Endings & Repair
Recovering, and what actually helps
The research on adjustment after separation is unglamorous and reasonably clear about what makes a difference.
Imogen Hart
25 articles by Hart
Conflict
Fighting about nothing
Disproportionate conflict over trivial subjects usually has a small number of ordinary causes, most of them physiological.
Attachment
What holds up over forty years
Long-running studies of couples who stayed together describe something less dramatic than the advice industry implies.
Family & Parenting
Illness in a relationship
Long-term health problems change a partnership in specific ways, and the changes are easier to handle when they are named.
Communication
What to do when they are having a bad time
Supporting a partner through a difficult period is a specific skill, and the instinctive responses are frequently the wrong ones.
Dating
Meeting people when you are past the obvious stage
The structures that produce relationships in your twenties are largely gone by your forties, and replacing them takes deliberate effort.
Endings & Repair
Staying friends, and when it works
A common intention with a poor success rate, and the cases where it works have identifiable features.
Conflict
When one of you wants to fix it and the other wants space
A common mismatch in how people recover from conflict, and it is negotiable once it is named.
Communication
Conversations that keep stalling
Some subjects get raised repeatedly and never progress, and the pattern usually has a structure worth diagnosing.
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.
Family & Parenting
Caring for ageing parents while raising children
A period that puts specific and predictable pressure on a couple, and it is rarely planned for.
Conflict
When one person always concedes
An apparently harmonious relationship in which disagreements always resolve the same way is storing something.
Dating
Dating after a long relationship ends
The practical landscape has changed and so has the person, and both take longer to adjust to than most people allow.
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.
Family & Parenting
Housework, and the arithmetic of it
Time-use data is unusually clear on this, and the discrepancy between perception and measurement is where most of the argument lives.
Communication
Talking about sex without it becoming an audit
The subject is difficult to raise for identifiable reasons, and the standard approaches make it worse.
Dating
How long the early phase lasts
The intensity of a new relationship has a fairly predictable course, and mistaking its end for a problem causes avoidable damage.
Attachment
Friendship inside a relationship
The component most consistently associated with long-term satisfaction is also the one most easily displaced by logistics.
Family & Parenting
Becoming parents, and what it does to a couple
The research on relationship satisfaction after a first child is consistent and rarely mentioned in advance.
Conflict
The pursue and withdraw loop
One of the most reliably observed patterns in distressed couples, and both halves of it are individually reasonable.
Dating
Being single without treating it as a waiting room
The research on wellbeing and relationship status is more complicated than the assumption behind most dating advice.
Family & Parenting
Meeting the family, and the politics of it
The introduction is straightforward. The ongoing negotiation between a partner and a family of origin is where the difficulty lives.
Communication
Listening in a relationship is not the same as listening at work
Most people apply a problem-solving register to conversations that were not requests for solutions, and the mismatch causes more friction than the topics do.
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.