Relationships
The Psychology of Anxious Attachment
We might expect that the most natural response to being told by a kind, patient and attractive person that they…
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Relationships
The Psychology of Anxious Attachment
If the anxious can accept that their condition isn’t a sign of random sickness but is the result of a very identifiable sort of upbringing, they may develop the courage one day to explain their fears to a partner.
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Relationships
The Psychology of Avoidance
One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the warmth and affection it is so natural for us to want.
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Relationships
Changing Yourself Rather Than Trying to Change Your Partner
Here are seven ways in which we can improve our relationships – not so much by asking them to evolve as by altering the mindset we approach them with.
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Relationships
A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships
To love is not to confront someone with the full might of moral judgement at all times. It is to be able to bear something less than ideal at points.
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Relationships
Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean
We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. But this is to miss out on a disquieting reality: these deviants are manifesting in an extreme form proclivities in which we are all to some extent implicated.
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Calm
Keep Going
Here is humanity as we seldom allow ourselves to see it: neither triumphant nor defeated, but doggedly persisting – despite so many arguments against it.
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Relationships
When One Person Has to Be Needy so the Other Can Feel Invulnerable
Vulnerability is so much less of a burden when, finally, two people can be brave enough to own up to their share of it.
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Relationships
Offering Love to Someone Who Is Not Convinced of Their Loveability
There are distinct challenges around trying to offer love to someone who isn’t convinced that they are, deep down, worthy of such a thing.
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Relationships
Using AI to Have Better Relationships
For too long, we have thought of love as an emotion, it is in fact a skill – and there is no reason why, as with so many other tools, we wouldn’t allow one of our AI machines to lend us a hand with one of the great challenges of our lives.
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Calm
The Letter You May Need to Send to Save Your Life
If we are to survive (and there truly may be nothing less at stake), we are going to need to be very brave indeed. We’re going to need to break the isolated habits of a lifetime – and take someone into our confidence.
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Sociability
Ideal Questions to Ask at Parties
There are – let’s suggest – very few truly boring people on earth, but a great many who end up seeming as much for a simple, touching and highly avoidable reason: because they are asking one another the wrong questions.
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Leisure
An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One
We may be destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones, lives marked by a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding, and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium. What we lack in terms of contentment, we may make up for in terms of insight and experience.
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Liming
To know how to lime isn’t just one more low-key leisure activity, it’s evidence that one has understood some extremely significant things about oneself and one’s place in society and the cosmos.
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Leisure
Reasons Not to Give Up
We can sometimes wonder what art is for. Kølle’s picture offers us one possible answer: art is there to refocus our attention on what matters most deeply.
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Sociability
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We may choose not to complain not because we are weak, but for a more fundamental and clear-eyed reason: because we are up against something we know we cannot change.
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Leisure
The Pleasures of the Underground
There are moods – of dissatisfaction and loneliness, panic and despair – when the very best counsel we might be offered is to go and take a ride on the underground.
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Self-Knowledge
Is There Something Wrong – or Am I Just a Miserable Person?
Hope can spring from an initially hugely difficult thought: we don’t live in an unbearably miserable world, we may just have grown up (for extremely forgivable reasons) to be very miserable people.
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Relationships
Why Small Pleasures Become a Bigger, Not a Smaller Deal, the More We Suffer and Age
The more challenging existence as a whole becomes, the more we may appreciate what remains pure and hopeful, despite its modest appearance or lack of obvious glamour.
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Relationships
A Crucial Sign That Someone is Worth Going Out With
There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person to go out with: that they are prepared to go to therapy.
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Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
The only way to prevent the largest problems is to focus exhaustively and with dark good humour on the very smallest ones.
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Relationships
On Not Being Very Good at Love
Our romantic fiascos can get a little less arduous the more we can bring ourselves to shrug our shoulders and confess: I really can’t do this thing called love.
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Relationships
When One Partner Feels Controlled; And the Other Feels Abandoned
A thread has come out of the seam of the relationship. If it keeps being pulled, a whole hem may unspool.
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Relationships
The Sorrows of Anxiously Attached People
For all their professed faith in love, the anxiously attached find it extremely hard to trust that love could eventually go right for them. And therefore they discover that it seldom does so.
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Relationships
Our Longing to Avoid Love
We’re avoiding love now because somewhere in the past, it proved intolerably distressing in a way that we have not understood – and therefore cannot overcome.
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Relationships
Five Ways to Handle an Avoidant Partner
Part of the difficulty of handling an avoidant person lies in being clear exactly what the issue with them might be.
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Relationships
The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense With Someone We Love
People who know and love each other deeply do not sit together discussing philosophy or economics: rather, they talk nonsense.
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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?
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Self-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?
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Sociability
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.
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Self-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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Self-Knowledge
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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Self-Knowledge
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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Relationships
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…
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Self-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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Self-Knowledge
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…
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Relationships
The Psychology of Avoidance
One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the…
View
Relationships
Changing Yourself Rather Than Trying to Change Your Partner
We know – of course – that they urgently need changing. Where do we start with the problems? They are…
View
Relationships
A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships
It sounds odd to suggest that one of the things we may most long for, and in a sense even…
View
Relationships
Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean
We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. We tend to read of…
View
Calm
Keep Going
Giuseppe de Nittis, Winter Landscape, 1880 It’s early morning in the middle of winter and we’re in a northern suburb…
View
Relationships
When One Person Has to Be Needy so the Other Can Feel Invulnerable
Sometimes, without anything being explicitly said, couples come to certain remarkably awkward and sinister agreements between them about who might…
View
Relationships
Offering Love to Someone Who Is Not Convinced of Their Loveability
There are distinct challenges around trying to offer love to someone who isn’t convinced that they are, deep down, worthy…
View
Relationships
Using AI to Have Better Relationships
It’s understandably daunting to be invited to rely on a machine to do something that, throughout our lives, we’d believed…
View
Select themes
Relationships
The Psychology of Avoidance
One of the most perplexing of all our behaviours is our tendency – in relationships – to flee from the…
View
Relationships
Changing Yourself Rather Than Trying to Change Your Partner
We know – of course – that they urgently need changing. Where do we start with the problems? They are…
View
Relationships
A Chance to Be Bad in Relationships
It sounds odd to suggest that one of the things we may most long for, and in a sense even…
View
Relationships
Four Kinds of Sexual Deviancy and What They Really Mean
We don’t typically imagine that sexual deviants have very much to teach us about anything. We tend to read of…
View
Calm
Keep Going
Giuseppe de Nittis, Winter Landscape, 1880 It’s early morning in the middle of winter and we’re in a northern suburb…
View
Relationships
When One Person Has to Be Needy so the Other Can Feel Invulnerable
Sometimes, without anything being explicitly said, couples come to certain remarkably awkward and sinister agreements between them about who might…
View
Relationships
Offering Love to Someone Who Is Not Convinced of Their Loveability
There are distinct challenges around trying to offer love to someone who isn’t convinced that they are, deep down, worthy…
View
Relationships
Using AI to Have Better Relationships
It’s understandably daunting to be invited to rely on a machine to do something that, throughout our lives, we’d believed…
View
