In the dating world, we all start out with some idea of what we want and are looking for in a prospective partner or love interest. As we meet people who we think have potential, we tally up and score them based on our set of criteria.

Whether it is about a same-sex, interracial or nonconforming relationship, as a rule, I tend not to involve myself in the question of whom other people choose to love, and it’s not because I have a self-righteous sense of egalitarian, progressive thinking. It’s mostly because I have one universal rule for other…

Over the weekend, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, dropped a video for a new song called “This Is America.” You are reading this, which means there’s a better than 90 percent chance that you’ve both seen the video and had a discussion about it already. Probably several.

Dating in the age of Twitter should really come with a manual or a rulebook or at least some guidelines for what happens after you successfully complete the first date and decide that you want to continue seeing the person.

I began this week in tears. Early Monday morning, hot, torrential tears were flowing as if I were in the midst of my last heartbreak—or the one before that, or the one before that. I was reading Junot Díaz’s searingly confessional essay in the New Yorker about confronting and coping with his childhood rape. Like many…

Editor’s note: This is part 4 of a multipart series. Catch up with part 1 , part 2 and part 3.

Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a multipart series. Catch up with part 1 and part 2.

Cheating. Infidelity. Adultery. “Playing” on your girlfriend. “Creeping” on your man. Home-wrecking.

I am an incurable flirt. It is a big part of my personality, and it is something that often happens without me being conscious of it.

I wasn’t planning on meeting anyone, and I wasn’t planning on liking him.

I’m in a real, grown-up relationship. We’re engaged, but it already involves kids, a mortgage, car payments, bills, blended families, vacations and real-life decisions. It also involves fun, but it’s less of the boozy-brunch variety and more of the adult-with-kid fun that occurs when you hang with the other homies…

For roughly the past six months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk and write about my family in a way that is more substantive than I have in all my years of writing; most discussions were spurred from the article about how politics had created a rift between my (white) mother and me.

Valentine’s Day is Wednesday, and everyone is gearing up to show the one they love how special they are. I’ve seen conversations all across social media about what people will be giving their significant others, and I thought that now is as good a time as any to clear up a few misconceptions people may have about this…

When you consider being in a relationship with someone and you think of the expectations you have for that relationship, what do you base them on? Do you look to other couples whom you admire for inspiration or are your expectations grounded in what you know about your potential partner?

Recently, a couple I have known for a long time split up—much to the surprise and disappointment of everyone around them. They were the kind of couple that threw amazing dinner and cocktail parties, who were the picture of love and affection everywhere they went, and generally made you feel good whenever you were…

Connected. If I had to describe what intimacy means in one word, that would be the word. Connected. You being in tune with your partner and your partner being in tune with you. Puzzle pieces that fit together the way they are meant to, working together to make a beautiful thing.

The straights are at it again.

“I may never get married,” I said. At 22, what seemed like a statement of fact to me brought a look of horror to the face of my friend’s mother.

In our last #TheRootAfterDark Twitter chat, we discussed the differences between “baggage” and “experience” and how to tell the difference between the two. A recurring theme among the people who admitted to still carrying around baggage from previous relationships was the idea that most of them were still looking for…

I wanted to kill my boyfriend in ways that let me observe his suffering and return the power in our relationship to my hands.