Endings & Repair
What people say they learned
Accounts from people looking back on relationships that ended converge on a small number of observations.
Relationship Punch — Say the difficult thing kindly
Endings & Repair
Starting again, with what you know now
A short account of what the evidence across this whole subject actually supports, for anyone beginning again.
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Endings & Repair
Recovering, and what actually helps
The research on adjustment after separation is unglamorous and reasonably clear about what makes a difference.
Endings & Repair
The conversation that ends it
Ending a long relationship in person is one of the harder things people do, and there is a form that reduces the damage.
Family & Parenting
Friendship after children
Social networks contract sharply after a first child, and the loss has consequences for the couple that are rarely connected to it.
Conflict
Fighting about nothing
Disproportionate conflict over trivial subjects usually has a small number of ordinary causes, most of them physiological.
Communication
Talking to a partner about their family
Among the most difficult conversations available, with a set of rules that make it survivable.
Dating
All dating →
Dating
Being wrong about your own relationship
People inside a relationship are systematically poor observers of it, in directions that are documented.
Dating
The friends who see it before you do
External observers predict relationship outcomes better than the people in them, which is worth knowing and difficult to use.
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.
Communication
All communication →Communication
Talking to a partner about their family
Among the most difficult conversations available, with a set of rules that make it survivable.
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.
Communication
Saying no to a partner
Refusal inside a close relationship is harder than in almost any other context, and avoiding it produces worse outcomes than doing it badly.
Conflict
All conflict →Conflict
Fighting about nothing
Disproportionate conflict over trivial subjects usually has a small number of ordinary causes, most of them physiological.
Conflict
The argument that becomes about the argument
Meta-conflict consumes the time available and resolves nothing, and it has a small number of recognisable entry points.
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.
Attachment
All attachment →
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
Love languages: what the evidence says
An enormously popular framework with a weak evidential base and a genuinely useful idea buried inside it.
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.
Family & Parenting
All family & parenting →Family & Parenting
Friendship after children
Social networks contract sharply after a first child, and the loss has consequences for the couple that are rarely connected to it.
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.
Family & Parenting
Holidays, and why they produce so many arguments
A period of enforced proximity, high expectations and disrupted routine, which is a reliable formula.
Endings & Repair
All endings & repair →
Endings & Repair
Starting again, with what you know now
A short account of what the evidence across this whole subject actually supports, for anyone beginning again.
Endings & Repair
What people say they learned
Accounts from people looking back on relationships that ended converge on a small number of observations.
Endings & Repair
Recovering, and what actually helps
The research on adjustment after separation is unglamorous and reasonably clear about what makes a difference.
About Relationship Punch
Dating, conflict, attachment, repair and separation — what relationship research actually finds, and how it plays out in an ordinary argument on a Wednesday night. We publish explanatory articles rather than news, which means an article here is written to still be useful a year from now. Every piece is bylined, sourced and read by an editor before it appears — the full process is set out in our editorial policy.