Relationships

Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships - yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship migh therefore be intuitive and easy.

Love has a history and we ride sometimes rather helplessly on its currents. Since around 1750, we have been living in a highly distinctive era in the history of love that we can call Romanticism. And it has been a disaster for love.

Relationships challenges the assumptions of the Romantic view of love. It shows how to develop new attitudes that can lead to a psychologically mature vision of love:

• That it is ok that love and sex may not always belong together
• That discussing money early on, in a serious way, is not a betrayal of love
• That realising that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple
• That we will never find everything we need in another person, nor they in us
• That spending two hours discussing whether bathroom towels should be hung up or can be left on the floor has its own dignity.