Gen Z, a generation that just a while ago was composed only by pre-teen children still in school, is now officially not too young to matter.

Its oldest representatives are reaching their mid-twenties. They’re graduating from college (the ones who actually went), joining the labor force, and taking over the internet — or most likely, starting their own online businesses, hitting a million followers on Youtube, and making bank on Instagram.

Scratch that. Gen Z thinks that Instagram is an old people’s social media, they’re all on Tik Tok now, a platform most Millennials can’t be bothered to figure out.

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When you’re about to get married, you suddenly receive plenty of marriage advice. Although well-meaning, most of it is unsolicited and not at all helpful. The task to separate the good from the bad marriage advice is a daunting one, and sometimes you can only really know what’s what once you’ve experienced it for yourself.

That’s definitely what happened to me.

My marriage might not have survived in the long run, but I know the lessons I learned will stay with me forever. My experience helped me validate some marriage advice, and invalidate others.

There were also a few things…

Falling in love sounds like a big concept. It sounds like it requires a major event, a lightning bolt striking the right place at the right time, or another definitive sign from the heavens.

Falling in love feels like it should be a specific moment that divides your life between the Before and the After. It sounds like something so big, so momentous that’s impossible to miss.

Love is not supposed to sneak up on you, but it does.

Love resides in the subtleties. …

Dating is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be an exciting way to meet new people, have a good time, and hopefully, fall in love.

But chances are you’ve been feeling pretty negative about dating lately. You feel like it’s a chore, or something akin to pushing a boulder up a hill.

I agree dating can be hard. Soul-crushing, even. But with small attitude changes, you can flip the script and go back to having fun again.

If you actively date, you will experience tough times and heartbreaks, which are unavoidable. But you don’t have to go into it…

So you think you might be falling in love.

You haven’t done this in a while so it’s hard to tell for sure, but most of the signs are there: you can’t stop thinking about that special someone; when you see them, your heart immediately races and a smile comes uninvited to your lips.

Being around them makes you feel good. Their presence is reassuring, even after you’ve run out of things to talk about. Just standing, or — let’s be accurate — laying side-by-side in silence is enough to make your heart feel full.

Is this really love? You…

I get it, you were hurt. You made mistakes and you have regrets. There’s a lot you wish you could have done differently.

You feel connected to what happened in your past because now you see the light. You’ve learned many valuable lessons, and it hurts to think how you wish you had behaved differently.

You’d give anything for a second chance, for a chance to apologize and be forgiven, to make people see you’re not the person you once were. You need someone else to give you what you won’t give yourself: forgiveness and closure.

You believe the one…

I’ve always had trouble with the concept of “finding yourself.” I never understood what it really meant.

It wasn’t until I completely changed my life that realized I hadn’t been myself in a very long time. The process of getting reacquainted with the real me was painful, beautiful, and revealing.

I understood then that “finding myself” meant recognizing myself in my choices, my actions, and my beliefs. It meant living a life I could recognize as truthful, as an accurate reflection of the person I am inside.

Now, I understand “finding myself” as finding enough self-confidence to unapologetically be who…

I’ve been in two long-distance relationships, both eerily similar in circumstances, but incredibly different in dynamics.

They both involved international travel, fourteen hours on a plane, having to deal with a four to six hours difference in time zones and having to be excited that it would only take us four months to see each other again instead of the six months we had originally thought.

But they each felt different, touched on different parts of my heart and soul, and taught me complementary lessons.

These relationships were tough, but rewarding in their own way. The two relationships combined spanned…