Relationships
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Relationships
The 9 Most Common Mistakes We Make When Choosing a Partner
Choosing a long-term partner may be the single most consequential decision any of us ever has to make. What then are some of the most weighty mistakes we make when attempting to find a lover?
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
How We Can Feel Misunderstood – Without Ever Explaining Who We Are
Did you ever explain yourself properly to the person who is meant to have ignored you? Did you work hard to make yourself known before surrendering to a sense of being unnoticed?
Read ArticleSociability
The Challenges of Male Friendships
Men are lonely because of an inherent conflict between what is required of being a man on the one hand, and what is involved in being a friend on the other.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
What Does the Child in You Need Today?
We’ll accede to a fairer, kinder adulthood once we accept how close we remain always to the delicate, sensitive, tear-prone little person we once were.
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Why We Can so Quickly End up Feeling Hated
We may be far more loved than we thought – once we remember the scale of the reservations that true love can encompass.
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Why We Sometimes Need to Be Tied to a Mast
There are situations in which we have to concede that only the blunt removal of temptation can save us.
Relationships
Good Endings in Love
Many relationships cannot be resurrected; all relationships deserve dignified and thoughtful burials.
Relationships
On Castration Anxiety
If sex is going wrong, we may need to look beyond physical interventions and take an audit of the mutual suspicions that each side can be unconsciously carrying with them into the bedroom.
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How to Find Out What Might Happen With a New Partner
When a new relationship is on the cards, we might greatly expand our sense of what could subsequently happen with our date by turning to one subject in particular…
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Trust What You Knew Then, Not What You Feel Now
The further away we stand from the moment when we took a decision, the more our judgement is likely to be clouded and corrupted.
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Four Explanations for Self-Sabotage
One of the most curious and dispiriting of all psychological behaviours goes under the title of self-sabotage. In our search for answers, we can identify at least four explanations…
Self-Knowledge
Those of Us Who Need a War Zone
In our personal lives, we may be rather more drawn to ‘war’ – conflict, intensity, anxiety, fear and jeopardy – than we are to ‘peace’.
Read ArticleSociability
Why Introverts Are As They Are
Introverts lack an experience that they could be with others and have their needs met. Their history has taught them that the only person who could possibly understand their needs is them.
Read ArticleRelationships
Those of Us Who Don’t Expect Kindness in Love
Why do we keep giving our partner so much leeway? Why do we hope against hope? Why don’t we cut our losses right now and leave?
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A Dark Way to Predict What Might Happen in Your Relationship
A dark and frightening way to predict what might happen in your relationship with a new person is to ask them what happened to them in their childhood…
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
Naturally You Don’t Trust Anyone!
We are continually on our guard. Our alarm is always on – even around our closest friends and lovers. We are always anticipating an attack.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
When It’s Extremely Hard to Choose
We are obsessed by the idea that a wise choice will help to prevent a nightmare, but considered soberly, there will be something pretty difficult about every route we take.
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What We Can Always Do to Improve Our Relationships
Once we know we’re not facing a uniquely misfiring human, only another version of our own broken selves, we can abandon once and for all the delicious yet ruinous sense that there is only one mad person in the couple.
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Who Actually Ends a Relationship?
The one who ends a relationship is not necessarily the one says it’s over. The one who actually ends the relationship is the one who ceases to love.
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Why Some Of Us Are So Bad At Spotting Red Flags
We can put it like this: the ability to respond actively to red flags depends on having had a certain sort of childhood.
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The Appeal of Rescuing Other People
We might say that everyone, at the start, longs to receive love. But when it has not been especially forthcoming, one way to handle its absence is to turn into a compulsive caregiver.
Read ArticleCalm
On Feeling Manic
Many of us are prone to slip into states of mind we might call ‘manic’ – in which we run obsessively and at high speed away from something within us that asks for our attention.
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Daring to Love
It might take some of us the greater part of our lives until we no longer hold it against someone that they can warmly adore us.
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The Pains of Heartbreak
We should not try to be brave. This has to count among the greatest griefs of our lives. Only thereby can we give the love we had for them proper stature – and begin to let it go.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
What Is It Like to Be Mentally Unwell?
Most states of unwellness are not radically different from those occasionally and briefly experienced by all of us; they are simply much, much more extreme.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
How to ‘Grow’
What does ‘growing’ really involve? And, crucially, how might we train ourselves to grow a little more – and a little more quickly?
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There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person…
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Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
We are sometimes let down by an unhelpful idea about how big an issue needs to be in order to…
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Relationships
On Not Being Very Good at Love
There are some things we eventually become experts at gracefully admitting we’re not very good at. After an initial period…
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Relationships
When One Partner Feels Controlled; And the Other Feels Abandoned
Every day the same argument unfolds, perhaps four or five million times, in different places around the planet, grinding hours…
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Relationships
The Sorrows of Anxiously Attached People
There is a particularly poignant and tormented figure known in psychology as the ‘anxiously attached person’, who may be us,…
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Relationships
Our Longing to Avoid Love
We won’t really have begun to properly understand human nature until we absorb a hugely awkward and strange sounding fact:…
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Relationships
Five Ways to Handle an Avoidant Partner
Is it ever worth trying to shore up a relationship with someone who exhibits traits associated with what psychologists term…
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Relationships
The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense With Someone We Love
We might expect that, if we could eavesdrop on the conversations of the most admirable, clever and loving couples in…
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Relationships
The 9 Most Common Mistakes We Make When Choosing a Partner
Choosing a long-term partner may be the single most consequential decision any of us ever has to make. No wonder…
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Select themes
Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
Relationships
On Not Being Very Good at Love
Relationships
When One Partner Feels Controlled; And the Other Feels Abandoned
Relationships
The Sorrows of Anxiously Attached People
Relationships
Our Longing to Avoid Love
Relationships
Five Ways to Handle an Avoidant Partner
Relationships
The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense With Someone We Love
Relationships