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Aside from fuelling jokes about how women impose unrealistic standards on men, or how men are just grown-up children who want their wives to be their mothers, the expectations couples place on their relationship define how they relate to each other, and influence marital satisfaction.

“Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.”— Bertolt Brecht

In my humble but literary-educated opinion, Tim Winton is Australia’s finest living novelist. Since winning publication of his first novel in a competition for young writers in 1981, he has had 10 more novels published, as well as collections of stories, plays, books for younger readers and a handful of non-fiction works. Winton has won Australia’s top literary prize—the Miles Franklin Award—on four...

Some psychologists fear that religion erodes self-esteem. Some believers fear that self-esteem endangers salvation. Who is right?

Life is not just a very cool gift. It is something that a person receives on loan from God. That's the conclusion of Oscar, the child hero of "Oscar and the Lady in Pink," a novel written by Franco-Belgian playwright, short story writer, and novelist Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt.

Did you wrestle with your decision to have children? Or did you know motherhood was for you from a long time back? More than six years ago, I found myself wondering about children. I couldn’t really find a “point” to having children. “Underpinning all of these [ideas] was the knowledge that the world is overpopulated and under-resourced,” I had written.

The first time Judas's kiss was heard was in the Garden of Gethsemane. However, its echo is repeated whenever the trust of an unsuspecting soul is betrayed. Betrayal, especially when it wears the mask of faith, tears apart the moral fabric of those who are wounded by it.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.

Sports betting may seem to be a harmless way to unwind, but the relationship between winning and losing is, mostly, not in the player’s favour. Moreover, the road from entertainment to addiction can prove to be a short one, while the recovery process is arduous and long.

There have always been people who relish a debate—though all too often, even when the subject hardly matters, the whole exercise amounts to little more than intellectual gymnastics in a thimble and scholarly squabbles over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

The Japanese Okinawans have a peculiar way of eating that supposedly extends their lifespan. What can we learn from them?

"I was wrong. I'm sorry"—these words can have a magical effect on a struggling relationship. But if we fail to show empathy, the apology will sound fake or hurt the offended person even more.

We log onto Facebook without any particular goal in mind. Perhaps we want to see what our friends are doing, or maybe we just want to pass the time or feel connected for a few minutes. Our feed appears as a natural succession of fragments: a family photo, an ironic comment, or an article shared by someone we know. Nothing seems forced. Nothing...

When it comes to purchasing food, price often guides our decision-making. We tend to believe that anything more expensive is also of higher quality. This perception can be true, but only to a certain extent.

I’ll never be able to separate the memories of childhood from that of books. They intertwine like colours in fabrics, in a jumble of real and fantastical, bitter and sweet, joy and guilt.