28 things I’ve learned

a birthday post

Hello! It’s my birthday, and I’m currently 11 hours into a 13 hour flight to Shanghai. I’ll be traveling for the rest of October, so you’ll get the travelogue version of Bookbear Express. Since I don’t know if I’ll ever spend another birthday 30,000 feet in the air, I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a Substack post about some things I’ve learned in my brief time on earth. This post will likely be unaccompanied by a photo because my wifi is not great.

1. When friends give you feedback, take it. “I wish you were a better listener,” “I wish you asked me more questions,” “I wish you’d kept that secret.” It’ll hurt your pride because you’re thin-skinned, but incorporating their advice will help you in the long run.

2. Be honest with people in your life when they ask you what you think, but don’t expect that they’ll actually take your advice. When they do, be grateful!

3. Some people you expect will change won’t change. Some people you don’t expect to change will change significantly. Give yourself the gift of letting people surprise you.

4. Some friendships that you hope will last forever won’t last forever. Let yourself be sad about that but keep the door open for the future. Life is very long.

5. Most people are way less intimidating than you think they are. If you open up, they’ll open up too. Sometimes when you’re just feeling shy you can come across as closed off or unfriendly. Try extending yourself and see what happens.

6. It’s okay to know you have to make a big change but not feel ready to act on it yet. One day you’ll be ready.

7. Just go to bed when you want to go to bed. Being well-rested gives you the energy and fortitude to tackle the rest of your life. Don’t begrudge yourself that.

8. If something bothers you, communicate it. Request the exact haircut you want. Ask the person loudly listening to music in the plane seat next to you to turn it down. Don’t sit there fuming when you could just open your mouth and fix it in five seconds.

9. Ask for things! You’re scared to ask for things because you’re shy and hate being turned down. The only thing that will help you with that is repetition. Rejection is not always about how you’re personally doing something terribly wrong. A lot of the time it’s just the wrong fit. Pay attention, aim for self-awareness, take it lightly, and try again. It’s much better to try 100 times and have it fail 98 and work twice than to never try at all.

10. Write online! You will meet some of the most precious people in your life that way. It’s worth the fear and discomfort a hundred times over.

11. Not everyone’s gonna understand you or what you’re trying to do. Not everyone is going to like you. That’s completely okay. Don’t let your desire to please stop you from taking up space and being yourself.

12. Love is not this huge complicated puzzle you have to solve. The situation itself can be extremely complicated, but love tends to be very simple. You don’t have to pretzel yourself constantly.

13. Keep going to yoga. It will teach you how to breathe and it will make you stronger. P.S. did you know you hold your breath without realizing it like… all the time? You gotta stop doing that.

14. Surround yourself with people who genuinely believe in you. That way, when you’re feeling doubt you can say to yourself, At least my five favorite people in the world believe in me. Nothing feels better than knowing that.

15. People will be way more understanding than you expect if you just communicate what you feel in a simple, honest, kind way. “It’s not what you say, it’s how,” is way more true than most people realize.

16. Never be mean to anybody. Every single moment that will ever haunt you is a time you were mean or careless.

17. You are really flawed and you will make lots of mistakes. Don’t wallow in self-pity, just try to be better. Everyone is flawed and thinking of yourself as especially bad is just self-indulgent.

18. If someone wants to date you and you don’t want to date them, just say “I’m sorry, I don’t think this is the right relationship for me.” If you want to date someone and they don’t want to date you, just say, “That’s okay.” It’s really hard, but it can be that simple.

19. You are much more capable than you give yourself credit for. Keep going, even when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

20. Try a lot of things and see what you actually like. Don’t be wedded to a fixed idea of who you are. At the same time, just say no to things you know you don’t enjoy.

21. You don’t have to be insecure about all the things our culture encourages you to be insecure about. Your appearance and your weight and status markers and getting older—you’re actually just going to get less neurotic over time, and it’s gonna feel really awesome. Sometimes it’s tempting to cling to certain forms of neuroticism because you’ve incorporated it into your identity. Let it go. You’ll be happier.

22. You are so wrong about psychedelics. Psychedelics are going to change every aspect of your life for the better.

23. You love to work hard. Sometimes that’s a useful quality, and sometimes it’s just a way to cope with your anxiety. You need to learn to pause and not try to fix everything all the time. Sometimes gritting your teeth and forcing yourself through it is the easy way out, and doing what you actually want to is the scary thing.

24. There are so many people in the world and so many of them are incredibly talented and beautiful and nice in ways that make you feel insecure about yourself. Try to draw confidence from who you are instead of worrying about what you aren’t. You are a subject, not an object.

25. Treat the people around you with care and attentiveness. There’s nothing more important than paying attention to the people you care about.

26. You are a deeply obsessive person and love hits you like a train. Sometimes this feels purely alienating, but the extent to which you let your passions consume you is your best quality.

27. By the way, it’s okay that you’re so hung up on the topic of love. It’s actually a great subject to be preoccupied with. It’s going to be the bedrock for your work and your life.

28. When you’re having conflict with someone you care about, try to be the bigger person. It feels way better to be understanding and forgiving than it does to hold a grudge. Sometimes other people need your help to show up as their best self.

against brute forcing

Karen Kilimnik, Dinner in the Alley, 2010

American culture encourages everyone to be a go-getter, and I’ve been reflecting lately that even in my former incarnation as a Semi-Gifted Kid I was never much of one. I sort of mashed myself into that shape, because I liked to please and it was important to my parents that I do the things—good grades, piano, math competitions, etcetera. And also I really wanted to go to college in the United States and college admissions requires teenagers to jump through insane and arbitrary hoops to prove that they are Worthy of Receiving an Elite Education. So I jumped! And then, of course, I quickly left college for Silicon Valley, which is where I met people so good at go-getting I kind of gave up on the whole thing.

Everyone in my life is so excellent at showing initiative. I mean, any one of my friends could cold email the statue of someone who died in 1578 and get a response in 30 minutes. They’re very crisp communicators and extremely competitive. A lot of them run companies or are otherwise self-employed in a way that requires them to just do things constantly. And again, everything in our culture sort of implies that that’s just how you have to be to succeed. You have to be working really hard all the time and constantly brute forcing things. But what I’ve become passionate about in the past couple of years is the idea of not forcing things.

Take the ayahuasca discourse. Urban legend has it that people take ayahuasca and afterwards do things like give up on their startups, which is bad because productivity, ambition, greatness, etc. Now, my argument is that if you do psychedelics and quit something afterwards, it’s probably because you didn’t like or care about it very much. Again, we live in a culture that teaches smart young people that they have to direct their attention and energy towards something, even if it’s arbitrary and they don’t get any sense of meaning out of it. Because of that you get a lot of people trying very hard to brute force something that’s essentially meaningless to them. To me, that’s a bad outcome.

I say this as someone who believes she has the best job in the world. But I could never have brute forced my way into my job, because everything sort of happened organically in a way that was impossible to predict. I started posting on Twitter, and then I started sharing my writing on a platform called Reading Supply, and then I became aware of the existence of Substack and started posting there. I got very lucky. But also, I’ve now been writing this newsletter for long enough (four years!!) to report that it’s not exactly a cakewalk. Writing a post is easy enough, but writing posts that people like enough to keep paying for, month after month, year after year, keeping the same schedule regardless of what’s going on in your personal life (people do not like it when you skip a week), constantly trying to stay consistent with what’s already working while trying to introduce new and fun elements, is… I mean, it’s a very privileged job, but it’s still a job.

I say this to illustrate that there are lots of opportunities to be challenged, even if you’re not brute forcing. I feel like people create this false binary where either you approach life in a super Type A way where you’re grinding away until you collapse exhausted at 1 AM or you’re unambitious and never going to contribute anything to society. I feel like what working in a more creative field has taught me is that actually there’s a lot of value to thinking and strategizing and you actually can’t do that well if you don’t take space for yourself.

Another way to say it: you don’t get to work on very many things for 10 years, so choose what you focus on carefully. Save your persistence for what’s truly close to your heart.

The same approach applies to relationships. If something is uphill all the way, it’s probably just… not that good? The biggest difference between me now and me 10 years ago is that 10 years ago if someone I liked could say to me “Well, maybe this relationship isn’t a great idea,” and I would’ve been like, “Wait, no, I need to prove you wrong.” And what I’ve learned since then is that if someone tells you a relationship with them is a bad idea you should just be like okay cool! Because you really don’t actually get to be in that many meaningful relationships in your life. So you should really reserve your effort and care and love for what is so deeply meaningful to you.

You can make a lot of things happen if you’re smart and persistent. But should you? I think most people should do less and try to understand themselves more. And maybe the only way to understand is through doing, but sometimes it doesn’t have to be. Like, maybe you have to date that awful guy to realize you shouldn’t be with awful guys, but also maybe you could just take a step back and be like, Am I acting like an idiot? And maybe you have to drop out of your PhD after 3.5 years in order to realize you hated grad school but also maybe you could’ve just been like… wait a second… do I actually want to go to grad school?

When I see people who are really good at brute forcing things I fear that they’ll just throw themselves at the nearest attractive obstacle without any sense of like… what is actually spiritually significant to them. And I actually think most people can find something to do that is deeply meaningful. I do not think that we teach our youth this! I would hazard a guess that most people who are graduating from Yale and, say, taking a job at McKinsey reason that they’re giving themselves financial stability and lots of optionality by taking a high-status job that gives them flexibility for the future. Which okay, perfectly true, but still, at some point you’re going to have to actually solve the problem of who you are and what you care about. And if you don’t, if you spend years distracting yourself from the very difficult task of figuring out what is actually meaningful and aspirational to you, in 10 years you might take several tabs of acid and be like, wait, I don’t feel connected to a single thing in my life. Nothing about my materially comfortable, spiritually bereft existence feels Real to me. And that sudden realization might lead to you doing things that make people on Twitter judge you.

But a life that looks good is not the same thing as a life that feels good. Maybe no one can tell the difference except for you, but you’ll struggle to fool yourself. More and more I notice that most people are primarily motivated by the avoidance of certain feelings. For instance, if you have spent a lot of time investing in something you don’t actually like very much, admitting that to yourself creates a lot of pain and discomfort and regret and uncertainty. And you might think to yourself, I can just avoid feeling all of those things if I don’t look at the problem too hard. I mean, my life is good, right? Everyone thinks my life is good. People envy me and the existence I’ve created by working very hard. That is basically the same thing as happiness.

To believe that joy and meaning are achievable for you means that you would have to go out there and look for it. Which is hard in a different way than throwing yourself at a concrete problem that can eventually be broken down by brute force. From the outside, it can seem insane to let go of certainty for something as intangible, as indefensible, as meaning and connection. But for many people I think that’s the most important decision they can make.

the essence of love is... annoyance?

Odile Redon, Les Landes, c. 1875

For everyone who’s participated in the matchmaking experiment—I will be sending out your matches tonight or tomorrow morning, thanks to Sophia’s hard work :) To everyone who didn’t get in this round: we will do another batch soon!!

When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy. How could you have known? Should you have known?

I find myself wondering how other people feel in relationships, or how they desire to feel. Jackson told me about the “bored or annoyed” test a few years ago—some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed. And then I realized: the essence of love is annoyance.

The bored and annoyed test is actually a question about closeness: would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws? I remember talking to Daria about this guy I was seeing, saying that the circumstances of his life seemed overwhelmingly complicated to me. And she said, well, people with complicated internal lives often have complicated external lives. Seen that way, feeling annoyed is a gift from god.

Of course, there is such a thing as too much annoyance. One summer, I dated a guy who seemed smart, kind and attentive. Then we had our first disagreement. He was patronizing in a way that made my eyes pop out of my head. I realized that I couldn’t date someone who spoke like that when we argued. In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.

*

Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp! Too long, and I crave the solidity of dry land. But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.

Someone’s best qualities, through a squint, are just their flaws. When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood. Love is not earned—it’s something we crash into. Being flattered that someone has fallen in love with you is sort of like being flattered by an automobile collision. Really, most of the time it’s an impersonal accident.

The violence of romance can feel threatening. It is threatening. The older I get, the more I understand why many people choose partnerships that are not particularly romantic. Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value. I often think of the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written in the Body, a rampantly romantic book, whom we find at the beginning of the novel in a relationship with a woman he’s not in love with.

I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK. I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision.

My friends were more circumspect than me. They regarded Jacqueline with a wary approval, regarding me as one might a mental patient who has been behaving for a few months. A few months? More like a year. I was rigorous, hard working and … and … what was that word beginning with B?

‘You’re bored,’ my friend said.

I protested with all the fervour of a teetotaller caught glancing at the bottle. I was content. I had settled down.

‘Still having sex?’

‘Not much. It doesn’t matter you know. We do now and then. When we both feel like it. We work hard. We don’t have a lot of time.’

‘Do you look at her and want her? Do you look at her and notice her?’

Noticing someone, wanting them. Who has time for that kind of intrusion? When there’s books to read, work to do, Pilates classes to attend? Historically, people didn’t look for passion in the same place they got their security. But some of us are better at living without passion than others.

*

What thrills me is intimacy, the exposure of it. From Intermezzo: "Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where. From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality – without meaning to, without knowing how not to.” In love, I hope to find the hidden person underneath the public one, the submerged, shameful child-self.

But then—oh man—the challenge of coexisting with another person. With a sentient adult, who you’re not only sharing a roof with but striving actively to remain close to. Everything gets mixed together. Their thoughts contaminate yours, their feelings contaminate yours. Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?

*

In my opinion, we are not sufficiently prepared for it. We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying. I believe this is what Heather Havrilesky’s wonderful memoir of marriage, Foreverland, is about: the unavoidable friction of making it work with another person.

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control. You’re trying to fall asleep, and beside you your partner is snoring. You lightly push their jaw to the side so it’ll stop. Two minutes later, the snoring commences again. You lay there in the dark wondering how you got here. Oh, right: three years ago at a party you saw someone and thought they were very beautiful.

the true shape of a thing

+ SF workshop on October 12th!

Emil Nolde, Wheat Field, 1900

Shortly after my friend’s long-term relationship ended, he met someone who made him feel all the things he wanted to feel. Almost instantly, he was sure about her; she, however, was not so certain about him. Or rather: she was sure she felt the connection, but her own life was complicated; she was contemplating getting back together with her ex, and besides, she wasn’t sure how serious of a partnership she was looking for, anyway. He felt desire, and a deep uncertainty that felt nearly unbearable at times while he waited to see if she would choose him.¹

Around the same time, my other friend met a girl who he couldn’t get off his mind. She didn’t seem obviously interested in him, though they knew each other at parties and bumped into each other all the time. Eventually, he started explicitly trying to ask her to hang out one on one, and after one of these hangouts, they kissed. He wasn’t sure she was the right person for him—she had a very different relationship timeline and a more conservative lifestyle, but he was drawn to her sweetness, steadiness and sensitivity. Every time he saw her, he wanted very much wanted to see her again. Though she seemed initially unsure, she decided over the next couple of months that she really liked him.²

*

If I had to describe the beginning of love, I would say: something is coming up that you just can’t ignore. It may be as a minor as a pea on the bottom of the mattress, but all of a sudden you’re not sleeping as well as you once were. Instead, you find yourself tossing and turning throughout the night. Something is troubling you. What?

Once you confront what’s troubling you, the complications may end. But more often than not, the uncertainty continues. The type of uncertainty is just different. Perhaps you are wondering if the two of you will start dating. Then you start dating, and you think, how long will we stay together? Or, should I move to Wisconsin to be with her? Or, how do I gently break it to her that I’m horribly allergic to her dog?

If you’re single, the number of people out there in the world that you could potentially date—the sheer illusion of optionality—can feel crushing instead of liberating. Falling in love whittles down the mass unknown to a radiant single figure. But anyone who’s been in a relationship for a prolonged period of time can attest that new uncertainties continue to pop up. No one, no matter how prescient, can predict all the challenges that will emerge over 20 years of loving someone. How many times have you heard, “Well, he was so different in the beginning, I couldn’t have known?” What one can know or reasonably guess is up for debate, but I don’t think anyone would claim that from any vantage point we can predict it all. Uncertainty is an inherent part of life.

*

I’ve been meditating on this James Hollis quote a lot lately: “An ability to tolerate the anxiety generated by ambiguity is what allows us to respect, engage, and grow from our repeated, daily encounters with the essential mysteries of life. But the payoff goes even further. Certainty begets stagnation, but ambiguity pulls us deeper into life. Unchallenged conviction begets rigidity, which begets regression; but ambiguity opens us to discovery, complexity, and therefore growth. The health of our culture, and the magnitude of our personal journeys, require that we learn to tolerate ambiguity, in service to a larger life.”

I’ve always seen myself as a decisive person. Another way of saying that, of course, is that I’m a person who needs order to function, who always seeks to impose control over chaos. For most of my life, I saw uncertainty as something to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Last year, when I moved from New York to San Francisco, I was trying to resolve the open questions in my romantic relationship, and figure out if picking a city to live based purely on the resonance I felt with the people living there was a viable life strategy. I’ve now reached certainty on both counts, but of course new uncertainties have emerged in their place. In the past I’ve reluctantly accepted that new questions to answer are always coming up, but now I’m wondering what comes after reluctance: what would it feel like to exist joyfully alongside uncertainty, to treat it as something I don’t have to control?

*

In work and life, I’m always experimenting. Take Bookbear Express: when I started writing this Substack four years ago, I had no idea it would become what it is. Which is to say, even now, I don’t know what it is.

Yesterday we had a meetup in Central Park. I was in a truly bedraggled state, having just returned from a beautiful wedding in the Catskills where I had no access to caffeine for 72 hours. But when I arrived and saw Justin, Annie, Terry and few others sitting cross-legged on a picnic blanket, I immediately knew I was going to have a great time. We were still going four hours later, having migrated from Sheep’s Meadow to a sports bar, when I had to run off for dinner. Everyone kept asking me if it was weird for me to be at a meetup for my blog, and I kept saying that it was… shockingly normal? Turns out, you can just start a Substack, and then people can subscribe to your Substack, and then you can meet them and really like them, and they can like each other. And also you can run a giant matchmaking experiment for hundreds of people at a time and some of them will actually start dating each other (there will be a post on this soon). And also you can facilitate workshops and hang out with people you met at the workshop you facilitated and then you can see them at the meetup for your blog and feel very happy.

Four years ago, I could not have predicted that all of this would happen. Even one year ago I couldn’t have predicted it! I probably would not have said I wanted it to happen if you asked me, since I’m quite shy and historically the idea of large groups, or even small groups, has been deeply intimidating to me. But having my blog evolve from me writing into the void to meeting people I like a lot and organizing various events centered around my most avid interests—relationships and feelings—has made my life so much the richer.

Uncertainty, when it’s good, can be so good. I have no idea where my work will take me next month or next year. Somehow that feels satisfying instead of scary.

*

I don’t read tarot, and I don’t generally ask friends to read tarot for me. Perhaps this is superstitious, but I don’t wish to look too far into the future. Some lines from Alexander Chee’s essay The Querent that have always stuck with me: “I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about, and I think those topics are all that most of us want to know about. Will I be loved, will the love last, is my lover cheating? Will I have money, will it last, will I be cheated? Will I get the new job, the new promotion? Will my book sell? It’s the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there’s a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read.”

Like everyone else, I want to know. And also, increasingly, I’m learning that I don’t. Several years ago, I paid $15 to see a psychic with a friend in Toronto. She said two fairly specific things to me. Both came true. Maybe she was just a talented cold reader. At that point, what’s the difference? The passage of time since then has turned me into someone who asks questions grounded in the present.

I often worry that my uncertainty will lead to pain, either mine or someone else’s. I think that if I knew the future, I could prepare better for it, do all the right things, avoid mistakes. And yet other people’s mistakes often seem to me the most lovable parts of them. Because the person they are today is the one I got to meet in this universe, the only version that matters, and I treasure the real thing more than any could’ve been, any ghost.

*

When you love someone, their beauty acquires a different kind of meaning. I often marvel that there are millions of attractive people in the world whose faces and bodies mean nothing to me, whom I can walk by, talk to, marvel at their build or dress or gaze without the impact of it ever seeping beyond the surface. It’s only when someone becomes truly precious that their appearance suddenly means something to you. Their freckles. Lower lip. Asymmetrical eyebrows. Bike tan. You stop appraising, start studying. You stop looking, keep finding.

I couldn’t describe your voice very well if I tried but I could recognize it anywhere, at any volume, in the middle of any sentence. It’s so dear to me. That means something, but what does it mean? Miriam, writing about Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo, says that Rooney is working on her own theory of love. Intermezzo, if I had to sum it up in a sentence, is about how loves takes us places we don’t intend to go and can’t possibly foresee. Upsetting and unsettling places. Strange and warm places.

I always used to get mad at myself if I didn’t know. I’m still mad at myself for not knowing. But I’m trying to let it play out. A thought I’ve been experimenting with: if we stick uncertainty for long enough, the true shape of a thing is revealed to us. You just have to wait for the water to recede.

Rishi and I are doing another workshop in San Francisco on October 12th! As you might be able to guess from the title of the last two posts, this one is about resilience in the face of uncertainty. We’ll be exploring relationship uncertainty, work uncertainty, and… general life uncertainty. Workshops run from 10 AM to 5 PM with lots of breaks. We’ve only had 4 workshops to date but have had repeat attendees which I will take as a very good sign. Facilitating them has helped me enormously with the topics that we’ve explored (so far, friendship, rejection, conflict) and we’ve received lots of feedback that they’ve helped participants have the conversations they’ve been hoping to have in their own lives. People who attend tend to be people who are in a moment of confronting the topic at hand in their own lives, which makes the workshop feel particularly precious. All this to say: if this speaks to you, it probably speaks to you for good reason. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Early bird tickets (first 8 people, in this case) are $275; we’re doing flexible pricing for regular tickets from $300-375. If you’re a student or just can’t afford the workshop, please email friendshipindustrialcomplex@gmail.com and we are happy to discuss options.

​Note: For both this and future workshops, if you have a space for 15-18 people and are willing to offer it, email us. We will comp your participation as a show of gratitude!

1. They’re still dating.

2. They’re no longer dating.