How to manage parent-child conflicts during the pandemic
One can hardly overestimate the role the relationship between a parent and their child plays in forming a matrix for the child’s future relationships, whether healthy or dysfunctional. The quality of the parent-child relationship is essential because it directly impacts the child’s social and emotional development, and its quality influences the child's ability to deal with future conflict.
“You can be happily married to anyone if you try hard enough.” True or false?
Can you be happily married to anyone? The idea of happiness as a thing of one's own creation persists in our times, although its cultural sedimentation belongs to the modern age.
How our friendships change throughout life
Because life in developed societies follows a more or less regular pattern, sociologists have managed to identify the age at which conditions are most conducive to forming a friendship. It's not that people who are not of this age are unable to form meaningful connections with other people, but at other ages, life takes us on different paths, without asking for our permission.
COVID-19: Helping children (and others) with viral anxiety
Even in difficult times there are many things we can do at home to help children as well as teenagers to feel less worried.
Marital incompatibility, and how to avoid it
Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself… We experience and treat ourselves as commodities, and [as if] our own powers have become alienated from ourselves… We are a herd believing that the road we follow must lead to a goal since we see everybody else on the same road. We are in the dark and keep up our courage because we hear...
“Pornography solves the couple’s intimacy problems.” True or false?
Some couples use pornography for sexual stimulation or educational purposes, to "spice up" their sex life. But while their intentions may be good, instead of helping, pornography can ruin a marriage.
Christ in them
I notice people, and passionately collect their stories. My favourite stories include those small cracks that allow one to peek inside another soul, those moments when their voice is almost imperceptibly altered, the eyes light up for a reason I do not know, and their gestures are unexpected.
The little secret that carries us further
The TV-series Friends was recently reviewed in The New York Times as “enormously easy to watch”. This characteristic however does not make the show unique, nor can it account for its popularity today, more than 15 years since its final episode.
When all direction is gone | How to survive adultery
Henri Nouwen once wrote about some trapeze artists who became his friends, emphasising the perfect synchronicity between them and the total trust that the one who jumps has when he lets go of the trapeze and remains in the air for a second, waiting to be caught by his teammate. But what if, at the last moment, when it is too late to...
Stuck in the waiting room
“Why are you still single?” Even though I have been asked this question countless times, I still never know how to answer it.
The one way road cancelled
I was there, I saw him. He was coming towards me mechanically, impassively, coldly. He suddenly stopped in front of me and waited for me to speak. For a moment, I froze. He was tall, thin, his face oval and his eyes blue, slightly sunken under his eyelids. I had met such people before, but there was something special about him.
COVID-19: What do we do after the relaxation of restrictions?
After the authorities in different countries announced a relaxation of the restrictions, people started to impatiently waiting for that, maybe even with plans to recover last bits of a confiscated spring.
How to be a better partner
We often forget that a relationship is the sum of two people—he + she = they—and what one does inevitably affects the other. That means each person’s behaviour influences the entire dynamic. Yet, more often than not, we focus on what the other person should or could do for us or for the relationship, and rarely stop to ask: What can I do...
When love blooms a second time | Couples who find each other after divorce
Many couples only realise after divorce the price they have paid for failing to find common ground, and a few even manage to rediscover the forgotten path to their partner's heart and to rebuild their relationship.
A second chance: faith in the forgiveness that transforms us
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.


























