Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
The twenty-minute parking lot pause looks like poor time management. It is actually a self-engineered threshold ritual — a small, defended pocket of autonomy in a day otherwise structured by other people's demands.
Some friendships don't end in conflict — they simply thin until neither of you is quite sure when the last real conversation happened. Psychologists call this ambiguous loss, and it may be one of the most under-grieved experiences of adult life.
We are writers and editors, not clinicians, psychologists, or therapists.
Charisma has a reputation problem.
Years ago in Dublin, I was working in finance and I did the thing you are not supposed to do at your desk.
The usual story about people who stay fit into their 70s is a story about exceptional character.
The friendships people carry into old age often look, from the outside, like proof of loyalty.
The uncomfortable part of happiness research is not that money fails to matter, or that relationships fail to matter, or that health fails to matter.
When an older adult starts giving things away, the easy reading is that they are preparing to disappear.
Nearly three in ten American homes now contain exactly one person.
The person who has cooked the same five meals for thirty years isn't stuck in a rut. They've built something quieter and more durable: mastery of a small domain, and the self-respect that comes with it.
Washing a mug the moment you set it down isn't about tidiness — it's a small, repeatable act of self-management that hijacks the brain's avoidance circuitry before it has a chance to fire. The psychology of why the tiniest completions carry disproportionate weight.
