What is alexithymia? The hidden condition affecting millions

Imagine feeling your heart race or your stomach tighten and having no clear idea whether you’re excited, anxious or upset. For millions of people around the world, that uncertainty is a regular part of life. The experience is known as alexithymia, a trait that affects how people recognize, interpret and describe their emotions. Although the […]
The attachment truth behind why you keep choosing the wrong partner

Attachment theory is one of the most well validated frameworks in developmental psychology, and its implications for adult romantic relationships are profound in ways that most people never encounter despite living them out in every relationship they have. The patterns formed in early childhood interactions with primary caregivers create internal working models of how safe […]
Successful marriages don’t just happen — they’re built daily

Research reveals the daily habits that keep marriages strong long after the honeymoon is over. There is a quiet myth about marriage — that the right person makes everything easier, that love is enough, and that a good marriage simply sustains itself over time. Research says otherwise. The couples who last are not the lucky […]
Parenthood used to feel inevitable — Here is what changed

More couples want children than you think — but something is quietly talking them out of it. The word ‘parenthood’ used to carry a kind of inevitability. For most couples, the question was never really if — it was when. That quiet assumption has been slowly dissolving for years, and now it is evaporating fast. […]
Ghosting has a psychological cost that goes far beyond hurt feelings

Ghosting, the practice of ending a relationship or connection by simply disappearing without explanation, has become one of the defining social behaviors of the digital dating era. It is so common that most people who have dated in the past decade have experienced it from one side or the other, and its prevalence has normalized […]
Why your partner’s bad mood becomes yours and how to stop it

Most people understand that living in close quarters with someone means sharing the occasional cold or flu. What fewer people realize is that emotions travel just as easily between people who are close sometimes without either person noticing until the damage is done. Researchers refer to this as emotional contagion, the process by which one […]
Marriage secrets most couples wish they knew sooner

There is no shortage of advice when it comes to love. Songs have been written about it, therapists have built careers around it, and nearly every cultural tradition holds marriage as one of life’s most sacred milestones. Yet somewhere between the proposal and the first anniversary, many couples find themselves blindsided — not by catastrophe, […]
Why feeling alone is more dangerous than being alone

You can be in a room full of people and still feel completely invisible. Most of us understand that feeling intuitively, but now science is catching up. Loneliness has far less to do with how many people are in your life and far more to do with how you feel within those relationships. The first […]
What nobody tells you about how parenthood changes your relationship and how to protect your partnership through it

Parenthood is one of life’s most profound experiences, and it is also one of the most reliably documented sources of romantic relationship decline in the research literature. Studies examining relationship satisfaction before and after the birth of a first child consistently find that the majority of couples experience a significant drop in satisfaction within the […]
How celibacy is challenging everything the hookup generation was told about sex

Celibacy is a word that has spent most of its modern life associated with religious vows, cultural conservatism, or involuntary circumstances that nobody particularly wanted to discuss. That association is shifting. A growing number of people, particularly among younger adults who came of age in the era of dating apps and hookup culture, are choosing […]