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More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care, and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.
No practical matter is important enough to keep you in the wrong relationship. Holidays can be canceled, weddings can be called off, houses can be sold. Don’t hide your cowardice in practical matters.
If you lose respect for someone, you won’t be able to fall back in love with them.
Sex isn’t a game of power play—it’s a consensual, respectful, joyful, creative, collaborative experience.
There are so many reasons a person might be single at thirty or forty or a hundred and forty and it doesn’t make them ineligible. Everyone has history. Take the time to hear theirs.
Anyone can be fucking fancied. It is a far greater thing to be loved.
The most exciting bit of a relationship is the first three months, when you don’t yet know if that person is yours. A great bit that comes right after that is when you know that person is yours.
Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it. How simultaneously freeing and overwhelming it is to know this. Men aren’t bad, women aren’t good. People are people and we all make, allow, and enable mistakes.
It wasn’t so much the concept of getting older that I found so overwhelming, but rather the transference from what I perceived to be one definite phase of life to another. Yes, my twenties had been rife with anxiety, insecurity, and bad choices, but I only recognized at the exit that there had been a comforting loosey-gooseyness to the whole thing. There was no specific requirement for being a twenty-something—it’s what I found so disorientating about the experience. I never knew where I was meant to be or what I was meant to be doing—it was just as normal to be a twenty-seven-year-old with a
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I had been, by total default, the Youth Representative in every room for all of my adult life. But at thirty, that mantle is taken away from you without permission or any sort of official ceremony. It’s just so obviously not your role anymore—we are no longer the resounding authority on relevance. My childhood is now talked about like a period of history.
Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.
The thing I am nostalgic for, the thing that had me crying on a stranger’s doorstep on Camden Road surrounded by Sainsbury’s bags, is not the life or identity of my twenties. It is the sense of being a time millionaire—having oodles and oodles of options. I will forever mourn the teenage and twenty-something feeling of being a proprietor of endless empty minutes; of having boundless days ahead of me. I think, whatever age I am, I’ll always be searching for stacks more of it.
The older you get, the more baggage you carry, the more honest, open, and vulnerable everyone allows themselves to be.
To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling—no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.
People meet with pain they are not even aware they harbor. There is a reason why those with shared demons or who had similar childhoods or overlapping ancestry often end up together. I think everyone’s deepest emotional fingerprints reach out and touch each other on an unconscious level. This can be good and bad. This can lead to intimacy and connection, and codependency and drama.
One of the biggest challenges you face as you get older as a single person is resisting cynicism. It’s so, so hard not to feel betrayed and let down by love and turn that into nihilism, skepticism, or anger. But cynicism, while funny and self-protecting, is...
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Identifying what the quiet, joyful, but often challenging sensation of long-term love is and identifying what’s just become a pain in the arse is where you have to really sharpen your instincts.
A much-underrated and incredibly simple considering factor when it comes to choosing a partner is how much you love their company.
the most important thing in a relationship is how well you work as a team. It’s a hackneyed notion for a reason: a couple needs to be really, really good friends.
When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.
