Olivia Parker 
Two Octobers ago my boyfriend and I finally closed the distance. About four months later I asked him what was wrong. He said I’m fine in a voice that was clearly not fine. We were standing in our kitchen at 8:30 on a Wednesday. I made every mistake available to me over the next ten … Read more
My friend Dani called me at 11:40 on a Tuesday night in March. She talked so quietly that I had to turn the TV down. She had just watched her ex Ryan’s story for the fourth time that day. She wanted me to explain why she could not stop. I did not have a clean … Read more
On a Wednesday last October my boyfriend and I were on the couch with the same Thai takeout we get every week, both looking at our own screens. I did the math and realized neither of us had asked the other an actual question in about two days. Nothing was wrong. We had closed a … Read more
My friend Dana sat at my kitchen table on a Saturday in March, turning her ring around her finger while her coffee went cold. She had been engaged to Marcus for nineteen months and she finally said the thing out loud: “I feel like I am just waiting for my life to start.” Their wedding … Read more
Last February I sat across from my boyfriend at our kitchen table with the pasta going cold between us. He was scrolling his phone, and instead of asking for what I wanted I said, “You never listen to me anymore.” That sentence bought me a defensive shrug and a colder dinner. What I actually wanted … Read more
I asked myself the “are we ready to move” question for almost a full year before I actually did anything about it. It is a bigger question than it looks, tangled up with career, money, family, and fear all at once. Eventually I figured out a handful of signs that helped me tell real readiness … Read more
For the first year of our long distance relationship, “someday” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. We both wanted to close the distance eventually, but neither of us had said out loud what that actually meant. It took an honest, slightly terrifying conversation to turn someday into an actual plan. Here is how we … Read more
Fighting over video call is a special kind of miserable. You cannot storm off to cool down without the whole thing freezing on an ugly paused frame, and you cannot reach for their hand when things get quiet after. My boyfriend and I had our worst fight of the entire two and a half years … Read more
I made almost every mistake on this list before I figured out what actually works. My boyfriend and I did two and a half years apart while he finished a job contract overseas, and looking back, most of our worst fights came from the same handful of habits. None of these mistakes mean your relationship … Read more
My friend Dana called me on a Sunday afternoon in February from her own driveway, sitting in the car with the engine off. She had walked out of her house because of a dishwasher. What she said was, I asked him twice, and the second time I hated the sound of my own voice. She … Read more
