Insights into the Mind

When I searched for advice on dating after being widowed young, everything I found was aimed at people in their 50s and 60s. The guidance assumed you’d been married for decades, that your friends understood loss, that you’d already done the work of being partnered as an adult. But dating after being widowed young — … Read more

Research into how couples actually communicate keeps turning up the same uncomfortable pattern: knowing the “right” way to argue and being able to use it mid-conflict are two completely different skills. I ran headfirst into that gap myself a few years back, when a counsellor advised me to “fight fair.” I nodded along as if … Read more

Why does every disagreement with your partner seem to circle back to the exact same place? Usually it’s because you’re not actually having new arguments at all — you’re replaying one familiar pattern without realising it. I noticed this myself years back, while I was working through my own anxiety: my partner would raise something … Read more

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with not knowing whether to stay or go. It’s not the tiredness of a rough patch—those you can usually feel your way through. This is different. It’s the paralysis of genuinely not knowing if you should break up, of lying awake at 3 a.m. replaying conversations, of … Read more

We have turned relationships into projects. There are goals. Check-ins. Growth metrics. Communication frameworks. Date night schedules colour-coded in shared calendars. Quarterly reviews of emotional intimacy. Couples therapy workbooks with homework assigned like GCSE revision. I want to argue — carefully, and with genuine reluctance — that this relentless optimisation might itself be a source … Read more

There’s a version of rebuilding trust after infidelity that lives in self-help books and therapist offices. It’s linear. It has stages. You find out, you feel devastated, you have a difficult conversation where he (or she) takes full accountability, you both commit to the work, and then — through couples therapy and honest communication — … Read more

When people ask me what couples therapy is really like, they usually expect a clean answer. They want to know: Does it work? How long does it take? Will the therapist take sides? What I rarely hear is someone asking what it actually feels like to sit in that room, week after week, with the … Read more

Over four months, I collected responses from 500 single people across the US and UK—250 from each country, balanced across genders, all aged 21 to 45. What emerged from our modern dating survey 2026 results was something I wasn’t entirely expecting: a profound disconnect between what people say they want from dating and what they’re … Read more