Relationships

Relationships

With Valentine's Day around the corner, you might be thinking about buying a sexy gift for someone you love, or for yourself, and feeling completely overwhelmed by the options. This week on Just Between Us, Jennifer Zamparelli is joined by Shawna Scott of Sex Siopa to cut through the confusion and talk sex toys without shame or pressure. From bullets to bondage, dildos to dilators,

Monogamy, you may have heard, is in crisis. Fewer people are in relationships, let alone opting to be in one 'til death. And even those who have already exchanged vows seem to be increasingly looking for wiggle room. Quiet divorce mentally checking out of your union, rather than going through the rigmarole of formally dissolving it is reportedly on the rise, as is ethical non-monogamy (ENM) and opening up a relationship to include other partners.

What they say instead is something softer, more nuanced: " I just want space." They describe feeling overwhelmed when their partner asks for physical affection, quality time, or emotional closeness. Not because those requests are unreasonable, but because they feel they have nothing left to give. What can look like withdrawal from love in fact often seems more like emotional exhaustion.

After more than two decades as a psychosexual therapist, I have learned to listen carefully for what people are not saying. When vulnerability is close to the surface, uncertainty shows up quickly. Am I doing this right? Do I belong here? What am I allowed to ask for, and what will it cost me if I do? At its core, psychosexual therapy is not really about sex.

My husband apparently believes it is perfectly acceptable-reasonable, even-to use the bathroom toilet plunger in the kitchen sink without washing it first. Not a new plunger. Not a "sink-only" plunger. The plunger. The one whose sole purpose in life is to do battle with human waste. His argument is that "it's fine," "it's basically clean," and my personal favorite, "it's just water."

To start, resentment is a complex emotion rooted in anger and typically involves feeling slighted in some way. In my clinical experience, because of a sense of being slighted, mistreated, or wronged, many people direct their resentment toward someone else and focus on that person and the mistreatment. And since I am a sex and couples therapist, in my office, someone else is typically their partner.

Now fast forward to your fifties. You've just moved to a new neighborhood, or maybe you're trying to expand your social circle after years of focusing on career and family. You put yourself out there, join a book club, strike up conversations at the gym. But somehow, those easy connections that once felt automatic now feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

When I first read that couples who touch while sleeping report 94% relationship satisfaction compared to just 68% for those who don't, I nearly fell off my chair. Could something as simple as nighttime cuddling really make that much difference? After diving deep into the research and reflecting on my own relationship, I discovered that those quiet moments of physical closeness might be one of the most underrated predictors of relationship happiness.

Most of these traditions began out of necessity. One couple I spoke with started their at-home Valentine's tradition 35 years ago when they had two kids under five and couldn't afford both a babysitter and a nice dinner. They decided to put the kids to bed early, cook steaks together, and eat by candlelight in their dining room. "We thought we'd go back to restaurants once the kids were older and we had more money," the wife told me, laughing.

When my grandmother passed away three years ago, I watched my family transform into people I barely recognized. The woman who'd been my biggest supporter left behind more than just her handwritten letters that I still keep. She left a family suddenly wrestling over who got her wedding china, her favorite armchair, and even who deserved to keep the voicemail messages she'd left on their phones. The money part? That was straightforward.

In New York, sex-positive communities have evolved into something more organized than outsiders tend to imagine. Not just parties, but curated ecosystems built on vetting, trust, and a shared commitment to consent. Alain Rostain, a Yale-trained computer scientist and longtime consultant, spent much of his life drawn to power, structure, and desire. Eventually, he applied the same thinking he used in professional settings to the messiest arena of all: intimacy.

Growing up outside Manchester, Sunday dinners at our house were an event. Not because we had fancy food-it was usually whatever Mum could stretch from the weekly shop-but because that's when everything stopped. Dad would turn off the telly, my sister would put down her magazine, and we'd all squeeze around our small kitchen table. Those conversations over shepherd's pie taught me more about life than any expensive holiday ever could.

Should I try to seek closure with a person I used to love but drifted apart from, or is it best to leave them be? There's a person I used to be really close to who doesn't talk to me any more. We didn't have a fight. We just drifted, but I still think about them all the time. We were really close from year 7 to year 12. The truth is I had a devastating crush on her. I told her about it one day; she let me down very sweetly and our friendship continued. She was the first (and so far only) person I've ever felt I loved. She's the reason I identify as bi. And I believed for a few years she loved me too, if in a different way to how I hoped.

But psychologists studying long-term couples have discovered something surprising: compatibility isn't the strongest predictor of whether relationships last. Instead, research points to a specific communication style that distinguishes couples who go the distance from those who don't. It's not about how often you communicate, how well you express love, or even how skillfully you resolve conflicts. It's about something more fundamental-a pattern of interaction that either strengthens your bond over time or slowly erodes it.

How often do you make jokes that offend your wife? If this happens a lot, I'd apologize for the whole pattern and let her know in very direct language that you want to work on it. If this is a one-time issue, consider whether you've clearly apologized. Ideally, an apology contains a direct acknowledgement of what you did, an accurate description of how that hurt the other person, and some fairly feasible statement of what you're doing to prevent recurrence of the same issue.

The man is pleasant and friendly. If I had not known this information, I would have suggested he and his wife get together with my husband and other friends. There are no children in my household, so no one would be endangered by his presence. Should this information about his sex offender status change how I see or respect him? Neither he nor his wife knows that I know, and I don't plan to tell them or anyone else.

There are two types of people in the world: type A and type B. Or so common wisdom says, anyway - of course, as with anything human, we're all much more complex than that. Still, sorting people into type A and type B categories can sometimes serve as useful shorthand for understanding ourselves and others. This is especially true in romantic relationships.

For Sam and Avery, the argument didn't begin as an argument. It came up the way it often did, in the margins of an already long day. Avery had stayed late at work again. Sam had handled dinner, emails from the school, and a tense phone call with Avery's mother, who still stumbled over pronouns and pretended not to notice when corrected.

The culprit? Neuroticism - one of the five major personality traits psychologists use to understand human behavior. This isn't about occasionally feeling anxious or having a bad day. It's about a persistent pattern of emotional instability that creates a toxic cycle in relationships. Researchers Lowell Kelly and James Connelly put it bluntly: "High neuroticism is uniformly bad news in this context." They found that neuroticism doesn't just make relationships harder - it actively undermines them in ways that communication techniques alone can't fix.

When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.

One of my colleagues has the annoying habit of entering my office without knocking. These are not social visits: She invariably needs help with her computer or wants to borrow instructional materials, and she just opens the door and walks in. Before we moved to this building, her office was a few doors down from mine, and she would simply shout for me whenever she needed something. If I didn't respond, she would shout louder.

I practice what I call breakup therapy - a short-term treatment I developed for couples who want to end their relationships without bitterness. The premise is counterintuitive: Instead of looking forward toward separate futures, we look backward at the relationship itself. It's structured to look at the beginning, middle and end of their time together with exercises that focus on both their gratitude as well as their resentment.

"Well, they could get separate beds. They could put a wall up. They could sleep on the convertible couch," Corcoran told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Monday.

As a result of multiple disabilities, my wife may never be able to have sex with me again, or at least not for a long time. She always had a low libido, but recent developments have made sex actively difficult and unpleasant for her. I love my wife and do not wish to divorce her, but this presents a problem for me, because I have a very active libido.

The air feels heavier. And the struggles are changing shape. Beyond my office walls, the world is shifting, and my clients sense the tremors. The things they once trusted, global order, democratic norms, and even their own personal safety, no longer feel solid. They feel brittle, as if one strong wind could bring it all down. And what they're sensing isn't imagined.

When I was eight, my grandmother taught me how to make her famous apple pie. But it wasn't really about the pie. Every Saturday afternoon, we'd stand side by side in her kitchen, her weathered hands guiding mine as we rolled out dough. She'd tell stories about her childhood, ask about my week at school, and somehow make me feel like the most important person in the world.

At its core, premarital counseling is meant to prepare you and your partner for all the challenges that will test your commitment to one another. It's important to explore topics such as finances, family size, and how to manage in-laws before marriage, but we also need to recognize that the plan decided before marriage may not always apply in 5, 10, or 20 years. Premarital counseling can potentially teach you how to communicate effectively and what you need to discuss.

What should you do when a friend shares a dream with you, and you immediately see vital meanings in it that your friend doesn't seem to see? If you are someone who is a naturally insightful dreamer and/or has studied methods of dream interpretation, you may suddenly find yourself in these awkward positions of unequal knowledge and awareness. What's your best approach in responding?

"It means showing up and navigating discomfort by having honest conversations, and it sometimes means choosing your partner when it's hard and doesn't feel super cozy. There's no sweeping music and no perfect lighting - just a partnership that grows stronger the more you actually do the work."

To have a good relationship, you have to put in effort. Your effort should go towards communicating well, for example, learning to bring up concerns in a considerate way and working on listening rather than getting defensive. You should also have the necessary, but uncomfortable, conversations that help a relationship thrive, such as conflict repair discussions and talks that help you work as a team to meet each other's needs.