Summertime is meant to fall in love, so I’m not sure why it’s the time of year when we get most stressed out, short with our partners, and cranky. According to the University of Michigan’s American Freshman Survey, we’ve become more critical of our relationships over the last few years. We feel more isolated from others. We expect too much from romantic relationships. We stress our lovers out with too many expectations. We’re also getting a lot busier than our grandparents were. From a survey of young adults conducted by the National Marriage Project, it was found that almost two-thirds of those surveyed said that work was the primary thing they were giving up in order to date. Maybe instead of worrying about work and school, we could take a page from my dad, and worry about ourselves more. I’ve never seen a young man so pleased about getting a call from his girlfriend as my dad was about getting the job. My dad also felt stressed about finances, but my grandma and I thought his anxiety was “hysterical.” My dad’s biggest nightmare was being out of work, and it got so bad that he started to save up six months’ worth of the checks from his job, just in case. Now that my dad had some steady work, we were in a better position to take care of other things. His anxiety didn’t magically disappear, but as time passed, he felt a sense of security about our future. Why do we keep putting ourselves in the position where our partners have to be superheroes? We’re the ones who are supposed to make things work in our relationships. We tell our partners, “I know you can’t do everything, but I expect you to be more sensitive.” We’re trying to do for them what they should be doing for themselves. And guess what? They’re already putting in 100%, so we’re probably overestimating their capacity. We also make it about us by placing more expectations on our partners. I would suggest not stressing out about finding The One, but instead enjoy the process. Spend more time with the people in your life. We shouldn’t make it so much about making a perfect partner who is perfect for us, but instead, it should be about finding somebody we can make a good connection with. But then there’s the fear of commitment. It’s easier to break up if things get difficult than it is to deal with the discomfort that comes with growth. So we stay in bad relationships because we’re worried about the possibility of losing the person we love. We stay because we’re scared to venture into new territory. When we find somebody who can love us well enough, it should be time to take that relationship seriously. Not just thinking about ourselves, but the people we care about. We care about each other, so why not find someone who cares about each other too? If you are having a hard time with commitment and are single, ask your friends to start setting you up with people that they think you’d get along with. This way you don’t have to worry about if they’re “the one,” and it allows you to stay engaged in the real world. You can still take some time to evaluate if this is the person for you, and if you really want to put in the effort. I don’t know about you, but I think there is something really cool about that. It feels like we’re being our true selves. Now I want to hear what you think, and how we can talk about this issue with the people in our lives. What do you think we can do about love? I’ve spent most of my life trying to be someone that other people expected of me. By that I mean, I’ve always had to maintain an image that people expected. You might be wondering how I could possibly expect anything to be different if my image is the one everyone has always expected. The answer is I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was born not knowing what to expect. It wasn’t that my mom was a bad person or was incapable of being nice to me. She was just the mom. She had been given a child who was very much like herself. So, naturally, she gave me what she’d received. I can’t speak for her, but I would guess she didn’t really know how to parent any differently. It was the same as it had always been. It’s as if she saw how the child in her was going to turn out, so the best she could do was to allow her to flourish. I couldn’t tell you if there was ever a point in time when she decided to become the person I would need her to be, but I do know that it never really mattered. When I look back at how things were, I can’t help but wonder why we even bothered. I’m glad she was there for me, but there wasn’t a lot of room for me to grow. There was only a little room for a young and confused girl to make decisions that she’d have to come back and fix a few years down the road. There wasn’t a lot of time in my childhood for making friends. There weren’t enough people I could relate to for me to grow up and be a better person. Even when we were younger, I had friends that I was attracted to, but I couldn’t be like them. I didn’t understand them. They couldn’t accept me for who I was. But then one day, my mom saw what I wanted and changed it. She allowed me to become friends with all of them. But even so, I was still different. “Go to your room.” It was the first time she ever said that. She had never punished me before. But that was the first time she told me to go to my room without even a good-bye. I didn’t know what it meant, but I could tell from the tone of her voice that I should stay in my room. I never went back. But then there’s the thing about getting kicked out of the house. You’d think it would feel like you’re being tossed into the wilderness, but instead it felt like I was being sent away for a while. It wasn’t that I was alone because I had the world outside of my window. It was that I had no idea who I was. It was a hard moment to go through, but I was glad that nobody else in the house knew the way that I felt. It was like no one in the world knew what it was like to feel afraid. It was like I was at home in a way because I didn’t know how to express my feelings. It was like being invisible to the world. I still don’t know how to find the words for how hard that experience was. I’m not sure that I’ve learned how to express myself with words, because that’s really what the most painful moments in my life feel like. And even though that day was a hard one, I knew that it was a new beginning. I’m sitting in my room now, thinking about what this was like for me, and wondering what was going on in that house that day, and whether my mom knew why it was happening to me. I started to cry, and then I went back to my room, and when I closed the door behind me, I felt so alone. There was something I felt inside. It was like my soul felt heavy. I didn’t know what it was then, but I can say now that I’ve learned that it’s called depression. There was an even bigger problem. I didn’t have the tools to address it. The people in my family thought I was depressed because I was being spoiled. I couldn’t even explain the feeling. I never wanted to have friends like my siblings had, because they didn’t know who I