of heat, a lot of understanding. And understanding: that’s your life’s work.

What turns you on: The unknown. You’re game for anything that promises to get you closer to the veils of the beyond.

What you want: Someone you can’t scare off.

What you need: To not be rushed. You move at your own pace. You’ve got strong boundaries, and you aren’t going to share anything with anyone that you aren’t comfortable sharing. Some parts of you are just for you, and anyone who doesn’t get that can show themselves out.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People pushing your boundaries.

Scorpio Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Taurus, Capricorn
Take a risk: Gemini, Leo

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Sagittarius

Sagittarius moons are explorers at heart. Your heart is fed by meeting new people, in learning from new cultures (in non-appropriative ways!), in being footloose and fancy-free. Like your fellow fire folk, Aries moons, you enjoy your freedom, but you aren’t nearly as intense – you trust that things will work themselves out. This is what you teach others how to do: to live in the moment, to find joie de vivre in their current situation. But your life’s work, Sagittarius, is in establishing boundaries for yourself within this footloose lifestyle. Structure doesn’t have to mean conservative boredom; the right kinds of structure can help you thrive, and can help bring people into your life who don’t feed off your vibrant energy but rather, who themselves are centered and add to your joy.

What turns you on: Someone who helps you expand your mind. Who introduces you to new concepts. Who pushes you in new directions without trying to pin you down – and who isn’t an emotional vampire.

What you want: A one-way ticket to anywhere.

What you need: To be trusted by your person. You have a strong inner compass, and even though you crave freedom to roam, you require people who get that your magnetic, life of the party, flirtatious energy doesn’t actually threaten your relationship. You don’t need labels or boxes, and you do best when you feel trusted.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Cages of any kind.

Sagittarius Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Meet Your Match: Gemini, Aquarius
Take a risk: Libra, Capricorn

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Capricorn

You’re an unapologetic boss with a bitch face that never rests. But here’s the thing: it’s not that you’re not emotional – and in fact, you may be like, “why do all of these astrology websites say I’m cold and unemotional? I’m totally emotional.” But you are an expert at locking that shit up. You know that line from Frozen, “Conceal, don’t feel?” Capricorn moon, right there. You want to be in charge of how you present to the world. And how you present which emotions to the world, and when. Scheduling emotional shit into your calendar? Sounds like something you do. Vulnerability is your life’s work, and not just with other people, but with yourself. What is your own personal awareness of your emotions like? Can you locate your feelings in your body at any given time? It might be time to break out that journal and start getting in touch with the connection between your body and your emotions.

What turns you on: Safety – which is to say, someone you feel safe with and seen by.

What you want: To be able to trust someone else enough that you don’t always have to be in charge, planning every date and making every move.

What you need: Consistency – whatever that looks like to you. For example, if you’re a texter and crave responsiveness, that’s vital. You are reliable and consistent – the person everyone in your life goes to when they’re in trouble. You need someone who you can count on to be there for you, whether it’s picking up groceries for dinner or something a lot more serious.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Unreliable fuckbois who ghost.

Capricorn Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Meet Your Match: Cancer, Libra
Take a risk: Sagittarius, Pisces

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Aquarius

Aquarius moons are probably one of the most fearless moons of the zodiac, which is to say, you could legitimately give two fucks what anyone thinks. When you’re done with a person or a situation or a job, you’re fucking done. You’ve got airtight boundaries. Here’s the thing about Aquarius moons: you’ve got a strong internal compass, and you just know what you want. You’ve fought like hell to figure out who you are, and you aren’t going to settle for a less-than life, which also means the people you surround yourself with. Your life’s work? Understanding how to accept the situations that are within your control, and the situations that aren’t. (Just because a situation is out of your control doesn’t mean you have to go for the nuclear option.)

What turns you on: A sense of purpose, or calling, or vocation. Aquarians are often called the humanitarians of the zodiac, and folks with Aquarius moons feel strongly about being emotionally connected to a community.

What you want: Independence. Many folks in astrology take the easy road and say that your independent streak makes you more open to polyamory and open relationships. That’s too easy a stereotype. Folks with strong Aquarian energy require the freedom to build their own kind of system, no matter their relationship orientation. You need freedom within whatever relationship system you are building with your partner(s), who themselves have to be thoughtful and considerate and open-minded people.

What you need: The time and space to set your own boundaries.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Clinginess. Any energy that wants to contain you.

Aquarius Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Meet Your Match: Aries, Sagittarius
Take a risk: Cancer, Capricorn

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Pisces

Sensitivity is strength. Pisces moons know this better than most; you feel more deeply and are more psychically in tune with this world than others are capable of grasping. Your capacity for empathy is inspirational to those around you, but you also pick up on everything in your environment like whoa. Your life’s work? Developing boundaries. Not feeling everything going around you, everything people put on you. It is not your responsibility, alone, to take on the cares of the world, or even the cares of those closest to you. Learning to filter out, and feel through, the various layers is a difficult road, but one that leads to deep and fulfilling relationships that build you up.

What turns you on: “How do you feel about that?”

What you want: Big, romantic gestures. Everyone loves to be appreciated, but you, more than most, appreciate the grand gesture, the one that is specifically attuned to your interests, the one that is over the top. The one that, let’s be honest, makes you cry.

What you need: Tenderness. Friends and lovers who are real with you and who understand you, and who, for this reason, can challenge you and push you while cherishing you. Who know how to be tough and tender at the same time.

Biggest Pet Peeve: People who view feelings, empathy, and sensitivity as “less than.” Fucking heteronormative patriarchy.

Pisces Moon Compatibility

Most Compatible: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Meet Your Match: Taurus, Virgo
Take a risk: Gemini, Aquarius

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Here’s How to Do Moon Sign Compatibility Yourself!

There are many places you can go, but to do your own chart, go to astro.com. To get the most accurate chart, you need your exact time of birth in addition to your date and place of birth; however, you can still do a chart without a time of birth.

If you’re an app person, I would recommend Time Passages, which provides an incredibly detailed breakdown breakdown of your chart with daily horoscopes as well as your transits and progressions (this will make sense to the more advanced astrology folk among you). It also gives you the opportunity to save other people’s charts

If you’re interested in starting to research and learn more so that you can interpret your chart for yourself, start with The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need (which is not, in fact, the only book you’ll ever need, but is a great starting point). There’s also a wealth of excellent free content by queer practitioners on the internet, like Chani Nicholas’ horoscopes and courses as well as the queer-centric astrology content at Beth Maiden’s Little Red Tarot. Go forth and learn!

You Need Help: Your Girlfriend Makes More Money Than You, Just Wants to Have Fun

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

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Q:

My partner and I have been together for five years and are engaged, I love her very much and we have a genuinely great relationship. The one thing that distresses me is money. My partner is earning more money than me and has always been better at saving and managing finances. She likes to spend this money on holidays, nice food, and memorable experiences. I can rarely afford to keep up with this lifestyle without accumulating credit card debt and have no savings to fall back on.

This has always been a pattern in our relationship and I have brought it up numerous times as problematic, not because I don’t want her to spend her money on nice things, but because when I say that I can’t afford to go on holiday with her or book a fancy hotel for her birthday, she always frames this as me not wanting to be romantic or adventurous. This is despite me wanting to save money for things like a house, where some delayed gratification is necessary, and despite the fact that she even wants a house more than me!

Recently she has moved to a different city for work and while we plan to live together again in the next few months, managing the rent on my own has made finances even tighter, while I’m also expected to travel to see her regularly. When I can’t afford to travel to visit her, she gets upset about missing me and questions whether I want to see her if I’m being reluctant to book travel.

Obviously this is frustrating, especially when I’ve asked her not to make me feel guilty for wanting to not get into (more) debt and trying to save money for our future together. She does get it when I bring it up and apologises, but her solution is then to spend the money herself on a fancy hotel room for her birthday, my travel, and so on, which makes me feel guilty about not being able to do nice things for her. I’m not particularly romantic either, so find it hard to figure out how to make it up to her with smaller gestures.

I don’t know what to do to make her see things from my point of view because it’s justifiable that she wants to make the most out of life while she can. She thrives on new experiences and it boosts her mental health to have these things. She’s said on more than one occasion that not going on holiday for a year would exacerbate her depression, which also makes me feel like refusing to spend money is contributing to her poor mental health. It also makes her sad to go away by herself though, as she would much rather be making those nice memories with me around.

How can I support the way she wants to live and not drown in debt?

A:

Friend,

I am so glad you wrote in to ask this! Firstly because money issues and sex issues are the main issues all couples face, and I want to reassure you that you’re not alone in having these worries and frustrations. Secondly because I make less money than my partner so I have a little bit of experience I can share with you. And thirdly because the way you wrote about this conundrum is so level-headed and full of a real sense of urgency to make sure both you and your partner have what you need and want for your mental health. That’s a great leaping-off point for addressing any relationship riddle and I feel confident y’all can come to a better understanding around money that will make both of you less stressed out.

Let me pull out the two things that jumped out most to me from your question. Neither of them are really about money.

When you say you can’t afford something, your fiancée frames it as you not wanting to be adventurous or romantic; or when you say you can’t afford to come visit her, she frames that as you not wanting to see her. That’s a thing that’s going to need some work, and I think it would be best if that work came proactively. By which I mean: Don’t wait until the next time she asks you to do something that’s out of your financial comfort zone to talk about this. It feels very necessary for you to say to your fiancée, “Hey, babe! I think there’s a better way for us to talk about money, and I would love it if we could find a good safe time to sit down and really hear each other about our financial realities and goals so we can make sure we’re supporting each other’s individual needs and empowering ourselves to have the best future possible!” (If you initiate that conversation over email, I would advise not making the subject a smiley face. My research suggests that comes off as sarcastic.) (Just a little side tip, you’re welcome!)

Of course, when you’re having a tough conversation it’s best to use “I feel” statements and avoid saying things like “always” and “never.” Just for one example, “You always make me feel like a broke bitch.” That is not a good way to say the thing you want to say. “I want you to have everything you need to be happy and mentally healthy, and I want to contribute to that happiness and mental healthiness, but sometimes when I tell you I can’t afford to do the things you want to do, I feel like you don’t hear the real reason, which is that it will cause me to go deeper in debt and that stresses me out and makes me feel like future me isn’t going to be in a good position to give us both the big things we want, like a house!” That is a good way to say the thing you want to say.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that you feel guilty when your girlfriend offers to pay for both of you to do the fun things she wants you to do. That’s some work you’re going to have to do internally, and oh, I understand how hard that is. Why does it make you feel guilty? Is it the way she offers? Because if so, that’s something to bring up in the conversation I mentioned above. If not, though, really: why do you feel that way? Is it because you grew up in a supremely patriarchal religious institution where you were expected to stay at home and have babies while your husband provided for you, and thinking about anyone “taking care of you” financially taps into that trauma? Is it because you’re afraid to rely on her financially because what if she leaves and you’ve lost the ability to take care of yourself? Is it because you’re afraid that she’ll grow to resent you for not being able to pay for half of everything? Is it because you believe you’ll be indebted to her in ways that aren’t financial if she pays more for things than you do? That it will shift the balance of power in your relationship? That it will mean you’re expected to do more housework because of internalized ideas you have about gender roles and money? That it will cause you to lose any sense of personal control over your life?

I’m just tossing out all the reasons I struggled for years to just accept the fact that my partner makes more money than me and that it’s totally okay. In fact, it’s very normal for one person in a couple to make more money than the other person!

Once you unpack why you feel guilty, talk to your fiancée about it. It’ll probably help her to understand more of where you’re coming from, and allow her to ease some of your anxieties, and permit you to begin working to let go of the guilt so you can just go to a nice hotel for her birthday and enjoy it!

On a practical, actual money level, it’d be good for y’all to sit down and talk numbers. How much money do you each make, what do your individual monthly budgets look like, how much money do you both want to be saving for your house, and then how much disposable income do you both have left, at the end of the day? If you have a hundred dollars left and she has a thousand dollars left, maybe you agree to pay ten percent for fun things and she pays 90 percent. It’s proportional! And fair! You each have the money you have and you’re a team and when you combine that funtime money together — no matter who put in how much — you get to spend it as a team!

I’ll leave you with Mr. Rogers: “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like ‘struggle.’ To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” Be honest and compassionate with each other about who and where you are at this moment in time on your long and winding and ever-evolving relationship path; you’re gonna be great!

Yours most humbly,
Heather

A+ Roundtable: What’s Your Relationship Kryptonite?

We’re taking our Bad Behavior to A+ to get down to the nitty gritty about our deviance. This week we asked our writers, editors and staff: What types of relationship situations or people are you often drawn to even though you know they’re bad for you and will destroy you?

You know the kind; they make you weak in the knees and then before you know it, they’ve sucker-punched your heart. The twist is we keep falling for the same trap over and over again. Who do you gravitate towards but know ultimately they’re downright no good for you?

Al(aina), Staff Writer

I am drawn to relationships that end up being codependent. I think that many black people (and I only date black people) are taught “family is the only thing you can rely on” as a sort of cultural way to shield ourselves from white supremacy. It was also popular in Christian circles when I was growing up to teach that couples should only speak to and rely on each other for emotional support. These are hard to unlearn, and as someone who naturally doesn’t find sharing my feelings with friends easy, it’s convenient to have one person who I unload everything onto. It’s a bad look. We become this insular unit where one of us (usually me) stops wanting to be social outside of the home because I can just have someone I really like come over. But eventually, it gets too uncomfortable, it becomes dangerous, I become manipulative, and probably low-key abusive. Coincidentally, I have been single for 7 years and I am always the one who gets broken up with.

Alexis, Staff Writer

S I N G E R S. The first girl I fell hard as shit for was the lead in a lot of musicals which explains why I have done five times more theatre than originally planned and also for a while believed I’d major in theatre? Anyways. You can sing? You sing to me??? It’s over. I’m done. There is nothing else I can do I’m in love with you and we’re just gonna have to deal with this. I know you’re thinking, but, Alexis, so many pretty and handsome and everywhere in between can sing? And you’re right! And do you see my problem??? As soon as someone starts humming, I just walk my ass the other way.

And like less than I used to but also, those lesbians who lean too hard in the “I gotta be like a straight man in order to properly be a lesbian” because I will be enamored by your swagger long enough to fall into the trap of “there’s probably something softer hiding underneath” and I can get to it if I wait it out instead of realizing that if you’re talking like a misogynist and acting like a misogynist, odds are, you’re an asshole. And if I don’t properly prepare myself against pet names you use to get me to believe whatever you did wasn’t really *that* bad, I will remain under this curse.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

Like basically every other kid who grew up with a parent who had an untreated narcissistic personality disorder and various un-dealt-with addictions, I spent the majority of my life thinking that the actions, reactions, and feelings of everyone around me were my fault/responsibility. And like basically every kid who grows up with dysfunctional family dynamics, the roles I was forced to play with my parents are the roles I gravitated toward in romantic relationships in my early adulthood. I dated people who were all about criticism and accusations, denial and projections, constant “martyrs,” and who withheld affection and communication as a form of punishment whenever I said or did anything that challenged their perception of themselves as good or right. I knew these people were bad for me, but I didn’t know exactly how or why, and I kept dating them and befriending* them over and over and over. Getting into relationships with narcissists was as easy to me as slipping into my favorite pajamas. It was just what I knew.

(*I say befriending but what I mean is getting into toxic, deeply intimate, definitely romantic, but nonsexual relationships with straight girls.)

In my mid-/late-twenties this perfect storm of things happened. I realized I’m gay, started therapy, and left church. For the first time in my life, I began trying to understand who I was and where I started and where I ended and where other people began.

In the last ten years or so, I have been the opposite of drawn to people who’ve tried to force me into repeating those patterns of my youth and early adulthood. Repelled, in fact. To a fault, though. I still haven’t really found balance with it. People who can’t or won’t self-reflect and work to get better, people who refuse to take responsibility for how their actions and inactions affect others in their orbit, people who expect an unwritten pact of silence so their fragile sense of self remains unchallenged, people who have erratic outbursts, people who do not practice active empathy — once I realize what’s going on with them (though, admittedly, it often takes a minute because of my childhood conditioning; plus, I am such an easy target for narcissists) I am completely done with them.

I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t think shutting myself off from anyone who displays any character trait that reminds me of my mother is the best or wisest or most compassionate way to move through the world — but it’s the only way I know how to protect myself. When I cut you out of my life, you are out of my life. Me and Mr. Darcy have social anxiety and this in common: Our good opinions once lost are lost forever! I’ve worked reaaaaaallllly hard to deconstruct my kryptonite and I don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life getting sucked into vacuums of other people’s narcissism.

Erin, Staff Writer

I think before I got into a long-term relationship that destroyed me mentally and emotionally and therefore going forward truly all bets are off in terms of what I’m looking for in a person or relationship, it seemed I was drawn to women whose pendulums were at that brief pause before swinging swiftly back in the other direction of wanting to date men. What was – and probably will be again – crushing about this is not the dating men part. We’re all god’s children under flags of various colors. It’s the kind of men. Just dopey, doofy men. Tragic. If a crush starts dating a hot woman, I’m like, obviously. Good for them. Of course she would. But when it’s someone whose entire instagram is them just slamming PBRs and playing video games, I ache. So, women who date terrible men seem to be my thrill and will probably lead to my ultimate demise.

Creatrix Tiara, Staff Writer

I once stayed in an abusive relationship way, way too long because we were living together, and as a foreigner (specifically an international student) I knew it was already harder for me to find a place to live on my own. I could have just kicked her out, but she was also very vulnerable (with a long history of homelessness and living off Social Security — I covered most of the rent) and I didn’t want to put her in an unsafe situation, even when she was making OUR living situation unsafe. In not wanting to be the abusive, heartless girlfriend, I over-accommodated her abuse and heartlessness.

I’ve only lived with one other partner (before her, that one was generally fine) so I don’t know if this counts as “kryptonite” per se. But it’s still hard for me to figure out how to balance wanting to be aware of structural inequalities (that lead to, say, homelessness) and wanting to protect myself from people taking advantage of me.

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer

I happen to be pretty into bossy femmes who could either really like me or they just like telling me what to do, it’s always a coin flip. Imagine a big doofus St. Bernard — me — just being bossed around by a little sassy Chihuahua — her — and you’ve got the picture. Well, make the St. Bernard totally happy to follow around the Chihuahua and end the fights it starts with other dogs or just generally back it up with sheer size, and NOW you’ve got the picture. It doesn’t usually end well for me, but I can’t help it.

Cameron, Cartoonist

I’m instinctively drawn to really dynamic, interesting people with high ambitions who don’t necessarily have time to be in a relationship. This isn’t entirely a bad thing aside from that 1) there’s a built-in expiration date and, 2) because of who I am as a person, I end up doing a lot of unreciprocated emotional labor. And that’s fine until I burn out at which point all of my own needs (that I’ve been ignoring, and Player 2 has been too busy to notice exist) collectively take a deep breath and SCREAM.

Here’s the thing. I like taking care of people and I hate when a whole lot of attention is on me. Being involved with busy people who have tunnel-vision is a great scenario for me in theory! I’m led by their example toward productivity and they enjoy small comforts like relaxing for a goddamn second. It really isn’t all bad.

What’s really fun is that having really chill, undemanding energy attracts a fair amount of very busy and emotionally unavailable people. So this situation has played itself out a few times over with varying shades of success/disaster & may continue to do so!

Archie, Cartoonist

I’ve been trying to figure out what the folks I’ve dated have in common that has made the relationships implode. And to be frank, the only real common denominator is me. I’m my own relationship kryptonite. I’m the bad influence. I’ve historically been the fuckboy in a way to combat my own anxieties and insecurities and as a way to stay aloof. I think I could try and swing it under a different guise but what’s the point. The reality is many of my past relationships (pre-therapy & before I actually started working on my coping skills) imploded because as soon as I felt a hint of insecurity, I’d fuck around or cheat first or look for some sort of physical/emotional escape or disappear in some way. And because the community is small, this would often be with my partner’s good friend/ex-lover/best friend’s ex-lover/my own ex/etc etc. I honestly think cheating can become a habit if you’re not careful and I wasn’t careful at all, with myself or with the people I was with. This is a shit way to treat people and I can’t even tell you the number of times it has come back at me or exploded in my face or I had a sit-down with an ex and listened to the ways I fucked up. It doesn’t matter if the relationship was monogamous or polyamorous and it’s very different than just wanting to sleep around with folks in an open and healthy way! I realize I wasn’t isolated in most of these relationships either-often it was that the anxieties each of us brought to the table weren’t compatible or our communication styles were just REALLY bad. So I don’t know, for the sake of honesty I guess the answer is me circa 2006-2016. And for the record: yes, I am pretty embarrassed by how long it took me to stop and be accountable for my own actions. But here I am, at the ripe age of 32, learning to be less of a shithead and cheaters: you can to!

Rachel, Senior Editor

In a sentence: my stupid self-destructive catnip is people who become intensely emotionally attached to and dependent on me, often struggling with Issues or Trauma of some kind and who I can really throw myself into support, knowledge and devotion of, but who never do more than the perfunctory in terms of returning so that there’s never any danger of actual reciprocal emotional intimacy or risk of vulnerability for me. Obviously the kind of person who is okay with deeply opening up to and asking for intense support from a partner but doesn’t notice or care that they know very little about that partner’s inner life or return that energy is… a specific kind of person! Some would say perhaps a tad narcissistic, or at best self-centered and emotionally immature. Often, though not always, this person is a man, because this is absolutely how men are conditioned to interact with women in our culture and so it’s a really easy dynamic to find. Anyhow, this goes on with someone until eventually I finally get burned out, or until I ask for support in one (1) small thing and they don’t show up for me because duh, that’s the dynamic I’ve actively established with them for 1-5 years, and I get upset and leave. Then I usually go to some minimal amount of therapy and repeat the whole thing 1-3 years later. I should probably stay single!

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

I know this is the cliche but I always fall for the unavailable girls. And not (necessarily) emotionally unavailable, I mean like, “omg we’re perfect for each other too bad you have a boyfriend/husband and/or ID as straight.” The first time this happened the girl told me to wait for her because she’d just been dating this guy for so long and he was her best friend and she wanted to ease him into the idea of breaking up but THEN we would TOTALLY be together because she loved me, she did. (We never even kissed because she didn’t want to cheat on him — and I mean I didn’t either but I would argue telling someone else you love them is worse than like a drunken one night stand!) Anyway I waited and spoiler alert she didn’t break up with him. In fact, they moved in together. I found out at a party we were all at where she had been weird and distant all night. She said to the group, without looking in my direction at all, that her boyfriend was picking her up because they were going to “give it a shot.” I felt like I had been stabbed in the gut. But as wary as I am of a situation similar to this now, I still find myself falling into these patterns where I am basically dating someone but without any of the physical stuff or without them admitting that we’re basically dating. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a girlfriend, but I keep finding myself with a “work wife.” Right now, the girl who I will call Work Crush are rapidly approaching work spouse status. We’ll get lunch together almost every day, leave work together, buy each other coffee, etc. Recently we started hanging out outside of work too: she came to Pride with me, I was her plus one at a show her husband wouldn’t go with her to. Part of me is like “Yay for adult female friendships! We’re gonna be just like the Bold Type girls!” but the other part of me is like “Haaaaaave you considered an open marriage?” Because I’m not good at dating! But we have such a good soul connection and an easy comfort around each other and why can’t I have that with single queer people I’m attracted to! Is it BECAUSE she’s not a single queer person? Were the stakes so low that I just let my guard down and was able to be real and comfortable with her early on? Or do I like torturing myself by wanting what I can’t have? Am I so afraid of rejection that I only let myself admit to liking low-risk people because knowing they won’t like me back is safer than hoping they will? You know what, don’t answer that.

Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor

There are a lot of awful things I find myself falling into over and over again in my relationships (long distance, duplicitous poly situations, etc), but ohhh boy, there’s one situation that I thought I had control over and yet SURPRISE!!! In my late teens and early 20s, I spent a lot of time pining after boys in bands. I played music, I went to shows, I was involved in local punk and metal scenes and these were the kinds of guys I always ended up infatuated with. The ones I liked were always tall, skinny, tattooed, slightly androgynous, the kinds of guys who never looked less masculine in eyeliner but who always spent way too much time on their hair. Bass players, rhythm guitarists, the occasional drummer, but never the lead singer (they were an entirely different category) — all sweet and respectful while simultaneously deliciously emotionally unavailable. They also (probably) had girls in every city, which meant that they’d usually forget about me as soon as they got back in the tour van, and it took me far too many tries to learn that this arrangement was never going to work.

I was able to snap out of it somewhere around age 26. A couple of important things had changed: I no longer considered myself straight, and I now worked exclusively in live music. Dating women had taught me that clear communication was a thing I could have, and as a result I raised my standards regarding what I was looking for when I bothered to date men. I met tons of bands every single day, and over time the novelty of hot musicians had sort of worn off without my even realizing it. The handsome, scruffy bass player who’d stopped texting me back until he appeared out of nowhere to ask for a +1 for his girlfriend (I’M STILL MAD) had gotten married and moved to Texas to start a family. I still mostly dated moody creative types, writers, actors, photographers (and okay, one roadie), but rarely dipped into my own industry.

And then I met L.

L was a gorgeous lead singer with impeccable style, a bleached blonde firecracker who played a lime green 1963 Fender Jazzmaster on stage and always wore platform heels. A cursory scan of her Instagram revealed that she didn’t appear to own a single item of clothing that covered her thighs. The night I first met her in a dimly lit Lower East Side bar, she handed me a shot and a beer before we’d even exchanged words – before I could even tell her I don’t like beer. I took a sip anyway. I would go on to drink a lot of beers around her, and I never looked back. When I bragged about her to my friends, I sighed that the hottest thing about her was her impressive collection of vintage Fender guitars, and I couldn’t believe her band was good! The band is never good! She was a night owl, a party animal, effervescent and funny and very direct about her interest in me. I was hooked.

There were nights where I’d come to see her perform and she’d know everyone in the room. I’d stand off to the side and awkwardly make small talk with relative strangers, knowing she was working and this was part of the deal. Sometimes she’d end up talking to a man, and I’d see that man laughing at her jokes, subtly touching her hip. This was also (unfortunately) sometimes part of the deal, being a woman in music; we talked about that together often. Knowing that didn’t help. She’d kiss me in dive bars, but she’d bail on dinner plans and it would REALLY hurt my feelings. I wondered why I felt such a familiar sense of confusion.

“Oh fuck,” I realized, far too late. “How’d I end up doing this again?!?! She’s such a boy in a band.” L and I are super close friends now – which was absolutely the right move! She’s so great! – but I can’t believe I still haven’t learned not to swoon over musicians.

That said, I’m a musician too, and I spend every single one of my sets praying secretly that someone else has the same problem I do.

Vanessa Friedman, Community Editor

I love taking care of people. I don’t know if it’s because it’s coded into my DNA or because I was raised and socialized as a girl or because I have mommi vibes or what, but I love it. I’m a nanny, I’m a kitchen top, I’m the friend who will text you back immediately with a lot of validation and heart emojis if you’re having a hard time. I’m the community editor of Autostraddle! I’m down for that sweet sweet emotional labor (and for the record, I think it’s bizarre and irritating when folks act like being a decent fucking human being to your friends and acquaintances is *emotional labor* but that’s not what I’m talking about here, I’m talking about the real heavy lifting) – not because I feel obligated, but because I genuinely want to help you. I do. It feels nice and is often reciprocal and is the way I know how to best show how deeply I care.

But uh…the thing about really being down to caretake people, is that you wind up with a lot of humans in your life who need a lot of caretaking! When I initially started answering this question I was just talking about my type, or rather, types – I am a little bit predictable, but I’m also attracted to a huge variety of babes. Fat non-binary writer? Yes please. Boyish butch who wants to grow things and live in the woods? Yep! Femmes in floral print? Yeah! Literally anyone who grew up in Alaska and has Daddy Issues? YES HI HELLO. But as I delved into the types of humans who make me tick, I realized I was evading the main question: who are the folks I’m drawn to even though I know they’re bad for me?

And that’s how I landed on the problem within myself, which is the caretaking piece. I don’t think any of the babes I’ve fallen for have been inherently bad for me (well okay, maybe one or two, but I’m trying to be generous and compassionate here) but I do think the relationship dynamic I frequently find myself in is bad for me (and for the other people involved, tbh!), and I have to admit that is very much My Own Shit To Work Out.

See, I say that I want an independent babe who can keep up with me, and sometimes I get that and sometimes I don’t. But when I go out of my way to caretake – cook all the meals, act as a therapist, make all the social arrangements, minimize and compartmentalize my own needs and feelings so that my partner can feel comfortable – I create a dynamic wherein the other person begins to rely on me whether they plan to or not. This can work for a while, and even feels good – but then it implodes. I begin to feel resentful. My partner doesn’t understand why I no longer wanna do all the things they got used to me doing. It’s a big mess.

I really, really, really want to work on breaking this habit and not letting this relationship dynamic repeat itself, because I think it feels just as bad for the other person as it does for me, and it feels really bad for me! If anyone has any pro tips on breaking similar habits, I’d love to hear them in the comments. My main strategy right now to avoid this in the future is to be single for forever, so uh, if you’re in the New York area and you wanna casually make out this fall with no expectation of any kind of caretaking, let me know! (Kidding.) (Kind of.) 

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You Need Help: Is Love Really a Lie? Should You Even Try?

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

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Q:

It seems like everyone’s breaking up in 2018, including me and my girlfriend who I thought was The One. Things were so easy with her, they just felt right, and then one day she was in love with our mutual best friend. It’s not just people I know, it’s people I’ve always looked up to in the community and considered “experts” like some of my favorite writers and speakers! How am I supposed to figure out who The One is if even professional queers can’t do it?? Should I even keep trying? What if love is really a lie after all?!

A:

Ah, friend. I’m so sorry you’re having such a rough year, both with your personal romantic relationship and with watching people you care about go through the same pain. I want you to know you’re not alone. Lots of people in my own life are spiraling with the same kinds of questions for these same reasons. I think I might be able to help a little. First, let me burst two of your bubbles — in, I hope, a good way!

Bubble the first: The professional queers you’re talking about, the ones you look up to and love and respect, they’re not any more qualified to have a successful relationship than you are! They don’t have a pocket full of secret tips to make relationships work! They don’t have hidden wisdom unearthed from a fountain of knowledge in the Professional Queers Only thicket of the Forbidden Forest! There’s not even a Professional Queers Only thicket; I made that up! I’m saying this as a professional queer writing an advice column right this very second. These queeros of yours, I bet they are wonderful people who possess loads of knowledge about loads of things, and the fact that they’ve touched your life in a positive way is a beautiful thing, but really, every human being on this planet is just out here winging it. We’re all just doing the best we can navigating the hard and cold and dark places in this world with the resources and information available to us at any given moment. That’s me and that’s you and that’s everyone else we know.

Bubble the second: There’s no such thing as The One. Remember in Mad Men when Don Draper says, “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons”? Well, that’s not exactly true, but there’s a searing kernel of truth in there. So many movies and books and TV shows and commercials and songs and poems tell the tale that there’s one single person in the world who’s gonna fill up our hearts with joy and when we find them — snap! — life’s a breeze. There’s a kind of comfort in that, maybe, but it’s just not true. Every day we make a zillion small choices that change the shape of ourselves and the course of our lives in a zillion small ways, and every other person is out here doing the same thing. How cruel that the universe or some deity contained within it would make a single match for us, give us both free will, and then sit back in apathy while we go about our lives hoping to make the one correct series of choices that will allow us to brush up against one exact person who has also made one correct series of choices, in a sea of seven billion people making eleventy kazillion choices. The odds that anyone would find their One are nearly impossible!

And believing in The One can actually do way more harm than good to us and to our relationships. It can cause existential crises when things inevitably get hard with our person: “Well, maybe they’re not The One. If they were The One, this would be much easier.” It can make us call our relationships into question if we have a connection with a different person than our person: “There’s no way I could have a feeling for someone else if my current person was The One. Maybe the person giving me the new feeling is The One.” It can cause us to believe there’s one single person in the world who can (and should) meet all of our sexual, social, emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic needs — and without conflict or compromise. It can cause us to believe that being happy together just happens. After all, we were made for each other.

That may sound discouraging, but let me flip that iceberg over and would you looky what we have here? Half of every iceberg is underwater and the other side of The One iceberg is the Love Is a Lie iceberg! It’s the same iceberg!

The idea of The One is that we cannot build a happy, healthy, soul-sustaining life with anyone who’s not The One. It’s out of our control. The idea of Love Is a Lie is that no one can build a happy, healthy, soul-sustaining life with anyone. It’s out of our control. Both of these ideas are bananas! They take the responsibility of our own happiness off of us and place it onto someone else or on the universe at large!

Relationships are choosing to do hard work. Not once, but always. It’s unpacking the way your lifetime of experiences has informed your behavior and how that behavior rubs up against your partner in good and bad ways. It’s figuring out when and how to put another person’s needs and desires before yours, and figuring out how to accept the grace of another person doing that for you. It’s not getting what you want sometimes. It’s not getting what you need sometimes. It’s making yourself trustworthy and allowing yourself to be vulnerable enough to trust in return. It’s respecting your partner enough to constantly take extra care with your words and your actions. It’s tough but gentle honesty with them and with yourself. It’s especially apologies and it’s especially forgiveness. There is absolutely no way two human beings with their own insecurities and longings and pain and hopes and fears and ambitions can join their lives together without an enormous amount of friction. And there’s no way to ease that friction without a constant commitment — from both people — to work and to work and to work.

There’s a stage of love, real love, that’s endless sex and laughter and ducking into corners to kiss and kiss because you can’t keep your hands and eyes off each other; expensive dinners and all-night conversations and feeling oh so completely seen and understood; passion and promises and you are perfect in their eyes and they are perfect in yours. That’s the kind of love our culture celebrates in movies and on TV and it has its place.

And there’s an evolution where, yes, there’s passion and, yes, there’s fancy dinners; but no one’s perfect anymore. It’s reading silently in bed together and reaching out to touch their hair, and no one’s thinking about sex. It’s sharing a secret, knowing glance in the presence of their boss or their mom. It’s watching TV in your pajamas for hours and rehashing every detail of your favorite characters’ arcs while the pizza is on the way. It’s putting their coffee cup in the dishwasher. It’s buying toothpaste. It’s renewing the renter’s insurance. It’s picking out a graduation card at the bookstore and pre-stamping it so they’ll remember to send it. It’s standing in line at the pharmacy to pick up their prescription. It’s their books with your books on the bookshelf together for so long you don’t remember what belongs to who anymore. It’s putting their coffee cup in the dishwasher, again. You’ve wounded and been wounded by each other, you’ve seen and experienced each other’s biggest flaws and most damning weaknesses. And yet, with this person — your person! — you are without shame and completely accepted.

I’m only telling you what I know from my own life. The life of a person totally unqualified and unprepared for lifelong love.

I grew up with an abusive mother in a rural town in a repressive Southern Baptist church in one of the most homophobic counties in the country. I didn’t come out until I was in my very late 20s and I didn’t have a relationship with another woman until I was almost 30. I have ADHD, sensory processing disorder, generalized anxiety, and seasonal affective disorder. Lack of experience? Check. Emotional baggage? Check. And when I met my partner, Stacy, oh, she had her scars too. There’s seven years between us and we lived thousands of miles apart. My trauma and her trauma interacted with each other in the most painful, toxic ways. I fell in love with her and the alchemy of our connection was rare and I knew it — but every odd was stacked against us. We really fit together in the ways we fit together, but boi it was fire and a whole lot of crying in the ways we didn’t. So we made a choice, together. I worked on me. And she worked on her. And we worked on us. And worked and worked; and work and work; and will work and will work.

It’s scary to know we can do the work and still not find contentment with the person we’ve chosen. It’s scary to know we can do the work and be devoted to continuing to do it and have the other person decide they don’t want to do it with us anymore. But neither of those things mean love, itself, is a lie; or that you just weren’t doing the work with the one single person the universe chose for you. Even when we do the hard work, relationships don’t always last forever. And relationships don’t have to last forever for the love inside them to be very, very real.

But they can last. And when they do, it’s often worth the pain that came before.

I’m sorry you’ve been hurt. I’m sorry you’ve watched the people you care about get hurt, too. Experiencing that sorrow and confusion and empathy against the backdrop of our current political reality has got to be damn demoralizing. It’s a hard time to have hope, I know. It’s a hard time to believe in love. But it’s a real thing, sweet friend. Don’t give up on it.

You Need Help: Your Potential Throuple Turned Into a Couple and Someone’s Feeling Left Behind

Q:

A friend and I both crushed on the same mutual friend. We explicitly negotiated that we were down for a cute little throuple, but then I learned that the two friends had a sexual/romantic history, and that our mutual friend didn’t actually feel comfortable with this throuple idea, but was kinda going along because of me!

Now me and the mutual friend are casually dating, and our other friend is completely ignoring us. I feel hurt, because I feel like I got the OK when it was the three of us, but now that it’s not, I’m not sure if I’m being a bad friend by going on dates! I guess I want to know if I should stop seeing this person, even though I’m happy and having fun? Am I being a bad friend by seeing them? Or is something the two of them need to work out? I just feel like I’m losing a friend bc I’m engaging in consensual fun, and it sucks! I want to fix everything!!!

Polly Pocket

A:

Hi Polly,

In my opinion, you haven’t done anything wrong here — I want to say that plainly. You talked about it in advance, and got the go-ahead, only to find out later that your friend wasn’t actually into it. The fact that you only learned that your friends had a dating history after the fact seems to indicate that they weren’t being completely upfront with you. But I think until you talk to your friend about this, we can’t say they’re totally in the wrong either — sometimes we don’t know how we’re going to feel about things until they happen. They might have thought at the time that being a cute throuple was exactly what they wanted, until it started happening and then a bunch of feelings came through that they didn’t expect.

You and your friends are now dealing with the fallout associated with them not making their needs and boundaries clear, either because they misrepresented their feelings or just didn’t know what was going to upset them. But you do have a choice now about how and whether you want to hold your friend’s feelings.

Talk to your friend. Let them know you’ve noticed that y’all haven’t communicated in a while and you want to know if they’re OK. Ask them if it bothers them that you’re dating someone with whom they have a history. This is going to be a difficult conversation, because it seems like they’re the kind of person who might lie to try and keep things smooth between y’all, and who might believe their feelings are an unnecessary burden on you and your consensual fun. It can also be that they feel like it’s not “queer” or “radical” to have feelings of jealousy, or that they’re doing polyamory wrong. They also might feel guilty for putting you in this position. Whatever they’re dealing with, y’all need to make things more explicit; you need to figure out how to get them to tell you how they actually feel. Your next move has to be based on their response — and on how good of friends y’all are and how much you want to keep them around.

If they tell you they aren’t bothered by it and give some other reason for why they’ve been MIA, then that’s their truth and you should proceed based on what they’ve told you. If you do your best to let them know that their feelings are valid and you’re their friend and want to know the truth, whether it’s unfair or not, and they maintain that they’re not bothered, there’s not much else you can do.

If they tell you that they are bothered by it, then you get to decide how to respond. Their feelings about it are real whether you or anyone else agree with them or not, regardless of the fact that they should have told you about them in advance to prevent this whole thing from happening. If you dating this person makes it impossible for your friend to stay close to you, that’s a reality you’ll have to navigate now. What’s more important to you – casually dating your new boo, or keeping your relationship with your friend? If this is how your friend feels, they’re forcing you to choose between being their friend and doing something fun that makes you happy. It’s not fair for them to do this, but that would be the reality. Ideally, they would just get over it. You can ask them to get over it, but I don’t foresee that going well, to be honest.

If y’all are close friends, you might want to make this sacrifice/compromise to preserve the friendship. Generally speaking, friends are more important than lovers, depending on how close of a friend they are. I also think it’s important that this is a new, casual lover, not someone you’re marrying or even dating seriously.

If they tell you they’re bothered by it and you do it anyway, you’d probably be a “bad friend” from their perspective. You wouldn’t be doing anything wrong, but sometimes we can hurt people close to us through no fault of our own. You’d need to decide how much it bothers you to be a “bad friend” to this person. Do they put you in difficult situations like this a lot? Or are they generally really on top of their stuff and this is out of the blue? Are y’all close or is this more of an acquaintance? Just HOW cute is this new boo (sort of kidding)?

You’ll have to decide if you’re going to hold your friend’s somewhat irresponsible communication and hurt feelings, or hold your new casual lover. They’re asking you to compromise and sacrifice something for their benefit, and, well, that’s something that friends sometimes ask each other to do, even though it’s unfair sometimes. That’s kind of what friendship is based on. It would have been much better if they asked you not to date this person from the jump, but they didn’t, and now here y’all are.

There unfortunately isn’t an easy “fix” here. Either your friend is hurt — and being hurt sucks, and you’re unintentionally hurting them, which also sucks, but it’s basically their fault and maybe they’ll get over it, and hopefully they can figure out how to work through their feelings with the other person, and you have to decide if you want to break up with your new lover for their — or they aren’t hurt, and it’s all good (or they lie and tell you they aren’t, and it’s not all good but there’s not much you can do). Good luck!

Six Queers on Polyamory and Identity

It’s not healthy for a relationship to form a person’s whole identity. But a relationship orientation can be a fundamental part of it. Here are six queers from Autostraddle’s Poly Pocket series on how their approach to consensual non-monogamy intersects with their identity.

Lazarus, 24, Albuquerque New Mexico

Lazarus, a queer solo poly non-binary trans/genderqueer Black kid with a white mom, stepping into polyamory was part of stepping into their gender and fuller sense of self:

“[M]y poly identity fits in neatly with my identity as a radical anti-racist decolonial sex-positive Black trans queer. I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to undo a lot of damage. I’m trying to interrogate the aspects of my life and identity that are the results of oppression, or that perpetuate oppression. For me polyamory is an aspect of this. I view polyamory as a structure that’s helpful in me decolonizing my love life and the way I view relationships. Having complete ownership of everything within the borders of my skin, and doing what I desire with it and with whom, is an incredible “fuck you” to the systems of oppression I seek to dismantle (and a fun one!). Allowing myself to love fully and completely has helped me foster compassion and empathy in ways I never anticipated, and I think these are two key parts of being an effective organizer or activist. The ability to love openly and fiercely, especially in times like this.

It also has enabled to see myself as a part of a larger web of things, not just in transit from one family unit to another. An alternative kinship without discrimination.”

Tyler, 23, Baltimore

For Tyler, a native and Jewish queer trans woman with Cerebral Palsy, poly and queerness are closely linked:

“[P]olyamory and queerness are pretty much inseparable for me in practice. I realize it might not be that way for everyone, but I find a lot of joy in acknowledging all the ways I’m attracted to my friends and lovers and all the ways they’re attracted to me. Not all of them are sexual, in fact, I think it’s part of why I celebrate non-sexual attraction as much as sexual attraction.”

Ginger, 40, Oakland

Ginger, a white femme cis woman queer polyamorous woman, says that for her seeing poly as a place of openness and choice lets her explore different parts of herself with lots of different people:

“Poly can feel like the most deviant of all the parts of my identities. Mono culture is deep in ways that I don’t think we often fully understand. I think being queer is more understood but that being poly makes a lot of people uncomfortable. There’s a lot of negative assumptions. and our culture is structured to be so mono partnered. Even the race towards gay marriage affirms that norm. There’s a scarcity element, in the sense of that the dominant narrative and I’d argue how our society and culture is structured is that you are seeking a soul mate, one person can fulfill all your needs. That’s super limiting and, I’d argue, boring. And it means you are in a one-to-one relationship with someone without realizing how you’re in multiple relationships to others all the time, at work, with friends, family, etc. For me, standing in my poly identity allows me to see all my relationships as valuable.”

Cecelia, 23, Brooklyn

Cecelia, a mixed-race Asian genderqueer polyamorous bisexual femme, says that polyamory is the only style of dating they could ever participate in, and that it’s a way to reconcile different and seemingly contradictory elements of their identity:

“I like polyamory because it really fulfills all of the conflicting, at-odds parts of myself that I’ve always been told that I had to somehow reconcile. I’m mixed-race so I’ve always felt like ‘not quite this thing, but not quite this other thing.’ And then being bisexual is like ‘you don’t belong here, but also not really here.’ So polyamory is a way I can say Fuck You to all of that.

I’m actively not ashamed of how different relationships allow me to perform gender differently, or give me a way to build love and acceptance with someone based on our similar life experience with race or any other mutual point of interest, really. When I realized that other people had always partially defined what categories I did or didn’t have access to, I decided to actively resist that.”

Mona, 28, Urban Midwest

How poly relates to someone’s sense of self can also change over time. Though she once did, Mona, an Arab-American queer demisexual ethically non-monogamous cis woman, no longer sees polyamory as particularly central to her identity. She’s found that stepping back from a local poly scene and not having the time to date means that other elements of her identity are now more important than her relationship orientation:

“I think if you asked me that a year ago or two years ago, I would have said it’s central to my understanding of myself in the same ways that my class background, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are. But now I’m not so sure. Those other elements of my identity and social position have a much greater bearing on my everyday life. That’s in part the product of my disengagement with a predominately white, wealthy, hetero poly scene. It’s also because I haven’t had the time or desire to date; I just want to spend my time with people I already know and love.”

Traci, 32, Southern California

Poly can also be central even when it’s not currently in practice. “Out of all the pieces of identity I’ve had to come out about over the years (and there have been a few!) I have to say that ‘being poly’ in the way that I see the world has been one that I’ve experienced at the deepest and most consistent core levels,” says Traci, a Japanese American polyamorous queer. Traci is now in a functionally monogamous relationship and redirecting her energy towards their partner and growing family instead of towards navigating different relationships, but polyamory still very much informs the way she moves through the world:

“[S]eeing the world from a place of potential connection and collaboration rather than competition (which are pieces that are core tenets of my poly philosophy) interact with all other elements of my identity. […] [C]onnection, collaboration, honoring other beings in our life for more than function, and having openness to folks creating lives that feel like a uniquely good fit for them, are really significant parts of how I understand myself.”

Lesbian Sex 101 is Autostraddle’s series on how to have lesbian sex for queer women and anyone who finds this information applicable to their bodies or sexual activities.

Sex ed almost never includes queer women or our experiences, so we’re exploring pleasure, safety, relationships and more to make that information more accessible. A lot of the language in these posts is intended to make them easy to find on search engines.

Some of the body parts we talk about will be yours or your partners’ and some won’t. Some of the pronouns will be yours or your partners’ and some won’t. Some of the sexualities will be yours or your partners’ and some won’t. Some of the language will be yours or your partners’ and some won’t. Take what you want and what applies to you or what you can make apply to you and your partners and your experiences, and leave the rest!

You Need Help: Long-Distance Relationships

Q1:

My phenomenal datefriend and I (both they/them) have been dating for a couple of months. They are AMAZING and make me feel like the sun is bursting out of my chest. In a couple of months, they’re going to graduate and they aren’t sure what’s next for them. (Maybe moving. Maybe moving internationally! Maybe not.) We’ve established that we need to have a chat soon about what might happen to this relationship come May.

I find myself internally approaching that chat with this framing: I love you, I think you’re incredible, so you have me rather over a barrel. Want to try long distance? I’m there. Want me to move and follow you? I’m there. Want to close this chapter and let it be the beautiful thing it was? Okay.

I know I’m doing myself (and my datefriend) a disservice if I approach it like that. But I don’t know how else to do it. They’re so lovely and sweet and level headed and compassionate! Help!

A1:

First of all, congratulations on what sounds like a truly awesome connection. They sound pretty ideal. What strikes me as positive is that you’ve already established that you would like to talk about it, so whatever happens is likely to be drama-free. Here’s my suggestion: Take yourself to a coffee shop with a notebook and a pencil, get caffeinated and write for a while about your life and if there’s anywhere else in the world you would like to be or see. Would you live overseas with a friend or by yourself? Do you have job opportunities and friends in places this person is considering going? Is it time for school or an art residency? Is there a place in the world you would and could casually visit every few months? You may find that you have some big dreams of your own — and going into the conversation knowing what they are is a good thing.

That way, you’re less like “omg i will follow yooouuuu, wherever yoooouuu may goooooo” and more like “wow babe – i’ve always wanted to visit cape cod. i mean, i have been looking at cool venues in austin but like, it’s doable.” And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wouldn’t even suggest breaking up. You two seem level-headed enough to at least come up with some options to try.

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Q2:

My girlfriend and I are currently long distance (in different countries), and she seems to be going back and forth on whether she wants to live with me. Several months ago we planned for me to move to her city and move in with her but then she told me that she didn’t think that’s what she wanted. And then a few months ago she started talking about how much she wants me to move in with her and we made a lot of really specific plans for my moving in. However, just yesterday she suggested that I move to a city eight hours from hers and that we could just see each other on weekends. I really love her and want to live with her (it always feels really nice and right when we are in the same place) but this back and forth is really stressing me out. I don’t know what she wants or what to do because I need to start making plans in terms of applying for jobs/moving either way. Please help!

A2:

I will be blunt: I would never move to another place to be with someone I established a relationship with online, especially if they kept wavering on me. It sounds like a broken lease and a sad cat just waiting to happen. Here are my concerns: You would need to acquire visas, which are very hard to get. I have friends who are married and are still separated by borders. Your girlfriend is cycling through periods of unsuredness that stress me out just thinking about. I’m super concerned that you would end up without a place to live having moved all the way somewhere. And immigration is sadly really scary right now in virtually any direction. Even if the relationship goes okay, the chances of you being able to stay together somewhere could be far more complicated than you think.

I would spend a lot of your free time doing research. Could you survive on your own in her country? If so, make a contingency plan and fact check it with your friends and resources about that country. Stay on top of immigration law and make sure you’re not going to end up lost. You may need legal help, legal advice, and you definitely need to save up a lot of money. The golden rule for moving for love is that the location has to be just as great without the love. My friend, the one who can’t be with her partner right now because of immigration? She loves this show Crazy Ex Girlfriend on Netflix, you should watch it. Terrible. But pertinent. It’s about a person who moves to a town for another person and kind of has to put up with the town, and cover up her mistake… please do not be that girl.

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Q3:

I met my girlfriend on a dating app (Her!) and we have been making it work somewhat long distance (only 100 miles apart, but still) for over a year now. Things are falling into place allowing me to move in with her as I have gotten accepted to graduate school in her area. In my two previous relationships we lived together basically from the start, mostly for money reasons. I feel like I should be totally ready to move in given that we’ve formed a solid relationship first, but I find myself very anxious about it. I really don’t want to take that as a bad sign, I just don’t want to compromise what we’ve built together. How do I get my head on board with going with the flow of this change and making it an exciting thing, not an anxious thing?

A3:

First, can I say that you’re not the first person to tell me they met someone on Her? Who thought queer babes wouldn’t cruise…. SMH. Anyways, I think the anxiety is a good sign. This relationship feels different, better somehow than the rest. You’re moving in for love and family building, not for survival or convenience. You probably don’t want to fuck it up. Why not de-escalate and do something silly like pitch a tent in your living room on the first night and act like kids, or make a point to go out to a nightclub before grad school and living in sin begins. Make sure to get some good old-fashioned courting and hot sex in — and try to get in as much as you can seriously because grad school can suck the life out of you. Make sure you have dates that aren’t about moving. Save the rent talk for when rent is due, catch my drift?

You could also think about what your anxiety might be alerting you to. A little bit of nervousness can be good, but it can also highlight what’s wrong in a situation. It’s kind-of like that feeling when you’re halfway to LA and you get worried that you left your flat iron on at home and it doesn’t do that auto-turn-off thing. Did you forget to turn off your stove? Try to think about the little things you might be overlooking: would it be better to rent a flat near your school for a while, so you have a place to settle into your studies? If not, would a studio benefit you? How about a two-bedroom apartment, a place with two beds and a place for you to study? Create a network of people and possibilities so when the time comes to pack up, you’ve done your best to start the next chapter of your life with the resources and spaces you need. Hot tip: Grab your nearest Virgo and ask them to make a list of all your moving considerations. We like French Press & Kush strains.

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Q4:

My girlfriend and I met in North Carolina over two and a half years ago and fell in love. I am from the United Kingdom and was travelling when we met, but we decided we wanted to start a long-distance relationship when it came to time for me to go home.

Things were great during the first year, but we have been struggling in the relationship recently. We argue a lot — she says I am not there for her when she needs me or in the way that she needs me, and I feel pressure a lot of the time from her to be there which stops me from planning to do the things I like to do.

After a recent argument, she told me she was going to join a dating site because she was lonely and wanted to make friends. I said I wasn’t okay with that, but she went ahead and did it anyway. She has met up with one girl three times in the last seven days, once in her home. It makes me insanely jealous and insecure that she is meeting up with girls when I’m in bed or at work, but my girlfriend assures me I need to trust her that she is not interested in anything other than friendship with these girls.

What should I do? I’m not sure that I can continue like this for much longer.

A4:

Jealousy and long distance don’t mix. Generally I don’t believe that sexual relationships that are long distance should be monogamous. At the very least, I would suggest reading the chapter on jealousy from the book The Ethical Slut, which might help you come up with some coping tools. Long chapter short, your jealousy can be used for good things like inspiring you to do some self care, reaching out to your own friends, making art, doing the gym — but if you’re feeling gross at work or in bed, you should pay attention to those feelings as something more. You might not be cut out for this, and that’s okay.

Your girlfriend, like it or not, needs friends. She needs her own friends, separate from the relationship, and so do you. Because you’re physically separate, you can’t monitor her private time nor should you want to. You need to either become secure that no matter what your girlfriend does in her town, that’s her time and body and her choice — or accept that your trust levels can’t go high enough to continue this relationship without causing yourself more stress. I honestly think some people are more monogamous than others, and I think some folks are cut out for long distance and some aren’t. I feel like you need to know that your partner is being faithful, and when you’re apart it only makes it a million times harder to feel secure in yourself and your relationship. Read The Ethical Slut and see if there’s a way to self-manage your jealousy, transform it into something positive. Don’t beat yourself up if it’s not in the cards.

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Q5:

I went overseas for a few months and dated a girl who was def more into it than me. We agreed to end it when I left but she keeps mentioning coming to where I live and even moving her life, and also told me a good while back that she really really likes me still and I just kinda ignored it. I really like her and want to be friends but not like that at all. Can I keep ignoring this (please)? Do I have to be really formal and clear with her? Do you think she’s probably getting the message? Am I a shitty person?

A5:

Give it to her straight, doc. You need to set clear boundaries with her right away so that she is getting the message, and if she continues then she is doing so knowing that she is doing it against your consent. You don’t need to be there for anyone but yourself and I would say that to anyone. Tell her how you would like to know her (as friends) and what would make you uncomfortable. Hopefully she respects your boundaries; if she doesn’t, make even more boundaries. Sanction her until all she can do is like your tweets and then if that’s still creepy, block her. The more time you spend pushing and pulling for a girl tugging on your sleeve, the less time you are spending making meaningful connections with new people. Also she may feel like you’re leading her on! Don’t do that.

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Q6:

I’ve been in long-distance relationship for two years. Friends for four years before that. We’ve never met IRL, but we’re planning on meeting this summer (we live on two different continents).

Here’s the problem: although we were madly in love at first, made promises to get married and have kids one day, etc., I find myself not into it anymore. This is my first real relationship, and I’m terrified of all this commitment at my age when I’ve never even gone on a date. We wouldn’t move in together for at least another year anyway, but she frequently talks about how excited she is to live with me, start our future, all that.

That’s the next problem. She’s definitely more committed and in love than I am, which makes me feel horrible. The whole long-distance relationship thing is getting to me at this point. I want someone I can hold hands and be with, not someone I can’t touch or see for months and months. She’s also almost graduating college, while I’m just getting started. I think we’d be much better friends, but I’m terrified of breaking her heart when she’s so in love with me. Help!

A6:

You might break her heart either way, friend — but it will hurt even more if you wait too long to quit. I wouldn’t give this bold of an argument for a help column without feeling like I have the authority to do so. I don’t know why, but I have escalated relationships that needed to stay on lower levels just because my partner wanted me to, or my friends wanted me to, or society wanted me to. I took that escalator up really, really high once, I got married. A second time. That morning I cried out on the deck while trying to put together my vows. It was hard for me to think that my “cold feet” were telling me something but they totally were. I was only 27 at that time and had already been through a few super serious relationships. It wasn’t always like this. In college I went to sex ed workshops and queer dance parties. I made out with a lot of different kinds of people in a small college town and experienced all the small college town drama and intrigue that goes with it. I also needed a lot of alone time in college. Doesn’t matter what you study, you will do your best work and be the healthiest/happiest if you have plenty of time to yourself. I am in my third year of grad school, single, and not upset about it.

So here’s the funny thing — I actually think that distance might be god for you. I have found recently that flirting online or even just chatting about your day through text with consensual friends is a really low-stakes way to get some of the foundational energy that relationships provide. Intimate online friendships are kind of what get me through my life. However, high-stakes relationships can take away a lot of the college experience, this is meant to be a time of transition… and something tells me you’re ready to experiment. It’s okay to be young and break hearts, just be honest and do it with kindness and maybe you’ll have a friend for life.

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Do YOU need help? Submit your own quick and dirty questions to Autostraddle any time! 

Five Poly People on Navigating Jealousy in Any Type of Relationship

At some point, everyone gets jealous. When it’s because your cat is giving someone more attention than you or your girlfriend is giving some cat more attention than you, the insecurity, anxiety, totally-up-in-your-own-head feelings of jealousy — along with the nausea, or a weird flash of heat, or like the ground is out from under you — are just sometimes part of life.

Some polyamorous claim to just not experience jealousy, but I think for most of us, it’s not that we don’t experience jealousy — it’s just that we’re more experienced in dealing with it. Like any other uncomfortable feeling, you can either examine it and figure out where it comes from and what you want to do about that, or you can ignore and repress it and wait for it to come out sideways or blow up in your face.

Here are five people from Autostraddle’s Poly Pocket series on where jealousy comes from and how they handle it.

Mina, 32, American South

Mina, a multiracial queer woman, says that what’s worked for her is questioning ideas of what relationships look like in theory versus practice, and what she wants them to look like for her specifically. Not deconstructing assumptions, in her experience, can lead to jealousy:

“I think jealousy — at least as I’ve seen it among my poly friends — often stems from an unwillingness to interrogate one’s own assumptions about oneself and one’s partner(s). I do NOT think that everything can be resolved by communication, but sometimes it sure does help clear the air.”

Instead, her approach involves thinking about relationships as deep and unique — and if that’s what relationships look like in your life, it can get a lot easier to see them that way in other people’s lives, too:

“The idea that ‘loving more than one person is possible’ finally started to make sense to me when I realized that I describe more than one person as ‘my best friend.’ For me, ‘best friend’ is more like a level than an exclusive, one-person-only category — I love each of these people deeply, and differently, and I wouldn’t try to prioritize which one of them I love ‘more’ because that isn’t the point of how we care for each other. Happiness is not a competition. And so the idea that I could also, in theory, be in love with more than one person at once… that idea started to make more sense.”

Cecelia, 23, Brooklyn

Cecelia, a mixed-race Asian genderqueer polyamorous bisexual femme, says they don’t experience jealousy because they’re aware of what they can bring to any relationship and know they can’t be everything for any person:

“I actually don’t really get jealous, so that helps. I feel confident that I can bring a really specific and positive energy to a relationship, but I also know that I can never provide one person with everything that they need in a relationship. For example, I’m insecure about how funny I am sometimes. So it makes me happy if my partner has someone who makes them laugh for days, because they deserve to have that energy too. And it relieves the pressure on me to be super funny or whatever. Because I know that if they need a good deep and healing convo, they’ll come to me.”

For them, a fundamental part of their approach is seeing each person’s complexity and multiplicity, and taking joy from all the ways there are to try to feel complete, which means supporting others who want that, too:

“I think we’re taught that being whole means being one easily recognizable thing … I believe that each person contains a bunch of conflicting, intersecting parts, and that different people can make someone feel really vibrant in many beautiful different ways. So if I really like someone, it makes me excited when they have multiple partners who can light up different parts of their mind/body/soul etc.”

Nicole, 20, Philadelphia

Nicole, a Latina queer polyamorous femme, says that she experiences less jealousy outside of serious relationships than inside of them, but that it still sometimes comes up in her dating life, and that empathy helps her through it:

“When people I date mention their past partners, I usually get this random slight pang of jealousy, but it’s not very significant. I try to prevent jealous thoughts by putting myself in the other person’s shoes, and realizing that I would not want them to be jealous nor see the need for them to be if the situation were reversed.”

Seeing love as appreciation, and not as possession, also helps:

“I do not believe that love is something that is limited and can only be shared with one person at a time. I also believe that love is about appreciation and not possession. Someone’s separate relationships should not affect how I feel about them. People have different aspects of themselves, and sometimes, those aspects can only all be satisfied by different people.”

Linh, 22, Bay Area

Linh, a Vietnamese American bisexual grey ace polyamorous woman, experienced a lot of jealousies with her first polyamorous relationship, a long-distance secondary partnership. Discussing her next relationship, she frames the issues for her as less about jealousy and more about comfort:

“Jealousy isn’t really an issue with the two of us so we’ll talk openly about dates and crushes and it’s totally fine. Once in a while I’ll go on a date that, after I tell him how it goes, he’ll tell me it made him uncomfortable and so we’ll talk about why and come up with rules from there. … Basically, if someone feels like something’s fishy or weird, then that person’s feelings have to be first priority and decisions are made accordingly. It’s been working out for us so far because we generally have the same vibes given the same situation.”

We also can’t talk about jealousy without talking about its opposite: compersion. Compersion is when you feel happy that someone with whom you’re in a relationship — however serious or casual — feels happy with someone else. It’s an energizing empathy that can feel as good as jealousy feels bad. Linh describes what it can be like:

“[When one of us dates or crushes on someone new,] it involves a lot of playful teasing and advice-giving! We both get super flustered with new crushes (as most people do!) and I find it super cute to see him in that phase again, and I know he finds it charming when I’m all blushy and crushy too. It adds a new layer of excitement to our relationship. Similar to how your best friend would be super excited to hear you have a crush on the local Starbucks barista.”

Jasmine, 23, Los Angeles

Jasmine, a bisexual polyamorous nonbinary femme xicanx, found that looking at where her jealousy comes from helps her — not because the feeling goes away, but because she can then be honest about it and about what she’s feeling:

“I used to be really jealous, but then I learned that it came from my own insecurities of someone leaving me for someone else because the other person was ‘better.’ With therapy, I’ve gotten WAY less jealous but there are times that jealousy does come up. I’ve been able to do a lot of introspection about where that comes from and why and address it that was rather than expressing it in a way that is unnecessarily harmful.”

Figuring out where the feeling comes from can be a challenge, and so can owning what that feeling is, but you still have to move forward:

I try to be honest and have conversations about what the jealously is directed towards once I figure that out. Like, if I feel jealous about my partner’s relationship, I’ll try to be as honest as I can with my partner and let them know I’m feeling jealous/insecure so they can give me a little more reassurance.

I say ‘try’ because sometimes it’s really hard to admit when you’re jealous and insecure of someone else so it’s sometimes harder than other times to be open and honest about what you’re feeling.”

Monday Roundtable: The Real and Fictional Couples Who Inspired Our Very First Relationship Goals

Whether we saw them on screen or in real life, we took notice of these dynamic couples and their undeniable chemistry and love. They shared something special and showed us what it meant to care for each other and modeled for us what we could have some day. Here are the first couples we shipped and were our first #relationshipgoals.

What’s the first couple that made you feel hashtag relationship goals (irl or fictional)?

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Brittney Griner and Glory Johnson

Alaina, Staff Writer

It started off so beautifully! Remember that episode of “Say Yes to the Dress??” And their adorable team rivalry! And they were black and in love with each other and it was beautiful and I was obsessed. And then it ended…..exactly the way you expect lesbian relationships to end — a mess. I loved watching all of it unfold though.

Carly and Robin

A.E. Osworth, Staff Writer

They’re a queer power couple that clearly loves each other hard yet they don’t meld into each other, thus retaining their own individual personalities and both have bombass careers and are also really pretty on the internet all the time and probably this is a really weird way for them to find out that I admire their relationship this much?

Crosby and Jasmine Braverman, Parenthood

Mey Rude, Trans Editor

I can literally think of two male characters in the history of media that I can relate to. One is Crosby Braverman from the NBC tv show Parenthood. The other is Héctor from Coco, but this isn’t about that. Crosby is a screw up, he makes lots of mistakes, he’s also cool and creative and ambitious. He wants to be impressive and loved, but he also is more than a little afraid of commitment and giving 100%. He’s the black sheep of his family. But he gets himself together for the woman and the children he loves. Crosby and Jasmine are one of the best examples of an interracial couple I’ve seen on television, and as a mixed race twenty-something, it really meant a ton to me to see this kind of love celebrated on TV. I love Jasmine, I love Crosby, I love their kids Jabbar and Aida. I want to have a beautiful family like that one day.

The Laurens

Raquel Breternitz, Staff Writer

This may seem late in life, but the clearest feeling of #relationshipgoals I’ve ever experienced happened during my first year of Design school in college. We were each paired up with a Senior on one of our first projects, ostensibly so they’d teach us the lay of the land. But my Senior Was Lauren D. (redacted for her privacy, AND so she doesn’t google herself and find this and I deeply embarrass myself)—one of the most badass, handsome soft butches I had ever seen in my life. Before I could develop any sort of crush, however, I also met her girlfriend at the time, Lauren G. (Yes, they actually had the same name and were dating, a phenomenon I’ve since observed several times since!) I don’t remember what Lauren G. was studying, but I do remember that she was gorgeous, had the best sense of style of anyone I’d met up until then, and was the frontwoman of a stupidly-cool band. For her part, Lauren D. was one of the funniest and most talented designers in her crew and did a lot of the design work for her girlfriend’s band. Together, they seemed like an unstoppable force of coolness and I dreamed of being even half as cool as they were. They also seemed to clearly love each other, and provided a model of what a healthy, badass, queer female relationship involving two highly individual and creative people could look like, something I’d never seen before and wanted desperately. When they inevitably broke up, I was, embarrassingly, probably an equally-devastated outside third party.

Han/Leia, Star Wars

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

I looked to fictional characters for inspiration and goals all the time in my youth, but I was pretty cynical about fictional relationships, which is something that is definitely attached to my struggles with my sexuality, but we won’t get into all that in a simple roundtable! My totally honest answer is probably basic, and I can’t BELIEVE I’m promoting a straight ship but, uhh, Han/Leia were pretty much the pinnacle of romance to me when I was 12ish. I justify this nowadays by explaining to everyone how they were both badass bisexuals. Also, Han dresses like a lesbian, and everyone knows it! I would be lying to you if I said anyone other than them…I used to scribble ”I love you”/“I know” in my diaries. (A close second, by the way, was Lupin/Tonks…I just love when couples are prepared to die together in the name of a resistance?)

Elizabeth Bennet/Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

No, listen. The thing about Elizabeth Bennet is she wasn’t going to settle. Not for Mr. Collins with his weird potato simperings and not even for Fitzwilliam Darcy who owned half the Derbyshire. And Mr. Darcy wasn’t going to shirk his family and career obligations for something as fleeting and ephemeral as attraction. And they were both jerks about it. Him more so obviously. Okay but then, as they were forced to dance around each other, they started to understand that maybe the other person had been a little right about the things they’d said, even if those things had been said less-than-kindly, and they both had the wisdom to actually make themselves better as individuals because of the self-interrogation they caused in each other. When Darcy approached Elizabeth that second time after giving her as much of the actual world as he could, he promised to be silent on the subject forever if her feelings remained unchanged. He gave up even his own sense of entitlement for her! And of course her feelings had changed because she believed in his ability to learn and grow. She forgave him! I actually don’t even think Pride and Prejudice is the most romantic Jane Austen book — it’s Persuasion, fight me — but after I read it I knew I’d never be happy in a relationship unless I found someone who could sharpen and comfort me in equal measure.

Jenny and Marina :/, The L Word

Erin, Staff Writer

Let me put this into some perspective: The L Word came out the year I realized I was gay. With that discovery, I all of a sudden found myself in a community of seasoned gay women, and whether I was ready or not to engage with it didn’t matter because the proximity of it made it so I had to. I was also being pursued by this equally intense older woman (lol “woman” we were 21 and 19.) Okay? I was mirroring Jenny’s arc in real time, so Jenny and Marina’s season one non-relationship was probably more formative than I care to admit. Your girl was thirsty for some gay content, and I think their intensity and false intimacy spoke to my newness. Also, they were literally the only gay “couple” I knew of on TV besides Bette and Tina. SUE ME.

Spencer and Ashley, South of Nowhere

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

While Willow and Tara was the first queer ship I shipped, I was so young and closeted while I was watching them, it never occured to me to want what they had, not really. I think the first time I saw a couple and thought, “That. That right there, that’s what I want,” was during Season 3, Episode 11 of South of Nowhere, which I had discovered late so it was fall 2009 when I watched it. It’s so small, the moment; it wasn’t the first time they kissed or the first time they fought and made up or the first morning after — though I loved those moments, too. It was a moment where Spencer was at the refrigerator, and Ashley came up behind her, brushed her hair aside and kissed her shoulder. It sent what felt like electricity through my entire body and while I had been bordering on sure since I was 12, and bordering on accepting it since I was 18, finally right there in my first real apartment as a 22 year old adultish human watching a show that aired in the US on TeenNick that I knew for sure that this was exactly what I wanted.

Idgie and Ruth, Fried Green Tomatoes

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer

What can I say? I was young, and my parents, who were pretty controlling about what media their daughters consumed, thought Fried Green Tomatoes was a good one. Thank gods, because the pulsating potential passion between Ruth and Idgie was palpable, even when I was a kid and didn’t understand why I needed them to be there for each other, needed them to end up together, needed them to protect each other. I knew then that one day I’d be someone’s bee charmer.

Alanna and Liam, Song of the Lioness

Laura M, Staff Writer

I think the first couple I ever shipped was Alanna the Lioness and Liam Ironarm, in Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet. Liam taught Alanna martial arts; in turn, Alanna expanded Liam’s worldview on things like magic and femininity. They were two strong people coming together to make each other even stronger. I liked that. They were also really direct with each other, which I found admirable.

There were valid reasons for their breakup, and I doubt I would still find their relationship as inspiring as an adult. As a pre-teen, though, Alanna and Liam were totally where it was at for me!

Mulder and Scully, The X-Files

Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor

I was deeply, deeply invested in the then-unresolved sexual tension between Mulder and Scully, a tension which has been completely ruined by everything that’s happened from the second X-Files movie onwards. These two knuckleheads had such wildly different ways of looking at the world, but loved each other fiercely for it – yet could never figure out how to verbalize it to one another. Did they even have to? They just knew, and 12-year-old Stef was deeply moved. Later, 12-year-old Stef would realize that while she was definitely deeply infatuated with David Duchovny, she wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to be Gillian Anderson or kiss her perfect face.

Anyway, this is probably why I prefer silently pining after people instead of having fulfilling human relationships.

Michelle & Barack Obama

Reneice, Staff Writer

The first couple I ever took notice of in a way that made me hope and pray that one day I’d have something like what they have was the Obamas. I feel like this doesn’t need explaining. They are everything. They are the picture next to the definitions of Black love and power couple in my dictionary. The unwavering support and care they have for each other was the first thing that drew me in. The next was the fact that they never lost the playfulness and enjoyment of each other in their relationship. In the hardest public positions to hold with stress raining on them for 8 years, they still managed to make their love for each other last and hold it at the center of all they did. I’m still amazed.

Cory/Topanga, Boy Meets World

Alexis, Staff Writer

You don’t know how much I love this question and I’m trying to be very calm and not bring up thirteen billion couples. A deep breath. Okay. They were my OTP before I knew what an OTP was. You know how your parents and grandparents have those soap operas that you’ve got to be quiet during or else you’ll get in trouble for making them miss their “stories”? That was Boy Meets World to me. No one could get between me and this show (this is also because I was in love with Topanga). When Topanga turned around in Feeny’s class and told Cory, “Give me your hand.” so she could do some strange magic, I was hooked. When Topanga kissed Cory when his hair was all messed up so he’d know he was loved because of who he was not because of how he looked? Cory making these epic monologues to declare his love to the homie?? WHEN MY GIRL CAME BACK FROM HER AUNT’S HOUSE TO BE WITH CORY AND SHOWED UP IN THE RAIN???? No one screamed louder than me and my sister. WHEN CORY PUT THAT LIPSTICK BACK OVER HIS FACE WHEN SHAWN’S DAD WAS DYING AND TOPANGA WAS LOSING HOPE AND HE HAD TO REMIND HER WHAT KIND OF AMAZING PERSON SHE WAS AND ALWAYS WILL BE? When Cory walked into the apartment and yelled, “I have seen the Promised Land!!!” because Topanga showed him her butt?? This is my all time favorite couple. They learned to communicate and were each other’s family (for real did Topanga have a family? Where are they? I need answers.) They were the strangest couple and would be the lighthouse to the other whenever they forgot who they were or what love they were worthy of. And they also lowkey introduced me to OT3 because Shawn’s love for both of them and their love for him was amazing. I’m doing a rewatch I love these damn kids.

The Babysitter’s Club

Vanessa, Community Editor

I grew up reading The Babysitter’s Club books and they gave me very unrealistic expectations for relationships — but not romantic relationships, friendship relationships. I just figured it was totally normal and entirely possible to have 5-10 best friends and go on wacky road trips and international adventures with them and fight but then make-up and run a small business together and always have delicious snacks. Uh except wait, actually, I thought this was an unrealistic expectation but then I realized I just described Autostraddle, so maybe it’s actually totally doable and The Babysitter’s Club was just preparing me well for my future life endeavors. In any case, the friendship between those wacky babysitters was definitely my very first, and arguably most important, #relationshipgoals.

Roberta/Junior, Now and Then

KaeLyn, Staff Writer

Christina Ricci and Devon Sawa in Now and Then (and to a lesser degree in Casper) were my actual middle school #relationshipgoals and also my first celesbian obsession. I wanted secret kisses outdoors on summer nights. I wanted a bad boy who secretly had a soft heart. I wanted to be the girl who kicked a boy’s ass in basketball and earned their damn-well-deserved-and-shouldn’t-have-had-to-earn-it respect. I’m realizing in this very moment that a lot of my actual relationship choices revolved around these themes, honestly. Secret kisses / summer night kisses: check. Bad bois with a good heart: check. Making respect sexy-as-hell: check. Wow, I think I just learned something about myself.

Jim/Pam, The Office

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

Most TV couples who get extended relationship arcs are heterosexual, so that’s the field I was working with when first sorting out my #relationshipgoals, and most heterosexual couples on TV and in movies pretty much hate each other. Except they don’t call it “hating each other” they call it “men and women are so different lol!” Jim and Pam’s relationship was never gendered, it just was. They were just two humans who found each other hilarious and delightful, who collected private jokes and secret nods and used those gathered gems of interpersonal connection to make it through soul-sucking, garishly-lit days in the office of a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I also loved, specifically, an episode when they were long-distance and all their phone convos that day just fell flat. One would make a joke the other couldn’t hear, or didn’t understand, stuff like that. The episode ends with them leaving each other voicemails simultaneously apologizing for being “off” that day and not connecting, and those messages contain the unspoken and so important element of: an off day is not the beginning of a decline, it’s just a down, and there’ll be another up. And there were! (honorable mention: Coach Taylor and Tami Taylor)

Levin and Kitty, Anna Karenina

Abeni, Staff Writer

OK, so this is so dumb and nerdy, but Anna Karenina is my favorite book? I don’t even know why. I just love getting lost in the 1,000 pages of often-incomprehensible story. It made no sense when I first read it at like age 14, and it still makes not that much sense now. Anyway, for some reason I always loved Levin in this novel. Looking back, Levin and Kitty’s romance is pretty problematic and silly — he’s twice her age and she’s a pretty one-dimensional character who only really seems to care about being a wife and mother? But honestly though there are like 40 main characters in this novel, and Levin is the only halfway-decent dude of the bunch. He works hard, attempts as best he can to actually apply his philosophical and political beliefs into his actual life, mostly respects his peasant workers as actual human beings unlike all of the other aristocrats in the book, and — most importantly — seems to really care about and want to do right by Kitty. All the other dudes are cheating and being assholes consistently and don’t give a shit about it, but Levin actually wants to be a good dude and treat his wife well.

Y’All Need Help #20: Is This Too Many Metaphors?

Look what I got in the mail!! Look!

Dear Laneia,

I submitted a question to Autostraddle last year, which you replied to in Y’All Need Help #10 Q1. I just wanted to say thank you so much for your advice, for dispensing your words of wisdom, and just being so kind. It really meant a lot. I took screenshots of your reply and just kept them as a reminder that things will get better during an emotionally trying period and it was just so inspiring. Your framing the issue and getting me to look at the issue from a different perspective I hadn’t thought of previously helped a great deal in me getting over my crush eventually. And you were just so kind! Thank you!

Love,
No longer crushing on a straight girl

I AM SO HAPPY FOR YOU !!! Thank you for this update. If y’all ever want to send an update, please do. This is the best thing that happened to me all week! Now on with the show.

Q:

I live with my parents, and my mom and I are very close. She was pretty upset when I first came out and weird about my first girlfriend (understandably tho, my first gf sucked), but she’s come to accept it. Now I’m in a long distance relationship with a woman I really love, and my mom’s met and liked her. She’s told me a couple times how glad she is I have a “friend” like her. My problem is, she sometimes says things that come off as bitter? For example I told her a story about how my partner spilled a drink on herself at work, and my mom responded with “too bad, so sad,” a phrase I have never heard come out of her mouth. My mom is usually very compassionate, so I’m really confused by her behavior. I have approached her about it before and she claims not to know what I’m talking about and reiterates that she likes my partner. Am I being overly sensitive? Or am I right to be hurt by these comments? Should I talk to my mom about it again or just let it go?

A:

I think you should let it go unless she says something out of character again, and then just very plainly ask her if she’s having a stroke. JK BUT NOT REALLY that’s 100% what I would say to my mother.

A few years ago, a very generous and brilliant executive-level businesswoman offered to help Riese and me learn how to be better at this job because we were very bad at it and she could tell that all the way from the other side of her computer. She taught us a lot, so much, but the technique I come back to almost daily is this idea of the Five Positions, and I tell everyone about it all the time and it’s not annoying about me at all. I can’t explain the whole thing to you because of this cold medicine I’m on but basically and in an extremely tight nutshell, position 5ing someone (that’s what we call it for short) is a thought exercise where you acknowledge that your initial take on someone’s upsetting behavior is probably the most drastic take and that it’s likely inaccurate and colored by your own fears and insecurities. Then you force yourself to assume good faith — the best faith, really, like the Megatron of Assuming Good Faith — and come up with a take that’s on the complete opposite side of this spectrum from your initial take (your initial take was position 1, this Megatron Good Faith Assumption take is position 5, imagine a pendulum ok, a Take Pendulum. Is this too many metaphors?). Position 5 is also most likely inaccurate and drastic, but the goal is to get you far away from your first take and out of your own head a little. The ultimate goal is to get to position 3, which is the desired middle ground of your Take Pendulum’s journey across the spectrum and it is the most chill. Position 3 is informed a little by position 1 and a little by position 5 and it’s where your Take Pendulum should come to rest, having seen the most upsetting take and the most generous take.

Ok so your initial take (position 1) is that maybe your mom secretly hates your girlfriend, hates that you’re gay, and is passive-aggressively making these out-of-character comments to blow of steam. If we position 5 your mom, we could imagine that maybe she thought “too bad, so sad” would be a funny thing to say and would lighten your mood? You know your mom better than I do so you’ll have to position 5 her more accurately for yourself. What’s probably happening is that your mom is mostly fine with you being gay and does think this your girlfriend is a great gal, but doesn’t know what to say when you talk about her because she’s tripping on the fact that your significant other is a woman and not a dude. Maybe, since your girlfriend is long-distance, your mom isn’t forced to confront your queerness every day, so she doesn’t, and then when she does, she stumbles because she hasn’t had enough practice.

All of which is to say (!!!), to test our [cold-medicine-informed] position 3 theory, maybe try talking about gay stuff more often for no real reason and without it having anything to do with people you love, so if she reacts weirdly it won’t carry as much weight. Talk about the out Olympians or like, Elton John. Moms love Elton John. Force her to confront the reality of your big gay world. Then, when you do talk about your girlfriend again, if she says something out of character and seemingly a lil’ rude, just stop her right there and say, “I’m sorry wait, why would you say that? That’s a weird thing to say.” or “That’s a weird thing for you to say, I thought you’d say [something better]. What’s going on?”

And that, friends, is the story of how position 5ing people can lower your blood pressure, water your crops, and clear your head so you can come up with reasonable solutions to your interpersonal problems. Amen please tip your waiter.

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Q:

I broke up with my ex-girlfriend six months ago, after being unhappy in the relationship for a while and knowing that splitting was the right move. It was initially amicable, but after going back and forth about whether we could get back together over a period of several months, she told me I was manipulative, cruel, and a user, and that I didn’t care about her. I felt blindsided and so hurt by this, and started questioning everything I had done in our relationship. We cut off contact after that, and she immediately started seeing someone. Now, I’m truly obsessive about all the things she said to me in that last conversation, and the fact that she has moved on, and thinking about her feels like opening a wound. I still love her even though I know that I felt breaking up was the right decision. Why can’t I move on? What can I do to help this feel more resolved for myself?

A:

You can’t move on because her words are making you second-guess what you thought you knew about who you are and what the relationship was. A of all, this is a very normal reaction to the situation, so don’t let yourself get caught up in the tangle of hating yourself for having a negative/confused feeling about yourself etc infinity — just don’t. You trusted this woman at some point and now she’s said things about your and her time with you and it makes sense to give it some weight. Do that! Give it weight. Accept that you made her feel manipulated, used, and uncared for. Apologize sincerely — either in a journal entry or to her, but probably just in a journal entry — and vow to be better in the future, then forgive yourself. It’s all you can do now.

Being in an unhappy relationship that needs to end can make even the best people turn into worse versions of themselves. IT HAPPENS. It happens it happens. Sometimes we hurt people without meaning to. Sometimes we even mean to! These aren’t proud moments and we don’t want to repeat them, and the only way to do that is to keep living and moving on and getting further away from them, every single day. Every day you live and breathe and you’re not in a unhappy relationship with someone who feels bad around you (for whatever reason, whether that’s on you or her, or both of you!), you’re doing GREAT.

Put the love you still have for her into yourself. Be proud of yourself for having the capacity to love and see the best in people. You’re not a robot, you have a heart and you can do great things with it! Go do them! Do a great thing with your heart right now and tell yourself you did the best you could with what you had at that time — you both did — and now that time has passed. Find the things you learned from that relationship and be proud of them, take them with you into all your future relationships. You’re a good person, she’s a good person, you weren’t good together.

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Q:

My family is big on gifts and surprises, and makes minor events into gift-giving occasions. My style has always been very laid-back—minimal jewelry, jeans, hoodies, sneakers, no make-up, no frills, no lace. I’m in my thirties and have been wearing men’s clothes since middle school.

However, every gift I’ve received since coming out (about 2 years) looks like it was meant for someone else-dresses, make-up, jewelry, lacy tops, and bedazzled nonsense. Maybe I’m over-reacting, but it feels very coincidental that I have dressed a certain way since childhood and everyone was fine with it, and then I came out and suddenly everyone (especially my mother) wants to gift me overly feminine clothes and jewelry. She didn’t do this before I came out.

How do I handle this without being a total bitch? I know I should be excited someone is giving me a present. How do I convey that I’m thankful for gifts, but they are throwing their money away buying me things that I’ll never use? I’ve never attempted to return anything because the process seems so complicated and rude to me (having to ask the gift giver where they bought it/needing a receipt/finding how much they paid/etc).

And how do I even begin to convey (to my mother, especially) that these gifts really hurt my feelings because it feels like she’s buying for the daughter she wants and not the daughter she has?

A:

You know what? I think it might be time to be a bitch. A lowkey bitch who asserts her actuality until everyone else is either on board or they stop buying you gifts altogether, their choice. Also real quick, now’s a good time for all of us to put this in our mini marquee lightboxes: asserting your actuality doesn’t make you a bitch at all! The patriarchy says you’re a bitch because you want to be seen. You’re not. You’re actualized. Also that will not fit in a mini marquee lightbox so maybe use a letter board.

It could be that these people in your family are buying gifts for the someone they wish you were, absolutely. It could also be that, since you’ve come out, they feel like they’ve lost track of the north and south poles of who you are, and how they fit into your life. So their compass is completely haywire and the easiest thing to buy for you, in this gift-giving bonanza they call life, is whatever Kohl’s has decided to put on those tables in the middle of their aisles. Most likely it’s a little bit of both, but either way there’s a real disconnect between you and your family, and it’s worth traipsing it out into the open so everyone has a chance to look directly at it!

Before we get any deeper into this very lengthy reply I’m putting together here, I want to step up onto this soapbox and say that organized/cyclical gift-giving can quickly become an exercise in just performing mindless tasks, where the value of and the connection to the gift itself means very little to the giver and the givee, bless our hearts, because people are more focused on the fact that a gift was given, full stop. It’s gross, I hate it, so do you, so do we all. And yet here we are in this consumerist society and we are MAKING DO, friend. We are making do! The dreamers and the makers and the minimalists and the people just trying to fucking not fill their house with useless garbage, WE ARE MAKING DO. Ugh I love us for it; we’re doing our best.

So! Try all or some of these things, maybe:

• Make an Amazon wish list and just copy/paste that motherfucker to everyone you know.

• Have real, no-walls conversations with your mother about some things you really do want and need. Bring her into your actual life and show her the poles. Here’s why you like this kind of shirt, here’s why you could really use a membership to the Lightbulb of the Month club, here’s how you really feel about LACE.

• In the gift-giving off-season (which is probably now?), be blunt! “If you’re ever going to spend money on me, I hope you know what I really need is [this very specific brand and cut of jeans]!!!”

• When receiving a useless disconnected gift, respond in kind: a cursory smile, maybe a stiff one-armed hug — the one that’s front-to-front but you have something in one hand and the hugging arm becomes one enormous animatronic elbow + hand. You know what I’m talking about.

Context is everything everything everything, so there will definitely be times when asserting yourself is unnecessary — NOT because the assertion itself is unimportant, but because your energy is a finite precious thing that deserves to be rationed, and some people are beyond helping. That’s fine. Donate the things you can’t return. Return the things you can. Unless someone bedazzled it themselves or like, baked it in a kiln, it probably meant just as much to them as it does to you (very little) and they won’t even notice that you’re not wearing that necklace or carrying that hot pink purse, ever.

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Y’All Need Help is a biweekly advice column in which I pluck out a couple of questions from the You Need Help inbox and answer them right here, round-up style, quick and dirty! (Except sometimes it’s not quick, but that’s my prerogative, OK?) You can chime in with your own advice in the comments and submit your own quick and dirty questions any time.

Monday Roundtable: How We Knew We Were In Love

People fall in love for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s a specific, magical moment where everything just seems to come together. Sometimes it’s a simple thing someone says to us or does for us. Maybe it’s a personality quirk or character trait or the way they smiled at us in just the right sunlight at just the right time. Here’s when we knew deep in our bones we were goners.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

I’ve written and rewritten this answer about twenty times because the truth is I can’t remember the thing Stacy did to make me fall in love with her. I actually don’t think it was a thing. There was no arrow, no anvil, no epiphany. It was who she was and it was the way we fit together. When I was with her, my body and my brain and my spirit buzzed with energy. Laughing was easy, talking was easy, sex was easy, just being together in the same space doing nothing was easy. The first time I told her I loved her we were fighting and the reason I blurted it out right then was because I wouldn’t have been fighting with her if I didn’t love her. My entire life up until then had been bolting the second things got tough.

Maybe that’s the real answer. Love comes naturally to me. Loving Stacy, falling in love with Stacy, was effortless. I can’t tell you what she did to make me love her, but I can tell you what she did to make me stay: She learned how to fight with me. She worked on herself while I worked on myself and then we worked on ourselves as a couple so we could learn to fight with each other, not against each other. No matter what I’m battling, Stacy is the one I want fighting beside me. She knows how to comfort me and how to empower me; she knows when to push and when to just hold on. And when we have inevitable conflicts she knows how to position herself so we’re on the same team, working to make our relationship better instead of trying to score points off each other. When we go through scary, stressful things we don’t lash out; we lean in and say over and over how grateful we are to be going through it together.

That did not come naturally. Stacy worked on it with me deliberately, relentlessly.

I walk to meet Stacy at the train when she’s coming home from work most days, my heart skipping like a puppy. Sometimes I wake up in the night and am so overwhelmed with affection for her steady breathing beside me I want to jump up and tackle her. I love her. I just love her. And I know I’ll be with her for the rest of my life because the things that are easy have just gotten easier, and she’s proven over and over and over again that she’s willing to work on the things that are hard.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I fell in love with Brandi, but she is such a good listener that at some point I realized she knows me better than anyone else simply because she puts the basic effort into asking me how I feel and then really listening. I am terrible at talking about my feelings, but Brandi makes me feel comfortable doing so. She is incredibly intuitive, making me feel like sometimes I don’t even need to say something out loud. She just gets me, you know? We have little telepathic moments all the time that make me feel incredibly close to her. I’ve never had that with anyone else.

Valerie Anne, Staff Writer

I fell in love for the first (and thus far, only) time when I was 21. It was with a girl I worked with at Barnes & Noble in Union Square and I remember the first time we met even though it was so inconsequential because it is seared forever on my soul. There was something about her, something that made a little voice inside me scream to keep the conversation going where my shy self would otherwise have wanted out, something that made me want to be near her longer, to get her to talk more, about anything, everything. I realized I was in love the first time she was going to come over my place. (My senior dorm, very romantic.)

The night before I spent hours cleaning and pacing and worrying about what I would wear and where we would sit and where we would order pizza from. I tried to sleep but my body was vibrating with energy and I couldn’t even lie still. I had never felt anything like it, and it got to the point where I Googled, “What does being in love feel like?” (#nerd) Well, friends, Google told me that being in love could result in physical feelings of euphoria, increased energy, sleeplessness, etc. And so science proved what I suspected: I was in love with this girl. (I have no photo of us because while she eventually said she loved me too, we never even ended up dating. It was complicated, and a longer story for another time. Ultimately I was glad to have known her, even if just to finally understand what all those sad songs were about.)

Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

I knew I would fall in love with Mila the first morning we woke up together, when I made her coffee with cinnamon and vanilla almond milk and we made up every excuse in the book to get her ride to pick her up just a little bit later. I knew I loved her shortly thereafter when we talked about books, both realized we were referencing The Master and Margarita and kissed excitedly. I didn’t tell her for months, because that was a weird thing to tell somebody you’d just met, I didn’t want to freak her out – but there were false starts. I’ve been working with my therapist lately about how I grew up viewing love as transactional, something you didn’t deserve unless you did x, y and z, and I was terrified that if I told her too soon, the whole thing would disappear. I almost told her once, and she maybe blurted it out once when we were wasted, but it didn’t count.

One night while we were walking back to her apartment, I tripped on the sidewalk and fell, ripping my knee open. She rushed me inside and cleaned, disinfected and bandaged my bloody wound like I was the most precious thing in the world. I was mostly embarrassed and sheepishly told her she didn’t have to do all that, when she looked me dead in the eye and told me, “Well, I love you.” I believed her.

We broke up a few months later and were positively awful to one another for about a year. We didn’t speak to each other for a whole other year; that’s how much time I needed to heal. Sometimes I don’t know if I believe I’ll ever feel that way about another person ever again, or even close. I will say that we miraculously came out of it very, very close friends who still love each other, and if she’s still talking to me now she’s stuck with me for life. Love’s definitely a lie, except for sometimes when it isn’t.

Carolyn Yates, NSFW Editor and Literary Editor

Sometimes you meet exactly the right person at exactly the right time.

We met; and then we met again; and then we fucked for hours in a bathroom, and then in her car, and then in her bed. Everything about it felt impossible — impossibly good, impossibly bright, impossibly logistically complicated, since we lived in different countries.

I knew we would get married a few weeks later, when we were standing on an escalator going up and she was standing a few steps ahead, looking to back at me, with the sun glowing white and her eyes shining blue and this one smile she has playing across her lips, which was also the moment I thought, very clearly, oh fuck.

I live in Los Angeles now, but I can only handle so much woo. I don’t think I knew in that moment that I could see how hard we would fight to be together, and after that, how we would fight. I don’t believe that love is a lie even though I try to and I don’t believe that you only get one great love and I don’t believe in soul mates and I don’t believe that love doesn’t mean anything just because it gets messy, and I don’t want it to be over, either, even though it probably is. But every single day we had together was a gift, and if in those early moments I could have seen how much the end would burn I still would have chosen every second of that light.

Raquel, Staff Writer

It’s hard to ever say you know when; I fall hard, I always have, and falling out of love has always been a strange rejiggering of my worldview, in which the thing that I just had was not the End-All-Be-All. After a good while of that, you tend to harden. To keep yourself from giving in, to remind yourself, when things are good, that this is ephemeral, this will end, and it will probably end in a way that will hurt you and make you realize that much of what you believed was untrue. That when you love someone, you can give them everything they need from you. That when someone loves you, they will be faithful. That love is something that falls upon you like a mantle, and attaches itself to you like it’s always been meant to be.

But I did fall in love again, this time slowly. Really carefully. Through healing parts of myself with work, therapy, and self-reflection, and letting other parts of myself be healed through small kindnesses and nudges.

When we first started dating my namoradx would tell me they looked forward to our first fight, and I’d freak out. Why would you ever want to fight? If you’re in love, doesn’t it mean you don’t fight, ever? That you’re attached at the hips, the minds, the inclinations, the souls?

Well, no. I’ve learned to love in a way that means listening to myself as much as I listen to the person I love, that love comes and goes and grows and shrinks, sometimes permanently, but sometimes not. That you can never hold someone — or yourself — up with only love to stand on. That it’s as much about building something together and choosing to nourish it as it is about a thunderclap.

Not that we’re without thunderclaps. When I first saw their picture, I fell in love with their mouth—with the perfect bow of their top lip, with the tiny sneer that poked at the corner of it. Our first kiss felt inevitable, a magnetic draw we wouldn’t resist, up against a pool table during a perfect night in a neon-washed cowboy bar. The first time we slept together it felt like we fit, and we knew one another, our bodies and our wants, already. I woke up in the morning and knew I had to find ways to keep them around. We spent the whole day together, doing nothing, and I knew this was good. Love is also full of knowing and unknowing—the former which only makes you love someone more, deeper it goes; the latter which surprises you and lets you know you still have more to learn. To hold in the softest part of your palm.

There have been many moments in which I’ve known I love them, but one that stands out to me the most is when they stood up to the Texas Legislature, not for the first time, to speak up for the queer and trans youth of Texas that they work for. Their patience, as they waited for hours to speak. Their strength, as they heard hate and ignorance spewed from ugly mouths and made sure the kids still knew they were loved and wanted. Their fire, as they spoke in their defense and spoke truth to power. Their beautiful, sweet, exhausted face as they left, and their soft head that I held in my arms that night, wanting to imbue it with all the love I could generate in my body. That’s when I knew that I loved them, yes, had been loving them, and will still love them even if we don’t remain together, because they are one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever had the pleasure of being near.

Mey, Trans Editor

I met my girlfriend Shelby at a wedding, which is already super romantic and basically a Hallmark movie. I guess technically I had met her a few days before at the Bridal Luncheon, but the day of the wedding was when we really clicked. I was the officiant and she was a bridesmaid wearing this gorgeous purple dress and she had her hair all done and she just looked like she was from a Disney movie. At the reception we both got drunk and made out on the dancefloor and then on a table where we spilled a drink on one of the brides. But at that point, it was just physical. For the the final piece of the reception, we all lined up across from each other holding sparklers while the brides ran through and it was really beautiful. When that was done, I licked my fingers, turned to the person next to me and said, “watch this, I’m a fire sign, so fire can’t hurt me.” Then I put my fingers on the metal sparkler, failing very badly at trying to put it out. As I ran towards the bathroom to run my fingers under the faucet, I saw someone else doing the same thing. It was Shelby, with her big, beautiful, olive eyes and her always-puckered-lips and her fingers freshly burned trying put her sparkler out. We were perfect for each other. That was when I knew I wanted to keep making out with her every day.

A month later after dozens of texts about how much we liked each other and lots of kisses and hookups, I texted her asking, “so, do you want to have a label for our relationship?” She replied with “do you like ‘girlfriends’ or something else?” She completely fell for the trap I set and I texted back “are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” to which she confusedly replied, “wait, is that not what you were asking?” But I’m a bottom and a sub, so I don’t ask questions like that. I make the girls I like ask me instead. A few days later we said “I love you” to each other for the first time.

After that, things got better every day. She comforts me and sings for me. One time she sang “Rainbow” by Kesha and it was perfect. She lays with her head in my lap while I scratch her scalp. She loves my cooking. She does things in bed with me no one else has ever done. She calls me a cowgirl. Really, Shelby is amazing and I love her more every day. Even when she spent three months in Japan recently she was still the perfect girlfriend because it meant that I had someone to text with while I stay up until 3am every night. Shelby’s kind of a Dirtbag, but not really, she’s more of a Dustbag. Like, she’s ridiculous and loud and great at a party, and she looks like that cool lesbian who stole your older brother’s bike and her daddy’s cowboy hat and scares bullies and shoplifts candy to give to kids at the lgbt center.

I love Shelby. I love the way she watches TV and the way she dances and the way her butt looks in a skirt and especially her laugh and the way she makes me feel safe and they way she chews her food and, gosh, I love the way she looks and acts when she dresses up like me. I love her love of horror movies and anime and the way she listens while I talk about outsider music for hours. I love that she’s always up for having fun and making me laugh and laughing at my jokes. I love that she’s excited to get all dolled up with me and look fancy. I love the way she looks when she sees a capybara. I love the way she rolls her eyes. But most of all, I love the way she tries to put out sparklers with her fingers.

Vanessa, Community Editor

I don’t feel like there was a huge auspicious moment when I fell in love with Alley but rather a million small moments that we’ve woven together to form the life we share now, the life that brings me more joy and comfort than I ever knew was possible to have with another human being. I find this kind of falling in love extremely romantic, and I feel excited about the never ending opportunities we have to continue to fall in love for the rest of our lives. If you were to force me to pick a specific moment, though, I’d have to say that when she accompanied me to the women’s writing group I attended every month when I lived in Southern Oregon, filled with lesbians in their seventies who have lived on the land for decades, and read vulnerable poetry to that rapt audience of self-proclaimed land dykes, well… I knew I was in trouble then. I was right.

Reneice, Staff Writer

I didn’t want to fall in love with Tara. We met when I was still in the place that I knew the exact date and time that someone I thought I could love forever shattered that dream and thought about that day not as much as the month before, but still too often. We met when I’d sworn off loving, or liking, or doing anything but casually hooking up with a few people on a regular schedule to ward off loneliness. We met when the only people I wanted to meet were people I knew there wouldn’t be anything real with so it didn’t feel wrong to engage them cause we knew what we were doing and why. We met at the worst possible time.

At any rate, we met. Carly and Robin put out a call for extras for a pilot they were shooting, and there, on a set staged as a queer bar we met and pretended to talk to each other and laugh at each others jokes for a few hours. She was adorable and awkward and stunning and the way I felt when she looked at me terrified me. I left and tried not to think of her. Someone else gave me a reason not to and I latched onto that and moved forward with my crusade of loneliness. Two months later we met again. I wasn’t so angry or jaded and had no doomsday date floating in the back of my mind. She was still just as adorable and sweetly awkward. She still made me feel things i didn’t expect and couldn’t explain when she looked at me, but it wasn’t so scary this time. It was inviting. We went on our first date the next week.We drank local beer and played a very heated game of UNO at my favorite bar then watched Suicide Kale in honor of Robin and Carly bringing us together for an amazing first date.

We went on more dates. We said were scared of how we felt for one another because we weren’t sure if we were ready for it. We found out we’re both runners. We chose not to run. We realized we’d rather be scared and figuring it out together than safe and apart. I never stopped swooning when she looked at me. I never stopped missing her when she was gone. I woke up one morning after we’d dropped our “no sleepovers” boundary about six months into our rollercoaster courtship and felt safer and warmer than I had in years and realized we’d fallen asleep in each others arms. I’d slept the entire night with my head on her chest, her hand on my back, our hearts dancing with each other all night long. This was NOT a thing I did.

Any former version of me would’ve panicked but I knew in that moment it was a thing I did want to do. I wanted it then, I wanted it the next day, I wanted it forever. With her. It didn’t matter how hard I’d tried to talk myself out of wanting it, love went right ahead and booked me a ticket on its flight anyway. When she woke up and realized how we’d slept she was surprised at first too. Then she looked at me and smiled. I felt weak. Then she kissed me and said “ I feel so safe with you” and my heart filled with light. With warmth. With love. I wanted to say so just then but per usual got in my own way and got scared. I wasn’t sure if I could trust it, or trust myself with her. I waited. I wanted her to say it first. It was excruciating. I’m a Sagittarius and youngest child so if there’s one thing I can be it’s stubborn but a few weeks later I couldn’t take it anymore. I very bravely asked her “What would you do if I said a thing that’s a big thing.” She looked at me like the oldest child she is, completely uninterested in my games and said “What would I do if you said I love you? I’d say I love you too. There. Is that better? I love you Reneice. I do. You can stop being a wimp about it now.” It was perfect. Still is.

KaeLyn, Staff Writer

Falling in love for me has always been accidental and often for the wrong person at the wrong time. It’s hard to pinpoint. Falling out of love feels more clear to me. I know I don’t love an ex anymore when I look at them, at their face, and I don’t find them beautiful. Or, rather, I can fixate on the flaws, the devastatingly normal things about them, a scar on their cheek or a pimple or the way their eyebrows are asymmetrical. But that’s not what this roundtable is about.

I said I loved Waffle way before I knew if I meant it. We had… tumultuous beginnings and the sex was incredible and intense, but the relationship was confusing and rocky. It was in bed, about two months into formally dating and several into hooking up, that I blurted out, “I love you!” I had just ended a long-term relationship and it was something that felt natural in the moment, but immediately terrifying when I realized what I’d said. Everything stopped abruptly and I laid there with my eyes wide for a few seconds. It was so unlike me and Waffle responded in the best way. He said, “I love you, too,” and immediately moved on. It definitely could have killed the vibe, but we both just kind of pretended it was fine and continued. Later when we talked about it, he wasn’t mad that I wasn’t sure if I meant it. He knew I totally freaked myself out.

I guess I don’t know when I first fell in love with Waffle. Our beginnings were tawdry and complex and scary and kind of awful. And it was one of those deals where a friendship love turned quickly into a more-than-friends love and it was also a forbidden love (neither of us was available when we kissed) and there were trust issues and messed up histories and it was just…a lot. I committed to our love when I knew that we had done the work to be healthy as individuals and as a couple and that we were both willing to put hard work into our relationship, which took seven whole years. Even on our wedding day in 2011, that wasn’t the day I felt love most intensely for Waffle.

That day was the day Remi was born. It’s almost cliche, but I have never in my life felt more connected to another person. I’ve never been more vulnerable, more open and raw, or in more actual physical pain than when I was in labor. Every time I reached for Waffle, he was right there, for over 24 hours. He was right there with me, pouring warm water over my back as I screamed into a towel in the bathtub, catching me when I reached for him, letting me hang off him with all my weight, feeding me ice chips, and holding my hand for every contraction when I’d been laboring for hours and hours and I whispered, “I don’t know if I can do this,” and finally, being right there watching in the mirror with me when our child came into the world. I’ve never felt more in tune with Waffle, more in love with him and with us. You should know that I take pride in my pain tolerance and that I hate asking for help. You should know that I’m usually the one who takes the lead in stressful situations and the chill one when things get intense. I’ve never trusted that someone would be there if I allowed myself to be totally exposed.

I don’t believe in one true love. I don’t believe love is forever. I’m still that commitment-phobe girl who blurted something awkward out in bed and took it back as soon as possible. But I do believe that Waffle and I can get through almost anything because we have such a strong foundation—one that we built together after starting with a shaky, broken, falling apart one—and that’s why I know I’m in love, every day.

Laneia, Executive Editor

I was really honestly just hoping to find friends in my area and Megan’s dating profile was really sweet and she seemed like the kind of girl you’d want in your contacts. There was a line in her profile saying that she’d give you the last cookie, and just thinking about that now is making me cry because SHE WOULD. She has! At that time though, I thought it was simply a cute way to signal that she saw herself as selfless, and I needed a person like that. Sometime before we’d gone our first date, she texted “Hey, are eggplants a nightshade?” and I was like wtf is a nightshade and had to google it. I thought it was cool that she’d wondered a thing in a grocery store and thought I’d have the answer. That’s what I wanted! A queer woman who’d casually ask me about vegetables in the afternoon. And then there was the time I had to reschedule that first date, which I’d stupidly planned for Valentine’s Day like some kind of asshole in a movie because I’d forgotten that “next Monday” was February 14. So I texted her “I’m sorry, can we move our brunch to Friday? I didn’t realize Monday was Valentine’s Day!” and she replied, “I guess I’ll have to find someone else to give this enormous teddy bear and chocolates to,” which might not seem super cute to YOU, reader, but to me it was confident and familiar and breezy and perfect. For all she knew I could’ve taken that seriously! But she was just being herself.

So I was all geared up to be this cute girl’s friend and maybe we’d do chill things together and she’d text me with questions and who knows maybe one day, eventually, we’d think about dating? That was the deal as far as I was concerned. When I was sitting on the bench outside the brunch place and she walked up — tall and lanky, bad posture, wearing jeans with the exact perfect wash that’s my favorite, hands shoved down into her pockets, blue eyes totally unable to meet mine for even a second — and came in for a hug, it was like pushing off at the very top of a very high, very long water slide. If she hadn’t been so cute and so entirely my type since jr. high, I probably would’ve been fine.

I don’t remember the first time we said ‘I love you’ or the minute when I finally knew it’d be safe to marry her, but I’ll never forget the nightshades or the cookie or the way she looked walking toward me that morning. Those memories come back and pin themselves to every new time she asks for help, and every time she does something for me, and every time she’s hot, all of which happens a lot.

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

When I met Sarah, my heart was broken and locked up tight, like “love is a lie” tight, like “i don’t trust myself to know my ass from my elbow from a person who could win me over and spit me back out like I was nothing” tight. Plus I hadn’t been truly single since before iPhones were invented, let alone apps, let alone Tinder — so Tinder and its customs were very strange to me. I don’t remember swiping right on Sarah — I know it happened when I was in LA for the week, visiting from Michigan, where I’d unwisely bought a house with my ex that took me a year to unload — but she remembers. Even her first message, “This is the most important thing to ever happen to me,” made me laugh. She was too young, absolutely entirely too young, but also in one of her pics she was dressed up for Halloween as the “PC Police,” so how could I resist. We had friends in common. She was so fucking cute!

The first time we talked on the phone I laughed so much my face hurt. When I told her I didn’t really like college that much, she yelled I HAVE SO MUCH SCHOOL SPIRIT and collapsed on her bed and I thought “I need more of this.” The first time she came to visit, she made me watch The Notebook and said it was responsible for her formative understanding of romance and love and honestly I love how bananas that is, and that she cried during it.

I fell for Sarah because she’s as earnest and enthusiastic and outgoing as I am cynical and grumpy and introverted. Because she’s brilliant and ambitious and driven and so so funny. I love her brain. We’re both invested in the same issues, but are tackling them from entirely different fields, and I love getting her perspective on the things that matter to us both. There’s a shared vocabulary I didn’t know I needed in a partner but it turns out that I do. I fell for Sarah cause when somebody took our seats at the Tegan & Sara concert, she took action immediately and wasn’t cowed into submission by the fact that the concert had already started and what if strangers look at me and hate me what then!! I fell for her because she sees my work as important, not inconvenient. I love all her stories about her weirdo childhood and thinking about them when I look at her face now, at the person she’s become. I love how passionate she is about her work, and how her face scrunches up when she laughs and I love her self-deprecation and how sometimes she’s so excited about something that she literally leaps in the air. I love how we take turns helping each other through shit.

It’s almost been a year and my stomach still does backflips when she walks into the room with her eyes wide like she’s just happy to be here, on this planet. ‘Cause she makes me feel that way too.

Yvonne, Senior Editor

Gloria and I have been together for over 7 years now so it’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly when I fell in love with her; I feel like being in love with her has always been true. We’ve changed so much over the years but she’s always been my best friend. I do know for a fact that I’ve fallen deeper in love with her each year in so many beautiful ways. It’s like in yoga when you make a correction or deepen your posture, you inhale and then exhale to deepen your twist or move a millimeter more and that one subtle change makes all the difference. I feel like each year I spend with Gloria is like that; I discover new things about her, however small and slight they are, and my love for her is renewed and feels so right.

When I first met her, she swore a lot and was never afraid to speak her mind or talk loudly in public about vaginas or menstrual blood or pubic hair. I was the complete opposite and I was terrified of her boldness and loudness but also attracted to it. Over the years, she has helped me become better at describing my jumbled up feelings, asking for what I want, and arguing because she’s a supreme communicator and I learned it all from her. She is so passionate and still speaks her mind, mostly on Instagram stories, about why this or that is fucked up in the world and what we should do about it. Lately, I fall hard for her every time she makes me surprise brunch, or when she dances with the music turned way up in the middle of the day, or when she kisses me goodbye when she leaves for her 6 a.m. shift and I’m still dreaming. I can’t wait to marry her!

Monday Roundtable: The Wildest Things We Did For Love

When you’re utterly head-over-heels for a person, you will do some wild things. Spend money you don’t have, buy lies you absolutely know can’t be true, ignore that little voice in the back of your mind, break your parents’ rules, break the actual law, repercussions be damned. There’s no age limit on throwing yourself against the rocks for a human who makes your heart hammer in your chest, no rhyme or reason to why. Here are some of the wildest things our writers have done in the name of love.

Kayla, Staff Writer: Pretended To Love The Shit Out Of The Television Show Lost, 2012

Okay, look. I have never done any super over-the-top romantic gestures. I consider myself a romantic person, but my gestures are usually simple and small-scale, and food-oriented. I don’t think cooking my girlfriend a surprise pot pie really counts as doing something crazy for love. BUT, back in high school and college, I had a horrible habit of pretending to really deeply enjoy things that the girls I liked were into. Then I dated a girl whose favorite television show was Lost. Honestly, that should have been the first red flag that we would not last. But she was hot, and I was still mostly in the closet, and I probably would have done anything she asked of me…which includes rewatching Lost constantly. We were long-distance, so her idea of a fun time was watching Lost simultaneously while texting each other. I pretended to love Lost as much as she did, going so far as to call it one of my favorite shows of all time. Listen, there are plenty of people (especially fellow tv critics) who do consider Lost their favorite show of all time, but I hard disagree with all of those people. Evangeline Lily is great; Lost is just fine tbh. But I was in love (or at least thought I was), and enduring hours and hours of a show I had already seen and didn’t love the first time around seemed worth it at the time.

Erin, Staff Writer: Snuck Out For A Two-Hour Away, 30-Minute Date, 2004

I was sort of a notorious rule follower when I was younger – not because I liked rules necessarily, but because I had pretty strict parents and found that I never got away with anything – and so when I essentially stole my brother’s car and drove it an hour away across state lines to go see my then-girlfriend for only 30 minutes while my parents thought I was at the movies, that felt like a very big deal. Since then I’ve pulled stunts that are objectively much more wild, like going weeks without working in order to hang out every day with a person I wanted to devour, but that night where I just took off in the car because I needed to feels like my most significant moment given my circumstances. We did what you might imagine two people who only have 30 minutes together might do, and then I drove home at a consistent and solid 90 mph.

Tiara, Staff Writer: Fundraise To Bring Her To My Home Country, 2013

If you’ve been reading Autostraddle in 2013 you would have seen this: I wrote an essay about wanting to bring my American girlfriend over to Malaysia, sharing a culture I’ve had very ambivalent feelings about, fundraising for her ticket over. It was sort of an impulse decision and, me being the sort of person who doesn’t do anything by halves, decided to make a big project out of it. I shared the fundraiser around and got some pretty big names to support it, such as Kate Bornstein and Darren Hayes. We raised enough to get her ticket… and then disaster struck. We had a big argument, she broke up with me before the trip, I cancelled her ticket and gave everyone a refund. I was so humiliated by it that I actually stopped reading Autostraddle for about a year because I felt so ashamed about letting everyone down! Even now I have conniptions about asking for money for anything, even things I’d already done (and thus can legitimately ask money for), because it just reminds me of this trip. I can’t even read that article anymore, and it was my first ever AS piece too.

In retrospect the relationship was already dying and the trip was one of my last-ditch attempts to try and salvage what we had. It was not a very healthy or good relationship, and in some ways the breakup was like dodging a bullet — who knows what would have gone down if we did make the trip. I ended up going on this trip anyway but on my own — though one of my best friends (and ex-boyfriend) actually came up from Australia to visit me, which was very very lovely. I had wanted to introduce my ex-girlfriend to the most important people in my life; she missed out, but I got to make those connections with him and two of my Malaysian best friends, as well as my sister and family that came to visit from the UK, and that helped heal a lot of my pain. It was tough, but also showed me who really cared for me.

Carrie, Staff Writer: Believed That She Had a Brain Tumor, 2006

(She didn’t.)

Close runner up is driving to LAX to pick up my girlfriend at 2:00 AM, which is Los Angeles’ foremost grand gesture. True to form, we got stuck in a horrifying traffic jam (the “put the car in park for half an hour” kind) on the way back. We are still very much in love.

Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor: Donated $50 To A Fundraiser For Cancer I Knew Damn Well She Didn’t Have, 2013

Carrie, did we date the same girl?

Vanessa, Community Editor: Enthusiastically Agreed To Go On A Six Month Road Trip With A Girl I Barely Knew, 2014

I am not a person who likes to say no to Life. When Life beckons at my door and says, “Hey, quit your job in New York and go live on a farm even though you don’t have any experience farming!” I like to say, “Okay!” When Life whispers to me as I lie in my tent on a farm in Southern Oregon, “What if you tried to hike the Pacific Crest Trail?” I whisper back, “Yes, I want to.” So when Life showed up in the form of a pretty girl I barely knew who asked me to join her on a road trip for six months, I dove right in. It seems super crazy now but at the time it felt totally normal – I had left my job and saved up some money and was intending to go on some adventures. This would be an adventure! Why wouldn’t I fly to a state I had never visited to see a girl I had only ever spent five days with in person and accompany her on a six month road trip in her truck? What could possibly go wrong? (Spoiler: Literally everything.)

Molly, Staff Writer: I Have Spent The Last Decade Pretending To Love Sports, 2006-current

“Oh that Molly, she’s tall,” you say.

“I bet she plays basketball,” you say.

It’s true, I am tall, but I don’t play basketball. That shit stresses me out so bad! The plays! The aggression! I kept my distance from sports once I was out of high school, but then I met this long-limbed lovely who happened to play basketball at the University of Montana. All of a sudden I was saying things like, “yeah that post player was really sticking it to them, huh?” without fully knowing what I meant, just that I loved it when she would look at me. I loved it when she would do anything in my direction. I still do. Married her a couple years ago, and she knows about my fake exuberance for all sports except women’s soccer (thighs), but I like to yell at the TV and make her laugh, so it all works out.

Rachel, Managing Editor: (Almost) Moved Out of the Country for College, 2006

Does it count if it’s something I came close to doing? I’m very pragmatic, y’all, I’m sorry. It was senior year of high school and my Best Friend I Was In Love With and Would Have Been My Girlfriend If I Hadn’t Been a Fucking Wimp was going to go to college in Canada (we lived and had grown up together on the east coast of the US) because of course she was, she always did things differently than everyone else and that was one of the things I loved about her. Cool, no problem, I would obviously just also apply to colleges in Canada! That was a fine path for my life to take, why not, no reason. I got into the place we were both considering, got offered enough funding that it would be comparable to the amount of loans I would have to take out for the places that had accepted me in the US; she got in too. My parents, understandably, had some questions: would my credits even transfer, or would my degree be equally recognized back in the US? How would we adjust to me living in another country? Why, exactly, was this place that I knew very little about so much more appealing than the places within five hours of us? Did I really want to immigrate for no real reason before I could even change a tire? Eventually they convinced me, and I stayed relatively close to home for college. She did not. We both came out during university anyway. She still lives in Canada, and I still don’t.

Reneice, Staff Writer: Made Her Chicken Noodle Soup, 2016

Okay, long story short I give too much when I like/love people, ESPECIALLY to the ones who don’t deserve it, even when I know better, and it’s the worst. So I was on round two of a no-contact period with the last girl I fell in love with because she’d said some insanely hurtful things and disrespected and devalued me following months of me doing my best to be understanding and supportive of her. As a result, I set a boundary and asked for distance. A month and change later, she wanted to meet up and in my mind the meeting was basically going to be me saying there was no salvaging anything to allow for a friendship or anything else in the future given her actions.

I was nervous and angry and sad and just wanted the talk to happen and be over with so I could move on. The day we were supposed to meet she texted to say she was sick and asked to push it back. I was partly annoyed because I didn’t want the situation to drag out any further but mostly was still definitely in love with her, despite being severely hurt, and therefore had a hard time not doing something caring. So I spent an hour being angry, assuming she was lying about being sick so she could do something else and disregard me once again, then the next thing I knew I’d decided to make her my chicken noodle soup from scratch so that she could get better, I could feel helpful and close to her, and we could have this fucking talk.

I went to Whole Foods, bought the ingredients, and spent four hours making soup from scratch. This was for a girl I was so rightfully angry with, who I was planning to officially kick her out of my life, and who never would’ve done that for me despite constantly insisting she cared about me as well, cause love. I dropped it on her porch in my favorite ladybug lunchbag and texted saying to feel better and let me know when she was ready to talk. When we finally did talk, we met up at a coffee shop. I ended up agreeing to try being friends despite my conviction to do the opposite because she sincerely seemed to be remorseful and apologized and was really sad about the idea of not being in each other’s lives. So I, an idiot in love but trying not to be, said okay. It wasn’t the right choice and not long after I ended up doing what I should have done on that last coffee date and told her the best thing I could do for myself was not have her in my life any longer. She said she didn’t want it to be forever, I said it had to be. We cried a lot. It sucked for a long time. I don’t love her anymore, and am honestly hoping I won’t fall in love with anyone else for a long time cause I need to spend that energy on loving me.

Raquel, Staff Writer: Surprised her at the airport wearing a suit, 2012

My first girlfriend and I had been dating for barely a few months when she embarked on a Very Long Family Vacation to Paris. We were limerent af, completely overwhelmed with our feelings about each other and our new conviction that surely we were inventing something completely new. As I was saying goodbye to her at the airport, itching with nerves and upcoming anxious loss, she leaned close and whispered to me our first “I Love You.”

Reader, I died.

So naturally, about a month later, I decided to surprise her at the airport. The tricky part: she was landing in Dallas and going to stay with her family there. I live in Austin, about 2 hours away. And I didn’t have a car at the time. After a mad session of weird tweets, I ended up finagling a ride there with a friend of a friend whom I had never met and spent the two-hour drive talking her ear off about how much I missed my girlfriend. It’s a wonder I wasn’t murdered there.

My new “friend” wished me well and dropped me off at the airport and I never saw her again. I took an alternate outfit, my best, gayest baby-gay outfit: a navy blue little boy’s suit, replete with vest and tie, and got dressed in the DFW airport bathroom. I made up a sign that said, I kid you not, “Love Of My Life And Family.” Oof.

Her poor family, a reminder, had no idea this was happening.

Arriving at the airport, I realized that while I knew the day she was arriving, I had no idea what time, or what airline. DFW airport is huge. It is larger than the state of Manhattan. I obviously…did not think this one through.

Two hours and a lot of fervent googling later, I determined the gate I thought was hers…but no airplane arrived. Another hour passed. I started panicking. It was getting late. I texted her sister, asking, for “no reason,” if she knew when the flight was supposed to land. I waited some more. I started texting her, afraid I’d somehow missed her landing and she was already safely back home in her parent’s house. At first, I tried to be coy about it, but eventually, after no response, I texted her “I am AT DFW I came here to surprise you I hope you are safe and okay!!!!” I started looking on Travelocity for hotel rooms I could book for the night. I was this close to booking one when, finally, the gate announced the landing.

Turns out, the flight had been seriously delayed. It was almost 1a.m. and her sweet exhausted family let me come home with them and stay the night. She seemed amused, but mostly confused and slightly irritated at my presence. We fell asleep immediately once we got to their home and didn’t talk to each other much on our drive back to Austin the next day. Welp.

Sarah, Business & Design Director: SEXY GIFTS, 2010

Okay, essentially my girlfriend of three months was going away for Christmas to visit her family in New Zealand, and I wouldn’t be seeing her for at least a month. She also happened to be gone during her birthday, and since I wouldn’t be around for either celebration, I wanted to give her something really special. My tits.

I composed an elaborate sequence of events that I filmed and edited, all with the intention of revealing my “gifts” at the end. First I put on every t-shirt I owned, and then removed them one by one. In post I used the magic of iMovie to overlay cute/fun messages over the blank t-shirts. When I remove the last one you think OH, she’s finally going to show me her tits! BUT NO! With some high-end editing skills, the last t-shirt reveals my boobs–but they are PAINTED AS PRESENTS. Suddenly, a paintbrush appears in my hand, as I begin UN-PAINTING my boobs. Savvy reverse footage/editing my friends. Suddenly, the last brush stroke is removed and there they are in all their glory: my nipples.

I also did other dumb and elaborate things for her, like a striptease/dance to Kylie Minogues song “Obsession”. Mid-dance I threw open my closet door, which was covered in my girlfriend’s pictures–think Helga G. Pataki’s closet in Hey Arnold!.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor: I Went Back To New York City, 2011

My late 20s and early 30s were full of travel flings. I showed up in a place I’d never been before, invariably met someone who wanted to show me a good time in their city, and spent a heady weekend being wowed by the adventure of a new person in a new place and the heightened freedom of acting without emotional consequences. It was reckless and selfish but I had a single backpack and a plane ticket heading one direction and neither of those things were a secret. In January 2011 I met Stacy in trademark travel fling fashion, a weekend of intoxicating company in New York City. Gay bars and all-night diners and sidewalks covered in snow.

The travel fling enchantment always wore off after a couple of emails, a couple of weeks — but I couldn’t get Stacy out of my head. I watched TV she said she liked, read books she recommended, listened to her music. We texted some times, spent some late nights on G-Chat, talked on the phone once or twice. I never returned to my one-off weekends; they were untouchable memories, encased in space and time. Ten months after I met Stacy, I went back to New York City.

I remember everything: the food we ate, the beers we drank, her head on my shoulder in Central Park, the album she put on the record player in her bedroom when she took me back to her house, the smell of her shampoo fresh out of the shower, the concert ticket she pressed into my hand on the subway platform and the way her face hardened when I showed up at the venue that last night, the dinner afterward where I tested the word “relationship.” Korean Fried Chicken. Sapporo. And another. And one more. A blue and orange plaid shirt with a navy ringer-tee underneath. We got in a cab and she gave the driver her home address and then quickly corrected herself. I was going to the airport.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

I laughed. I said, “Man, you don’t know the half of it.”

It was 15 degrees when she got out of the cab with me at LaGuardia. She stared at me a long time, her face half-fury, half-hope. Full consequences. I kissed her. “Are you coming back?” she asked when she pulled away. I was broke as a freelance writer and broken as a person in ways I’d planned to never address. I nodded. I whispered yes. I said it out loud with my full voice. “I’m coming back.”

She didn’t want to believe me, but she did. And it was true. I’d already come back. I’d do it again. She slipped her hand under the cuff of my coat sleeve, caressed my bare wrist. I wondered if she could feel my pulse.

“You could just stay,” she said.

And I said, “One day I will.”

And that was true too.

Yvonne, Senior Editor: Hired A Mariachi Band To Serenade Her, 2012

Valentine’s Day was four days away and I had no idea what to give my girlfriend. At that point, we had been together for about a year and a half and I had just come back from a semester abroad, which made me miss her even more. I was super duper in love and wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I wanted to give her something special; jewelry or flowers weren’t going to cut it.

Then, I got an incredible idea in the middle of the night. What if I got the university’s mariachi band to do a serenata for her in front of the UT tower, the main building on campus? I was in my high school’s mariachi band and knew the ultimate romantic gesture was to play love songs for a beautiful girl.

I pulled out my laptop and found the mariachi director’s email and asked him if this idea was possible on such a short notice. To my freaking surprise, he said yes!

Gloria and I ate lunch together on Tuesdays between classes and it was the perfect time to surprise her. I told my friend about my plan and asked her to meet me at the tower to take photos of the occasion. I dressed up nicely that day and did my hair and makeup. When I met Gloria for lunch, she knew something was up because she asked why I looked so nice — she knew I didn’t dress up for class. She had a test that day and several assignments due so she was in sweatpants and didn’t even brush her hair.

After we ate lunch, I told her I had a surprise for her. I led her to the tower which is the heart of campus and where literally thousands of students walk by in all directions to get to class. Gloria hates surprises so the entire time we were walking there she was like “Oh my god, baby, what are you doing? I look like shit today. No.” When we finally got to the tower, the mariachi were there waiting on the steps. Once she saw them, Gloria was in disbelief. I told her Happy Valentine’s Day and they started singing. Gloria cried, I cried. It was a beautiful moment.