No marriage is perfect. Too often when partners seek a perfect or idealized version of marriage, they run up against a wall. Expecting something you will never obtain can lead to resentment, frustration, and anger. Marital hatred is a real phenomenon, especially for couples in lengthy marriages. Although the feeling is authentic, it’s usually fleeting, and the couple learns to manage these emotions in the natural course of their long-term relationship. Although marriage resea

Many of us recall the launch of the first online dating service, Match.com, but dating apps existed thirty years earlier when a team of Harvard undergraduates created the first of its kind in 1965. Over time, popularity exploded with most dating couples today reporting to have used one or more of these tools in pursuit of love. Although helpful for finding potential matches they would not have met otherwise, it’s important for the dating app user to understand that embedded w

If you’re on the dating scene, you’ve heard incredible stories of daters being stashed, breadcrumbed, ghosted, and ghostlighted. While these stories sound dreadful, they grow more horrific when you become one of the unlucky daters who experienced one of these tactics. You quickly understand the tactics’ abusive nature and the humiliation they provoke. More often than not, due to embarrassment or feelings of culpability, when someone is hurt by one of these four tactics, they

Regardless of the length of your relationship or how well you communicate with each other, talking about your sex life with your partner can fall out of sync. Your partner may complain that the two of you aren’t romantic anymore and recall earlier times in your relationship when you couldn’t keep your hands off each other, wondering what happened to the two of you. This shift isn’t abnormal nor is it indicative of a rocky relationship. More likely than not, it is a product of

When reading the classics, we observe the power of letter writing between couples, an essential communication tool for feeling close and connected. Films such as “The Notebook,” a romantic favorite set shortly after World War II, illustrate the importance of communicating via love letters to demonstrate deep emotions for a partner with words on paper. Today, we spend little time communicating with words. A short text, an emoji, or a date night (when we can squeeze it in) wher

This month, companies are throwing thousands of suggestions of what your man wants for Valentine’s Day. If you ask most guys what they want, they’ll say nothing. However, men thrive on feeling loved and desired by their partner just like women do. They aren’t always vulnerable or open about it and you may think they simply want more sex, but this isn’t true. Guys also don’t need expensive gifts; in fact, they don’t need you to spend any money at all. Below are four things tha

When a relationship ends, we experience a period of mourning. Within that grief, we explore our heart and soul recalling the details of every insult, selfish act, and painful moment we can conjure up - and it hurts. As we lay in bed late at night, we remember the turnaround points, possible openings, or moments we felt happy and question if we could have saved the inevitable from happening. We blame ourselves and our partner because, in society, a breakup is a negative concep