"You have to love yourself before you can love someone else." We've all heard this, right? It is a common belief in our society that if you are not finding the love you're looking for, you need to look at what you're doing wrong. If you're struggling with your past, that has to be fixed first. If you're struggling with your self-esteem, you need to raise that up before entering a relationship. The message is this: if you are broken, don't look to someone else to fix you. You have to figure it out on your own. 

What a challenge that can be. You see, we don't come out of the womb knowing anything, let alone what love looks like or how to give it to ourselves. That is all taught and learned. If you grew up in a caring, loving household, you have a leg up. If you grew up in a household with absent or abusive parents, you're at a disadvantage. If you're lucky, you find this love in other places, perhaps through friends or other family mem ...

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I remember a conversation I had with one of my guy friends a few months ago. "Ugh", he said. "What's wrong?" I asked. "I need to DTR", he told me. "DTR? What's that mean?" I asked. "Determine the relationship. I need to find out if she's actually going to be my girlfriend or not." My poor friend was worried that he would likely get "friend-zoned" again and that having a conversation related to the direction of this potential relationship would be its downfall. No matter what you want to call it - making it official, putting labels on it, becoming exclusive, going steady, changing your status to "in a relationship" on facebook - DTR conversations eventually happen, for better or worse, when you are exploring potential relationships. They may go in your favor, as you discover that the person you've gone on a few dates with wants to take the next step into an official, exclusive relationship. Or it may go terribly awry, as my fri ...

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"Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection." - Vironika Tugaleva

We live in a culture of "more." We encounter examples of this every day. When we go to the grocery store, we have ten different kinds of mayonnaise to choose from. We can binge watch hundreds of shows on Netflix and record multiple shows at the same time on our TVs. Our phones do everything for us and long gone are the days of being limited to only a certain number of texts or minutes to talk on the phone per month. Portion sizes and screens at movie theaters are bigger. We think having more choices is a good thing but in many ways it's not. 

When I was shown this q ...

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