Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
Joan Didion's most quoted sentence is usually read as poetry. A growing body of psychological research suggests it was something closer to a clinical observation about how the self actually holds together.
If you are personally navigating loss and would like to speak with someone, the GriefShare directory can help you find local support groups…
A study published in Nature Communications found that a 50 per cent chance of pain is more stressful than pain itself — which reframes premature decisions as a coping mechanism, not a personality trait.
The widow who keeps cooking for two isn't in denial — she's running a routine her body wrote down over decades of marriage, and that routine may be doing the actual work of grief.
The maintained drawer in an otherwise drifting house isn't inconsistency. It's a small, intelligent act of self-regulation built in childhood and quietly load-bearing ever since.
The standard explanation for why high achievers feel insecure is impostor syndrome. But for many, competence was never about pride or achievement. It was a strategy a child invented to avoid being examined too closely — and the strategy outlived its usefulness decades ago.
The company’s historical market share concerns rough diamond production and supply, rather than ownership of every diamond on Earth.
Frances Gerety scribbled 'A Diamond Is Forever' late one night in 1947 at a Philadelphia ad agency. The four-word line reshaped marriage across 40 countries. She never married.
The shift from parent-as-role to parent-as-person rarely arrives through the structured conversation everyone keeps trying to have. It arrives sideways, in a sentence so small it barely registers — and that's exactly why it works.
Late-life downsizing is often misread as surrender or morbid preparation. Looked at honestly, it's something else entirely: a deliberate, generous act by an older adult who remembers what it was like to sort through their own parents' house and is determined to spare their children the same burden.
The latchkey generation isn't mourning the absence of safety — they're mourning a daily expectation of competence that the current world has quietly stopped requiring. Psychology suggests the loss is real.
Long marriages don't deepen at anniversaries or milestones. They deepen on the ordinary Tuesday when one partner finally drops the curated version they were performing — and the other one chooses to stay anyway. Here's the psychology of why the unmasking moment matters more than any occasion.
