Attachment
Love languages: what the evidence says
An enormously popular framework with a weak evidential base and a genuinely useful idea buried inside it.
Attachment
Styles, origins, and what the research does and does not claim.
Attachment
What holds up over forty years
Long-running studies of couples who stayed together describe something less dramatic than the advice industry implies.
Attachment
Emotional labour, and what the phrase actually meant
A precise sociological concept that has broadened into something vaguer, and both the original and the popular version describe something real.
Attachment
Forgiveness, and what it is not
A concept with real research behind it that is routinely used to pressure people into positions they have not reached.
Attachment
Commitment, and what it actually consists of
The research separates it into components that behave differently, and one of them is doing most of the work people attribute to love.
Attachment
Kindness as a practice rather than a disposition
Everyday generosity in a relationship is mostly a set of habits, and habits can be installed regardless of temperament.
Attachment
The stories couples tell about how they met
Researchers can predict a good deal from how a couple narrates its own history, which says something about what narration does.
Attachment
Independence inside a couple
Merging is presented as the goal and produces a specific set of problems that appear around the third year.
Attachment
Jealousy, and the difference between the signal and the response
The feeling is ordinary and informative. What people do with it is where relationships are damaged.
Attachment
Friendship inside a relationship
The component most consistently associated with long-term satisfaction is also the one most easily displaced by logistics.
Attachment
Attachment styles, minus the pop psychology
A real research tradition that has been flattened into a personality quiz, and the accurate version is more useful than the popular one.
Attachment
What the research on lasting couples actually found
Decades of observational work point at a small number of behaviours, and most of them are about ordinary moments rather than crises.