juliana ong

I always make the distinction between love stories and life stories. There’s many more people you can love than people you can have a life with.

I think about the relationships I’ve outgrown—because of my personal or political evolution—and how living in cities has meant I could let go of those relationships and form new ones. Whitney makes me wonder if that was the easy way out. I don’t think relationships need to be held on to forever just because they exist. Plenty of us have rightly... See more

Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot... See more

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia , the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to... See more

Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)

I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a

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Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as... See more

"The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people." — @ShaanVP

This is one of those polarities I'm learning to embrace: that you can see improvement in many things, but still you never really stop worrying; you just get better at dealing with it.