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On Socks and Friendship
It seems like a tiny fact, just one more little blip of information that doesn’t really mean anything much, but in truth it sits on a major insight about friendship: in the paparazzi market, images of...
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Love and Self-Love
One of the great and slightly strange dangers of falling in love with someone is how we may respond the day they start to love us back. Some of the reasons we fall in love with people is because we...
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Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
Irrespective of whether you consider Jesus a popular itinerant preacher or the Son of God, there’s a very odd thing about his views on love. He not only spoke a great deal about love: he went on to...
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How We Need to Keep Growing Up
The business of growing up is something we normally think comes to a close when we get to 16 or so – and finally turn into those fully finished products: adults. Up until then, our growth is the...
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Good Solitude: The Origin of a Good Relationship
One of the most important principles for choosing a lover sensibly is not to feel in any hurry to make a choice. Being satisfied with being single is a precondition of satisfactory coupledom. We cannot...
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How to Get Over Someone
We tend to be generous towards people who can’t get over someone. It sounds Romantic, if a little sad. The love affair happened a year ago now, but still the ex’s thoughts remain loyal to every detail...
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How to Complain
Almost every day, with slightly dispiriting inevitability, someone in our vicinity will hurt us in some way: it could be a friend, a colleague, a child or, most likely, a partner. They’ll be neglectful...
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Can Exes be Friends?
There are some very strong and socially-endorsed reasons why partners breaking up generally try to remain friends. To the person being – however nicely – rejected, the promise of friendship can feel...
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Why we (sometimes) hope the people we love might die
It feels very shameful – horrifying – to admit but there are times when we may find ourselves daydreaming about a terrible thing happening to someone close to us. Deep in the privacy of our minds, we...
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Why Family Matters
- Emotional Nepotism One of the things that makes families so important and so meaningful is that they are centres of unashamed nepotism. We’re used to thinking very negatively of nepotism. We are...
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Why Old Friends Matter
There are people we are friends with for one major but often maligned or overlooked reason: because we were friends with them some time back. At one stage, it might be decades ago now, we had a lot in...
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Daddy Issues
To say that someone has ‘daddy issues’ is a somewhat rude and humiliating way of alluding to a very understandable longing: for a father who is strong and wise, who is judicious, kind, perhaps at...
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Political Correctness vs. Politeness
Political Correctness is, in many ways, an extraordinary and admirable achievement of our age. It involves an acute sensitivity to the suffering of minority groups traditionally overlooked by the...
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How to Love Ugly People
We live – obviously – in a very unequal world. But not all kinds of inequality receive the same sort of attention. One kind of inequality is especially hard to talk about, even harder to alter and...
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The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
We reserve some of our deepest scorn for couples who stay together out of compromise; those who are making a show of unanimity, but whom we know are, deep down, not fully happy. Maybe they’re primarily...
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22 Questions to Reignite Love
Occasionally, our relationships need to get re-started. We love one another but a lot has accumulated that we haven’t properly dealt with. Certain things haven’t been said, resentments may have built...
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The Incumbent Problem
The Incumbent Problem refers to the vast, but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, cities and jobs have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person...
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Twenty Ideas on Marriage
Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. We’re correct that a great deal of thought is needed somewhere. But it’s the...
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Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
Love is our highest value, what we all crave and what we believe makes us fundamentally human, but it is also the source of considerable anxiety. Chiefly, we worry whether we are entirely normal...
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The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
A bedroom at around 9pm. It’s quiet, save for the rustle of the leaves in the garden outside. We’re side by side, each absorbed in a different world. One of us might be in a submarine beneath the...
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