“Who in your family causes the most drama?”
By Shahida Arabi
These conversation starters and topics will spark unique conversations for couples, for friends, or even as a way to get to know someone.
Let’s face it, small talk is boring and often reveals nothing about a person at the onset of getting to know them or spending time with them. If you really want to set a conversation aflame, it’s time to get to the meaningful, meaty, juicy details — with some mindfulness to the context and person’s comfort level, of course. Here are 111 fiery conversation starters that can make a date extra spicy or really anyform of meeting a little less bland. …
Appearing to have multiple personalities.
By Shahida Arabi
The INFJ (standing for Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, Judgment) is the rarest personality type of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, making up only 1–2% of the population. But how does their unique personality translate into real-life contexts?
Here are ten things people don’t realize you are doing because you’re an INFJ:
1. Fixating on people and situations that don’t necessarily matter in the long run; planning in advance for everything and imagining every potential scenario possible ahead of time.
As an INFJ, you’ve got quite the imagination (which makes you pretty talented at visualizing and manifesting things). …
You feel totally numbed out, or apathetic about other people’s suffering.
By Brianna Wiest
1. You’re confused by your feelings.
It’s not just that you’re hyper-sensitive, it’s that you’re emotional in ways that just don’t quite make sense.
You might find yourself over or under-reacting to situations or world events. You might find yourself crying once an hour, or struggling to understand what you feel at all.
All of this is a symptom of a fundamental disconnect between you and your nervous system. In order to survive, you had to tune out your authentic feelings. …
Right now, you’re allowed to not be okay.
By Holly Riordan
You don’t always have to see the best in a situation. You don’t always have to be thankful for the lessons that you learned when going through a hard time. You don’t always have to act like an optimist, like nothing bothers you, like you can handle anything life throws at you.
There are moments when positivity isn’t going to help you. In fact, positivity might even annoy you. It might be the last thing you want to hear. You might want to rant, to complain, to sulk in your misery. …
I miss the sexual tension that felt like fire between us.
By Holly Riordan
Don’t get me wrong.
I love how comfortably we exchange kisses when I step through the front door or when I rouse you in the middle of the night after a nightmare. I love the ease in which our tongues caress each other, and how you know exactly where to press your lips to make me moan. I love the familiarity of your body. The welcomeness. The warmth. …
While 2021 forges a new chapter, I still find myself lingering on the old one.
By Katee Fletcher
At times it seems like our bodies are made for change.
We are born the size of a canteloupe and evolve into small, sapling-size humans with delicate eyelashes and imperfect smiles. But then, there are times change seems impossible to surmount — overcoming the death of a loved one, moving away from friends we called family, growing up, moving out, saying goodbye.
I grew up in many places that now weave together and form the tapestry I call “home.” People in college would ask me where I was from and I would answer with a spiel rather than a place: Born in Florida, moved to Italy, grew up in Southern Maryland, moved to New Hampshire halfway through high school, and now I’m in New Jersey. Each location had its perks and downfalls, but every place was called home for some time. In Italy, I knew the volcano seen only in morning’s mist was Mount Etna. In Maryland, I knew to eat boardwalk fries with Old Bay and to jump into brackish water in March because we craved its salty warmth. In New Hampshire, I knew that late nights with friends included long drives on green Hollis roads. …
Create your own certainty.
By Brianna Wiest
When it comes to building the life you want to live, most people try to design it backwards.
Most people begin with what habits and routines they want to have each day, as opposed to what habits and routines they would need to start doing to get them where they want to be in five, 10 or 15 years down the line.
This is something called reverse engineering: you have to understand what you want the final product to be before you’re going to be able to set all the parts in place to make it happen.
In the same way that companies or schools need to write mission statements, so do you. You need to understand what you want the big, overarching points of your life to be. …
You are not straying from the path, you are finally finding it.
By Brianna Wiest
Even if your plans have changed, even if your timeline is different, even if this year has not unfolded the way you thought it would — you are not falling behind.
The course of our lives is not contingent upon things happening precisely as we think they should. In fact, it’s often the unexpected that opens us up to opportunities that weren’t crossing our radars, ideas about life, and love, and the world itself, that we hadn’t stopped to consider. …
Organize one closet or cabinet in your house.
By Brianna Wiest
Chances are, every time you’ve tried to make a change in your life, you attempted to force a breakthrough. You decided you were going to make a radical change, and despite your gusto, it’s never worked.
This is because your body and mind are governed by something called a homeostatic impulse. If you shift the baseline too quickly, your body is going to try to compensate and bring you back to “normal” or “safe.” …
Heartbreak is when someone we love doesn’t meet our expectations.
By Brianna Wiest
For as many things as we grow into and gain in life, in equal proportion, we lose, outgrow, and gravitate away from others.
But we don’t respond to every loss in the same way. There’s a reason why we are so absolutely devastated in the face of some breakups, but neutral if not grateful for others. There’s a deep psychological current running beneath the surface of these events in our lives, one that we often aren’t conscious of.
There are ultimately three different types of loss that we experience in our lives, and each is meant to teach us something about ourselves. …
