Relationships, identity and social behaviour, including how institutions and technologies reshape the way people live together.
625 articles · Relationships & Society
After decades of perfecting the art of not needing anyone, a recent life transition has shattered my carefully constructed armor, forcing me to confront the terrifying truth that my independence was never strength—it was just fear dressed up as self-reliance.
We've got loneliness backwards.
I said yes to a project last Tuesday that I didn't want to do.
The phone call you didn't know you were making There's a 2018 paper out of UC Davis that describes something called compensation.
I drafted a text last Tuesday night that I still haven't sent.
Research links perceived control with anxiety, but the studies cited here do not establish an aisle-seat personality type or a construct called “autonomous exit”.
There's a version of you that doesn't exist anymore.
For about thirteen years, I treated happiness like a project. Something to research, optimize, and eventually achieve. I read the books. I tried the practices. I moved countries, changed careers, built a business, found a partner. Each of these things was, on some level, an attempt to arrive at a place where I could finally … Read more
Participants in one network study expected 94% of their reported friendship ties to be mutual; 53% were reciprocated within the sample.
Here's a pattern that kept showing up across decades of research, no matter who ran the numbers or where they looked: happiness follows a U-shaped curve.
Nobody wakes up on a cold morning, alarm screaming, and thinks: yes, this is exactly the moment I've been waiting for.
The dishes are done, the house is quiet, and I've mastered every responsibility of adult life so perfectly that I've become a ghost haunting my own existence.
