Articles by The School of Life
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Relationships
Trouble
Trouble and their friends are some of the most delightful souls ever to have walked the earth.
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Relationships
The Courage to Love Again
We ache for love like everyone else, but we also have detailed knowledge of how it can go.
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Relationships
Leaving in Search of a Worse Relationship
Without ever quite saying so to themselves, let alone their heartbroken partner, a person may decide to leave in search of greater isolation, increased suffering and more intense misunderstanding.
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Relationships
On Seeing An Ex’s Profile on a Dating App
The modern world has generated a properly distinctive contribution to the canon of romantic suffering – the ache of seeing your ex (the one who became so very much against your will) on a dating site.
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Sociability
Eight Rules for Friendship
We believe that good friendships follow certain principles, which can be identified, discussed and taught.
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Self-Knowledge
How All Meanness Is Inherited
The meanness we witness around us in the here and now – in shops, in boardrooms, in bedrooms and in online forums – is always, by a law of psychological economy, something that has been, with appalling diligence, passed down from one person to another.
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Relationships
The Repetition Compulsion
In Freud’s eyes, what we are trying to do is repeat an old story with one important caveat: we are seeking to give it a different ending.
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Become Unable to Protect Ourselves
It can take a lifetime to learn a simple-sounding lesson: that we deserve only kindness from those we love
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Relationships
Beware Those We Fall in Love With
It is in the confines of intimate relationships that we tend to come across behaviours that challenge most of our assumptions about sanity.
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Self-Knowledge
Mental Illness and Love
Mental illness is overwhelmingly not about inherent anatomical damage or chemical disturbance. What it does seem to be about – perhaps surprisingly – is the link between love and mental health, specifically the consequences of a lack of love.
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Relationships
Two Emotional Skills That Save Relationships
The world isn’t short of suggestions for what we might do to improve our lives. But we should prioritise learning how to communicate in a relationship.
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Relationships
The Psychology of Ghosting
Why does a person choose to run away so coldly from someone they were once connected to?
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Self-Knowledge
The Importance of Feeling Our Feelings
Beneath states of anxiety and depression, irritability and moodiness, there often lie sufferings we haven’t properly looked at – and therefore haven’t attended to with necessary care – because they don’t fit our ideas of what properly deserves our time and sympathy.
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Relationships
How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You
If we closely analyse a raft of successful early dinner dates, walks in the park, movie nights and phone calls, we can be almost certain that a few distinct modes of conversation will have been in train.
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Relationships
How Only the End Reveals the Truth About Our Partners
It is now, when it no longer matters, that we stand to gain our most telling glimpse of who we have really been with all these years.
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Relationships
On Needing to Leave the People We Are Trying to Change
Our efforts can be moving, but at some point, a difficult realisation may set in: we – the ones who so desperately want our partners to evolve – may actually be the very ones who are preventing them from doing so.
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Relationships
Are We Rejecting Them Because They’re Wrong – or Because We’re Hurt Inside?
Though many people will undoubtedly be flawed in a panoply of ways, there are cases where the wrongness we detect primarily reflects a psychological dynamic within us.
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Relationships
Anxious and Avoidant Couples and Their Phones
By offering us constant, seamless contact, our phones have simultaneously opened us up to perpetually renewed opportunities for doubt, disconnection and anguished speculations as to the loyalty and interest of the other person.
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Self-Knowledge
How Hard It Is to Be Patient
It’s not really our fault that waiting feels so terrible. All babies are born with marked tendencies towards impatience – or, more plainly put, outright panic.
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Self-Knowledge
The Futility of Seeking Closure
In the fantasy of closure, long after certain wounds have been inflicted, we imagine being able to sit down with a parent or an ex.
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Relationships
In Love, Happiness May Need to Be Paid for in Agony
When a relationship collapses, it isn’t the painful bits that we ever focus on.
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Relationships
The Importance of Expressing Our Needs
Too many relationships falter on the basis that someone has lost their tongue. There is a limit to how long we can suffer in silence before love goes cold.
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Sociability
On Not Being Able to Listen
We are, most of us, familiar with a particular kind of challenging human: the sort who seems unable to listen to much of what we might have to say to them.
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Relationships
How We Can Eventually Move On From Heartbreak
What begins to emerge is that – in truth – our affection can’t ultimately have been just about their existence. It must have focused on certain qualities we perceived in them.
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Relationships
Cures for Love
‘Cures for Love’ is the title of a self-help book written by the Roman poet Ovid in 2 AD that offers consolation and companionship to those who have suffered abandonment in love.
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Relationships
How Heartbreak Pushes Artists to Their Greatest Achievements
For all its many inconveniences and agonies, heartbreak appears to have a longstanding and curious power to push artists towards some of their very greatest creations.
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Self-Knowledge
The Theory of Triangulation
We should be generous with ourselves for our triangulating tendencies. We have them not because we are bad, but because we have suffered and because we were disappointed and terrified at an extremely vulnerable stage in our development.
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Calm
The Therapeutic Benefits of a Walk
We can be so much happier when we manage – for a time – to still the clamour of the ‘I’ and live less intimately with ourselves.
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Relationships
The Ordinariness of the Lovers Who Devastate Us
When we hear certain stories of devastating heartbreak – the kind where the longing and the suffering seem limitless – it is normal to conclude that the people at their centre must have possessed truly unusual qualities.
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Relationships
How Heartbreak Ends
Instead of immediately turning against our former lover for the devastation they have caused us, for an extended period, we simply miss them with new intensity.
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Relationships
Dating When You’ve Learnt to Love Yourself
We won’t be in any position to work out who is kind and good, who is worth investing in, until we are firmly on our own side.
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Relationships
Ruminating on One’s Ex
We can spend a great deal of time – years, perhaps – wondering why certain people, whom we loved very much and who hurt us very deeply, were the way they were and acted as they did.
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Relationships
The Only Love Worthy of the Name
We deserve to be adored where we adore. Anything less isn’t romantic; it’s self-abandonment.
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Self-Knowledge
What Is Gut Instinct – and How to Access It
We cannot account for our gut feelings; we don’t know why we feel as we do – we are simply, vaguely yet strongly, certain that we do.
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Work
Three Questions to Unlock Our Potential
Perhaps, whatever the hurdles out there, we are also suffering from a feeling that we don’t deserve more.
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Relationships
A Test to Measure How Good Your Father Was
A good father may not be able to spare his daughter every kind of suffering; he will, nevertheless, offer her some of the following bounty.
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Relationships
Two Reasons Why Online Dating Is So Miserable
Why is this medium the site of so much agony when – on paper – it should simply present us with a broad array of possibilities for love?
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Calm
The Universe Has a Plan for You
In relation to our reversals, we may whisper to ourselves: ‘The universe is teaching me a lesson.’
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Relationships
Learning To Trust Again
When we have been the victims of treachery or adultery in love, the loss is not just of the person we once adored but of a broader capacity to trust human beings going forward.
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Relationships
The Secret to a Good Love Life: The Relationship We Have With Ourselves
The origins of our relationship with ourselves are – tragically – only an internalisation of the very first relationship we had in childhood.
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Relationships
Stick At It
We’re complaining and wanting to run because we assume that fighting and misery are abnormal, but only because we’ve been insufficiently exposed to genuine normality.
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Leisure
What Tribe Do You Want To Belong To – and Why?
It’s simple enough to see why one might want more money, but why do some people, in addition, want so deeply to belong to one tribe rather than another?
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Relationships
The Wisdom of Taking It Slowly
Slowness does not necessarily have anything to do with prudishness or social mores; it can be where we land once we’ve built up a more profound understanding of the psychology of love.
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Leisure
The Most Beautiful Woman in London
She is beautiful because, in her sorrows, she is ready to meet you in your depths.
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Relationships
When Anxious and Avoidant Couples Spiral
Both anxiously and avoidantly attached people carry a distinctive and exaggerated core fear – typically the result of an unattuned and neglectful childhood.
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Relationships
How Regrets Increase As We Grow
The more we learn about ourselves and others, the more regrets we are liable to feel about how our lives have unfolded.
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Relationships
What Kinks Are About
Not only are we typically highly selective about who we sleep with, but many of us are – in addition – extremely particular about what will adequately excite us when we do.
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Relationships
When Love Feels Like Pressure: The Pains of Attachment
Two people who may have been on the cusp of building a whole world together part company, both nursing a sense of being mishandled – while not fully fathoming why or how.
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Relationships
What We Truly Long for in Love
We don’t want to be adored and admired; we want – beneath the terror and the shadow play, the games and the subterfuges – to be witnessed and held loyally in affection.
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Leisure
What Love Looks Like
It is, at one level, just a ‘view’ – and yet it might bring tears to our eyes.
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Relationships
Why We Should – out of Love – Sometimes Not Love Too Much
When we truly love someone, it may be the greatest kindness not to love them too much, too suddenly or too insistently.
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Relationships
How We Help Our Exes Have a Lovely Future
None of us is perfect, and the arena in which these imperfections are first identified and grappled with is in the close-up conditions of love.
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Calm
The Anxiety That Never Ends
Perhaps the greatest peace available to us comes from knowing that our torment is never quite going to end.
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Sociability
‘I’m Fine, Thank You and How Are You?’
‘I’m fine, thank you and how are you?’: an innocuous, ubiquitous sentence in which so much of the tragedy and loneliness of our lives comes to rest. Because we’re not – of course – ever remotely fine, and nor is our questioner.
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Relationships
Why People Who Were Never Chosen Will Have a Hard Time Choosing You
We may be far into a relationship before a somewhat puzzling and difficult realisation starts to dawn on us: we’re not in love with a single person.
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Relationships
Partners Who Punish You for Loving Them
For some of us, love is as terrifying in practice as it is desirable in the abstract – and our chief response to being loved may not be kindness and welcome but, strangely and yet with dark logic, cruelty.
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Self-Knowledge
People Who Are Missing a Sense of Self
One of the odder features of life is that, without there being too many significant outward signs of the problem, many people are to be found wandering the earth lacking any sense of self.
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Self-Knowledge
On Mocking the Superstitious
What the self-congratulatingly rational are missing is that their rationality is not, and never was, an achievement of the intellect.
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Relationships
The Best and Worst Ways to Be Left in Love
Being left by someone who once loved us – and whom we still adore – has to count among the most soul-destroying of all emotional eventualities.
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Self-Knowledge
When People Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them
One would think that such alarming truths would immediately enter our consciousness and lead us to walk away and defend our interests. The problem is that some of us are not remotely built to notice the attacks made on us by others.
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Relationships
Why – and How – We Need to Make Our Peace With Being Single
Only those who have fully made their peace with the prospect of being single can have the calm, steadiness and courage to face down the problems in love with the necessary conviction.
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Relationships
The Ex You Can’t Get Over
It’s when a very meaningful relationship comes to an end that we stand to discover a highly peculiar fact about ourselves: our brains appear to have two separate centres of consciousness, which operate according to very different principles.
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Relationships
When to Get Out of a Relationship
To prevent ourselves from wasting our time in fruitless couplings, we should learn to ask ourselves a simple sounding but imperative question about any person we are attempting to build a future with: ‘When I complain to them, do they listen?’
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Relationships
Stay Away From All but the Most Enthusiastic
It can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic-sounding realisation: we should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us.
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Relationships
The Sorrows of Love
So often, our suffering is deepened by a sense that we are unusual and cursed to be feeling it.
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Self-Knowledge
The Importance of Hating People
We are so scared that hatred might be the last word on a situation that we forget to honour its legitimate role in any process of recovery.
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Self-Knowledge
On Not Being Able to Believe Your Own Luck
For some of us, the lucky breaks – when they finally come along – far from being simple to assimilate and build upon, set off an insuperable background level of anxiety that may end up with us destroying much that we ostensibly want.
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Relationships
The One Question We Forget to Ask Ourselves in Love – And Why
Why do some of us end up associating the word love with a lack of calm, an absence of generosity, a strong degree of disdain or disregard – and what’s more, not even notice that we do so?
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Relationships
The Brutality of Dating
For those of us who know the activity from the inside, who suffer from despondency and fury and may have found ourselves bursting into tears after yet another disappointment, the word ‘brutal’ may be an understatement.
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Relationships
Starting New Love While Still Hung Up on an Ex
In the pantheon of modern villains of love, there is one character who stands out as worthy of particular condemnation: the fiend who starts a new relationship while still not fully over their ex.
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Love Our Bears
We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears.
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Work
How to Steal a Very Expensive House
The most effective ‘thieves’ aren’t the ones who strip people of material possessions; it’s the ones who quietly and harmlessly sit down and think about the beauty of what they desire.
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Calm
The Consolations of Deep Time
Thinking about the age of the earth is – unexpectedly perhaps – among the more consoling and calming of all activities.
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Self-Knowledge
A Simple Exercise to Help Us Find Direction
The familiar structure of films, ingrained in us since childhood, has a particular power to counteract our self-defeating impulses.
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Self-Knowledge
How Wounded People Seek Out Further Punishment
The true toll of bad childhoods isn’t circumscribed to their actual duration; it’s exacted via a lifelong search for their sad echoes.
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Self-Knowledge
When Evil Walks Into Our Lives…
Rarely but significantly, someone may enter our lives who is seismically dangerous: someone who is deep down extremely unwell and compelled to externalise their sickness by harming others…
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Self-Knowledge
What Are Germaphobes Really Scared Of?
A ‘germ’ has come to stand in for some other concern hovering just off stage. Germaphobes may be scrubbing away trying to expunge something; it’s just not what they tell us it is.
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Self-Knowledge
Why Are Some of Us Hoarders?
Hoarding is motivated by a fear of loss. By holding on to everything, the hoarder hopes that no further important things will be thrown away.
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Self-Knowledge
Politics, Mental Health and Virginia Woolf
For those of us who are not wholly steady inside, what happens in the political realm is not as distinct from us as it might be – and may prove especially charged and especially dangerous.
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Self-Knowledge
What Alien Delusions Tell Us About Our Minds
Alien delusions have to be read as a persecuted mind’s ingenious, desperate but highly understandable attempt to cope with awfulness.
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Relationships
On Being Terrified of Love
The mystery is not that men and women occasionally go strange at the prospect of love, but that they ever dare do anything else…
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Relationships
After They Left
What unexpected rates of interest happiness charges. If only the sweet times had come with warning labels.
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Relationships
Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful
The less we are able to admit to our despair, the more intense it will be. Here are some of the low points that deserve lamentation…
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Relationships
Why Hurt People Hurt People
In certain cases, one partner will punish another not for doing anything wrong, but precisely the opposite. They are being punished for their sweetness, crushed for their gentleness and tormented for their faith.
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Relationships
‘I Love You, but I Don’t Think We Should Be Together’
It is hugely honourable to do one’s utmost to be with someone. It may be greater love still to adore a person – and leave them well alone.
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Relationships
How to Get Over an Ex by Correcting Our Misfiring Brains
In order to outsmart our obsessions, we need to understand how badly our brains often work – and then figure out canny ways to work around their many cognitive glitches.
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Stoicism
Stoicism was a philosophy invented by leading minds in Ancient Greece and Rome to help us cope with agonising periods of our lives – especially those created by the selfishness and insanity of dictators and demagogues…
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Calm
The Fear of Losing Control Over Our Bodies
There is definitely something up with us; it’s just that the issue lies in our minds rather than in our bowels or stomachs.
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Self-Knowledge
How to Check in on Ourselves
We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.
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Work
Why Isn’t There Peace in the World?
When the people we call historians talk about conflicts, the blame is almost always laid at the door of material factors. But the truth may be rather different – and far stranger…
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Self-Knowledge
What Does a Silence Have to Mean?
It’s a feature of our minds that we cannot help but fill silences; we automatically develop notions of what an absence must signify.
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Relationships
Wild Advice for Those Who Have Lost Their Minds Over an Ex
The world is not short of advice for those who are struggling to get over their exes. The problem is how much of it is extremely sensible and therefore, in its way, utterly ineffective.
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Relationships
Red Flags for Everyone: How Therapy Has Made Love Harder
Once we are done with rightfully expelling every last demented and unworthy partner from our domain, we may be extremely proud of how well we have followed the principles of emotional maturity; we may also be entirely alone.
Relationships
To Get Back Together – or Not? An Exam for Couples
What follows is a sequence of questions that exes who are meeting up again after a long break should discuss with one another before coming anywhere near to holding hands (let alone going to bed).
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Calm
When We All Lived in Villages…
It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings…but there was one enormous advantage: there were so very few options to choose from.
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Self-Knowledge
How We Encourage the Behaviour We Feel We Deserve
People’s behaviour towards us is to a large extent determined by what we unconsciously communicate that we deserve from others.
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Relationships
Why We Should Treat Dates Like Job Interviews
Every date is at heart a recruitment interview, for which we need to show up with a privately held brief and the right set of questions. This is possibly the most serious work of our lives.
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Relationships
Can Our Partners Change?
We’re up against one of the central tripwires of existence. We’re trying to remake a human being; we’re attempting to retool DNA with our bare hands.
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Relationships
How to Work Out the Level of Emotional Maturity of Prospective Partners
It can help to begin with a sense of what it is we should be looking out for in terms of markers of emotional maturity – so that we may know as early as possible who we have on our hands.
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Relationships
The Mark of True Love: Simplicity
There is only so complicated a relationship ever needs to be. When it is viable, love is – all told – fairly obvious.
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Relationships
Eight Rules for Ending Relationships
There are a host of rules around ending relationships that all decent people understand – and here, framed for our consciences, are eight of the most important.
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Self-Knowledge
How We Respond When Life Gets Frustrating
Life is inherently filled with frustrations but how we interpret these frustrations – what we take them to mean, who we think is responsible for them and how we opt to complain about them (or don’t) – is fascinatingly diverse.
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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
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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