Self-Knowledge
Dating, Confidence and Childhood
We tend to keep a wide intellectual berth between our childhoods and our dating lives. The first was about rubber…
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Sociability
The Challenges of Male Friendships
Men are lonely not through any specific deficiency on their part but 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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Sociability
Why Introverts Are As They Are
We become introverted or extroverted as a result of particular experiences; it is our distinctive path through childhood that determines at which end of the spectrum we are going to fall.
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Sociability
The Boring Person
The boring person isn’t really boring; they are in manic flight from what is profoundly and agonisingly interesting in themselves.
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Relationships
The Courage to Love Again
It’s odd, surely, to use the word ‘courage’ – the thing you need in air raid shelters and cancer wards…
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Relationships
Leaving in Search of a Worse Relationship
Common sense dictates that people leave relationships because they wish, in essence, to find someone better: someone better able to…
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Relationships
On Seeing an Ex’s Profile on a Dating App
There will have been versions of this in other eras, of course. Seeing their name on the board for the…
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Sociability
Eight Rules for Friendship
A Community Dedicated to Learning the Art of Friendship We are inclined to think that the secret of great friendship…
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Self-Knowledge
How All Meanness Is Inherited
When someone is mean to us without good cause – pushes us away cruelly in love, bullies us at work,…
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Relationships
The Repetition Compulsion
One of the most remarkable ideas in the history of psychoanalysis is to be found in Freud’s 1920 paper ‘Beyond…
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Become Unable to Protect Ourselves
There are people who, in most walks of life, are extremely canny and highly able to look after themselves. They…
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Relationships
Beware Those We Fall in Love With
The word ‘madness’ tends to bring to mind distinctly lurid and macabre associations: psychiatric wards, staring eyes, murder weapons, hideous…
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