I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself—An Unfiltered Relationship Manual with Candid Insights, Embrace the Chaos of Modern Dating

by Eli Rallo

Partnership—in a friend, a lover—was a safety blanket that protected me from the unruly beast I saw in myself.

she’d rather be single than with someone she wasn’t head over heels for—and

Dating apps are a gamble—some people hate them, some people love them, some people travel all the way to Vegas just to see it all through.

decenter embarrassment from your life. YOU DON’T KNOW HER.

And nobody talks about this, but something working out is frankly more terrifying than something not working out at all.

me. Eli. I talk too much and am a little too loud and tend to be pretty messy. I love musical theater, have a history of disordered eating and anxiety.

Every ending is also a new beginning. Every new beginning is also, in some ways, an ending. Birth comes with death and death comes with birth. Love comes with loss, and loss comes with love. Once we accept that the good never exists without the bad, the bad starts to look less bad.

We spend so much time asking the person being manipulated why they stayed—where their self-respect was, why they didn’t end it. We spend less time asking the manipulator what they were doing to make them stay.

The truth is I trust a little too much, and give too many second chances, but my heart is bigger than the moon, and I’m proud of that.

Honoring your life means recognizing that while the sky’s the limit, we don’t need to reach the sky tomorrow. We can take baby steps. We can move slowly. We

What if a love story was me and a kid, somewhere with a lot of land and sky?