25 Relationship Problems Every Writer Understands
1. Publishing three articles a day yet spending three days drafting the perfect date follow-up text.
2. Thinking about how you’ll describe a relationship in your memoir while it’s still happening.
3. Resisting the urge to correct the grammar in other people’s online dating profiles.
4. Feeling like a failure when you make typos in your own profile or messages.
5. Writing personal essays about your relationships without revealing embarrassing information about your exes.
6. Creating pseudonyms for exes that aren’t the names of other people you know.
7. Or, writing about relationships in a general enough manner that people can’t tell you’re writing from experience.
8. Completely lacking mystery because every thought you’ve written down is accessible online to everyone you date.
9. Dating mentally unstable people because you find their creativity intriguing.
10. Dating completely insane people for the story.
11. Wondering if a date really happened the way you remember it or if writing about it skewed your memory.
12. Getting struck with inspiration in the middle of a date night.
13. Inability to tolerate when your significant other expresses themselves poorly.
14. Feeling intense cognitive dissonance when you have difficulty articulating your own feelings.
15. Narrating your dates, hookups, breakups, and make-ups with quotes from books and song lyrics.
16. Relating everything that happens in your own love life to something you read about.
17. Explaining to your significant other that you can’t take a break because you need to get an idea down while it’s fresh in your mind.
18. The endless archive of heartfelt letters you’ve written to exes and never sent.
19. Spending hours writing your partner the perfect birthday or holiday card and receiving a mere “thanks” in response.
20. Requiring days to plan all major relationship-defining conversations because you need to formulate clear responses to everything that could possibly be said.
21. If you’re a freelancer, explaining that you need to take any work you’re offered even if it means canceling plans, or else you are literally unemployed.
22. If you’re on the staff of a publication, explaining that it’s not your fault if you need to cancel plans to complete a time-sensitive assignment.
23. Receiving texts that say “your the best” or “your beautiful” and only noticing the poor grammar.
24. Cringing when your partner uses clichés like “you’re my other half” or “I don’t know what I’d do without you” because it just sounds like bad writing.
25. Holding yourself to such high standards that you can’t just say “I love you;” you need something more poetic.