It’s the twentieth anniversary of Say Anything (#iamold), and while some now confess to having replaced Dobler with Donaghy, his  In Your Eyes triumph will always be in our hearts. And now, thanks to a tipster, we’ve succumbed to the charms of Marit Larsen, who here comes pretty close to a boombox moment of her own:

… who are not Chris! Or Mike!

Read the piece at Nerve.com to find out how to make your love life go from stop-motion to Flash! Or something. (Chris didn’t write this post, either.)

Bonus: here’s where you can go on your first date.

“I’m crazy about her!” “My ex is a psycho hose beast!” It is customary, and often fitting, to dip into the lexicon of mania to describe love and its effects, salutary or otherwise. But what happens when real mental illness — the kind that shows up in the DSM — shows up in our relationships?

Breakup Girl has dealt with that issue here and elsewhere. And now, an essay from Nerve.com by Justin Clark, which just surfaced via Alternet, offers a compelling personal read about what it’s like to love someone bipolar. It is possible, Clark maintains, even fascinating and rewarding. “When I looked at Sara, I felt inspiration, not pity,” he says of the date on which she outed herself as bipolar. “And even though I’m not the type to plunge quickly into relationships, I was convinced I was in love. I invited her back to my place. Aside from a quick trip to clean out her studio apartment a few weeks later, she never went home. ‘Of the two of us,’ I told her as we lay happily in bed, ‘I must be the crazier one.'” Read the rest here. It’s harrowing and lovely. (And after that, after all these dark posts about DSMs and STIs and Client 9s — crazy, right? — we promise to lighten things up for you ASAP.)

Here at BreakupGirl.net, we talk a lot about the challenges of finding love when you are shy, when you have low self-esteem, when you don’t look like society’s ideal single, when you live in a small town, when you’re spinning your wheels in a romance rut. But what about finding — and keeping — love when you know that at some dreaded point, just when things were going so awesome, you’re going to have to say, “There’s something I have to tell you”?

At this point, the news that anyone has a sexually-transmitted infection (STI) should not be a shocker. STIs are, in fact, shockingly common. (At least half of sexually active men and women get HPV at some point in their lives, for example.) Yet matter how “out” people are these days about Asperger’s or therapy or whatever they take to help them sleep, the stigma against STIs — and the 19 million people who have them — remains as virulent and pervasive as the infections themselves. They are, after all, about sex — stereotypically, about casual, anonymous, unprotected sex; about (also stereotypically!) skeevy sores where the sun don’t shine. Just look at the vernacular: people who say they’ve tested negative for STIs commonly call themselves “clean.” Opposite: “dirty.” Carriers of STIs: they’re seen (WRONGLY, let’s be clear) as slutty, stupid, damaged goods. (This despite the facts: you can, of course, get infected from your first and only partner; condoms may not provide 100% protection.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place, a magical place, where people with STIs never had to have The Talk? Where they could make friends — even find lovers — knowing that no one would judge them, never mind dump them, over a stroke of bum luck and the occasional cold sore?

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