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The best thing about physical maturity is that it’s very easy to spot; we can so easily tell when someone has another decade of growth to go – and can therefore set our expectations, and our levels of forbearance accordingly. But we have no such luxury when it comes to…
Many tensions within relationships can usefully be looked at through the prism of a concept much used within psychotherapy: the idea of ‘rupture’ and ‘repair.’ For psychotherapists, every relationship is at…
We tend to imagine that it must be within the context of a close and long-term sexual relationship that people are best placed to understand one another and reveal who they…
It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person. We have – after all – only one body and answer to only one name. But inside our minds, we are…
We live in a culture that firmly suggests that the essence of true love is for one person fully to accept the other, as we like to put it, just as…
In the 1930s, the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach was seeking to understand more about the contents in the unconscious minds of his patients – when he hit upon the notion of…
When people try to account for why couples break up, the emphasis typically falls on the idea of difference: a disorganised creative type was up against a highly managerial ordered one;…
Far more than we are inclined to accept and sometimes even realise, we are creatures of mood: that is, our sense of our value as human beings is prone to extraordinary…
We’ve got a steady, unfortunate tendency to focus exclusively on what’s bothering us. We brood; we circle endlessly round our worries. We get drawn deeper into the gloomy recesses of our…
In the course of any adult life, there will be periods when we’ll end up involved in that slightly odd, slightly unrepresentative and invariably slightly challenging activity: looking. Most people around…
We are used to recognising signs of emotional immaturity in our fellow adults (and nudging them kindly and appropriately where we can), but we are generally not as practiced at spotting…
Many of us spend a large a part of our lives, in one way or another, feeling stuck, that is in a state where a strong desire to move forward on…
It’s not hard to understand the fear of being alone: the empty apartment after work, the eerieness of Sunday afternoons, the sense of exclusion during the holidays… We know the agonies…
The arguments for approaching life in a grave, serious and unsmiling mood are overwhelming: we are clearly a profoundly wicked species, we continually perpetrate monstrous suffering on one another, our greed…
The great drawback of the word ‘paranoia’ is that it can sound like something only very obviously disturbed people would ever end up being. We associate the term with types who…
There is one particularly salient question we should ask in order to measure our levels of emotional well-being: do you broadly feel that you have the right to exist and are,…
We are, a lot of us, a great deal sadder, more anxious, more incomplete and more restless than we really need to be because of something very large that is missing…
In an odd but quietly very important way, works of architecture ‘speak’ to us. Some buildings, streets and even whole cities seem to speak of chaos, aggression or military pride; others…
This is an essay about beauty – and in particular about what makes something beautiful. We want to give you the answer right away: BEAUTY = ORDER and COMPLEXITY In other…