Relationships

Daily stress is a good excuse to avoid other people's needs, but this choice is a double loss. The kindness we display to make other people's days better is a very strong antidote to the high level of stress we experience daily.

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.

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

Sartre may have been right when he said Hell is other people. Yet, for some, their first step toward Heaven is meeting the God who shelters in someone else's soul.

The loss of a loved one unbalances us; we are never ready for it. Here are a few recommendations given by psychologists for such a situation.

Trust is so difficult to build, and yet so easy to lose. A lie, a broken promise, or infidelity may lead to the weakening and breaking of trust between partners. Sometimes rebuilding that trust may seem impossible. But the good news is that it is possible to restore trust in a relationship.

There are many reasons why your daily interactions may become tense and even fractured, but if you decide to mend a relationship, you could also take a few extra steps to improve it.

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.

11pm and I am worried my patient will not make it till tomorrow morning, says Dr Glenn Wakam. Twelve hours after intubation, the COVID-19 patient's condition deteriorates dramatically, and Wakam knows that an even more difficult intervention follows: to explain to the patient's wife, who begs to be allowed to say goodbye, that the hospital does not allow her this sad privilege.

Statistically, by now Josh should have been either in jail, living on the street, or dead. The long years in which he was abused and expelled from the families who took him in made him no longer trust anyone. But the love of adults who showed him that they cared was stronger than anything that pushed him toward self-destruction.

When life takes a bad turn, we are often tempted to console ourselves with nostalgia. We begin to look at the past in a different light. We realise that we had been too demanding of ourselves, of others, of the world. That even though we had everything we needed we still wanted more. That we were always looking for something else, without paying...

Even in difficult times there are many things we can do at home to help children as well as teenagers to feel less worried.

Compromise is always present in relationships. It may pull us down, but it can also be a good reconciliation exercise when there are differences that cannot be resolved in any other way.

Nobody likes to lose an argument. The feeling of being proven wrong is never a good one. At best, it might provide a slight dent to your ego or sense of self. At worst, it can be a thoroughly humiliating affair, or reveal that one of the foundations of your beliefs is invalid or misplaced. But no matter where it lands on the...

Among the greatest disappointments of life is having our expectations unfulfilled; not by politicians, or publications that promote false news or weather forecasts, but by those close to us—people in whom we have invested our confidence.