To ascertain what type they might be, respondents are asked to report which of the following three statements they can most closely relate to: 1. “I want emotionally close relationships, but I find that other people are often disappointing or mean without good reason. I worry that I will be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to others. I

Through the lens of Romanticism there can be, quite simply, no greater betrayal. Even for those willing to countenance almost every other kind of behavior, adultery remains the one seismic transgression, appalling in its violation of a series of the most sacred assumptions of love. The first of these is that one person can’t possibly claim to love

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love. Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through

When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

For Rabih it is assigning too great a weight to his feelings to let them be the lodestars by which his life must always be guided. He is a chaotic chemical proposition in dire need of basic principles to which he can adhere during his brief rational spells. He knows to feel grateful for the fact that his external circumstances will sometimes be out

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. With infinite

By then, a standard, wholly nonjudgmental line of inquiry—appropriate even on a first date—to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and nondefensive answer, would simply be: “So, in what ways are you mad?”

Mrs. Fairbairn is helping to defuse bombs. It might seem silly to spend fifty minutes (and £75) on how Rabih responded when Kirsten called upstairs to him for the second time to make his way down to lay the table, or Kirsten’s way of reacting to Esther’s disappointing geography results. But these are the breeding grounds for issues that, if left

for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.