Relationships

Relationships

Just ask: 'what makes you feel most loved?' She says the answer can reveal emotional needs even long-term couples may not fully understand. 'It helps couples understand each other's love languages, what each person needs to feel special and cared for,' Nadkarni told Reader's Digest. Even highly compatible couples can differ in attachment styles and love languages, which can affect how they give and receive affection.

Using experiments where over 100 university students were confronted with differing viewpoints, either during an online chat or while watching a video, researchers discovered that simply 'feeling heard' sparked more positivity and interest. Even if the two people never agree on a specific topic, asking someone to lay out the key points of their argument made participants feel like someone was interested in their opinion.

I'm on the fence about using a chatbot to represent yourself in the online app to flirt better,

Letting our dogs lick the dishes before we put them in the dishwasher!

Love is more than a physical attraction and belief in the concept of soul mates. Love is also about choices, decisions, and even forgiveness. Lasting relationships can thrive when partners: Gratitude strengthens love It was a conversation with John Kralik, author of 365 Thank Yous, that inspired Revitalize Your Love Life with a Three-Day Gratitude Plan. With the gratitude plan, you are essentially clearing out feelings that keep your relationship from thriving. The ultimate goal is to create a mindset for unconditional love.

Relationships that matter will, at some point, require two people to sit across from each other and have a hard conversation. Disappointment, hurt, boundaries, power, change, or loss-no matter how emotionally challenging the topic, they're all non-negotiable subjects that need to be discussed in relationships. In a sense, they're a part of the regular relationship curriculum that people don't talk about.

After the whirlwind of the holidays, it's no wonder you're exhausted by the start of February. So exhausted, you may forget that Valentine's Day is a mere six days away. By the time the romantic holiday rolls around, the entire holiday section of your local drugstore probably looks like a zombie apocalypse. It's hard to find so much as a chocolate bar, let a lone a nice-looking card to express your love.

When Lily Telloyan was in middle school, her household grew from two generations to four. Her grandparents and great-grandmother were getting older, so her parents moved the whole family under one roof in Lansing, Michigan. Nearly 20 years later, four generations of the family are living together again. After spending her college years in Indiana and then moving in with her husband, Alex, in Lansing, Lily started thinking about multigenerational living again.

Parents hold a key that grants access to areas of their child's life that no one else can enter a foundational intimacy. However, more and more people are choosing to sever that bond and throw the key away. It's difficult to quantify how many children have decided to stop speaking to their parents, although some studies point to a steady increase in recent years.

Profound love is about the desire to live with a partner who can thrive in a mutual relationship. Sometimes, life wins out over love, and one partner may say, "I will always love you, but we cannot flourish together." Profound love isn't always synonymous with long-term love; some couples divorce despite deep affection. The heart of enduring love is the capacity to bring out the best in each other.

For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions. This week, a reader is frustrated that his partner of nearly a decade is avoidant with financial planning. Our columnist suggests either being comfortable with separate finances or gently guiding his partner along her personal finance journey. Dear For Love & Money, My partner and I have been together for almost 10 years now.

You get a coffee. The barista tells you how much you need to pay. You say thank you. They take your card for payment. They say thank you. They give you the coffee. You say thank you. They say thank you for your thank you. Then you say thank you for their thank you. By this point, the words thank you have lost all meaning, and both parties are exhausted by the pointless stream of politeness.

Here's something that might surprise you: older women often get bombarded with messages on dating apps. But before you think "that sounds great," let me explain why it's actually exhausting. According to the Pew Research Center, "Women are five times as likely as men to think they were sent too many messages." For women over 55, this often translates into dozens of generic "hey beautiful" messages from men who clearly haven't read their profiles, mixed with inappropriate comments about their appearance or worse, explicit photos nobody asked for.

Ever wonder why you're exhausted trying to maintain relationships with everyone from your high school lab partner to that person you met at a conference three years ago? Here's something that might surprise you: anthropologist Robin Dunbar's research suggests our brains can only handle about 150 social connections, and of those, only five make up our innermost circle. That's right, five.

Ever notice how some couples navigate the grocery store like a well-choreographed dance while others seem to be having entirely different shopping experiences in the same aisle? Last weekend, I watched a couple in the produce section operate with this almost telepathic efficiency - one grabbed tomatoes while the other weighed bananas, no words needed. Meanwhile, my partner and I were having our usual debate about whether we really needed three types of cheese.

The beer garden continues its annual tradition of destroying bitter feelings. On February 13 from 4 PM to 9:30 PM, head to the Shaw location and write your woes on the large piece of paper. Someone will read the grievances out loud, and then run them through a shredder. Prefer pyromania? At the Navy Yard location, you have a chance to scribble your outrage onto wooden chips before throwing them into the fire.

Lately, I've started noticing the importance of friendship in my life. This comes at an unheard-of time of change, disruption, and societal trauma. While it may not be surprising that I'm personally feeling the importance of a few close, deep friends ('heart friends'), it spurred me into thinking about how others are faring at this time and how close, bonded friendships may help us. In fact, friendships are positively correlated with emotional well-being, which we all could use more of right now.

Have you ever noticed how some people never show up empty-handed? Whether they're coming over for a casual dinner or just stopping by for coffee, they always have something in hand - a bottle of wine, fresh flowers, or homemade cookies. It used to puzzle me until I realized these weren't random acts of generosity. These people were following an unspoken set of rules passed down through generations.

As Valentine's Day approaches, we start enjoying images of ruby-red hearts, kisses, and holding hands-ideals of romantic love. But what happens the day or week after? For some, there are engagements and celebrations; for others, hurts, disappointments, breakups-some of those ruby-red hearts, broken or cracked. Lasting romance is built on a kind of love that requires more than sexy lingerie and roses; it needs trust, openness, and mutual acceptance.

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,

We met on Tinder when I was 30. I was 33 when I got divorced. Very, very quickly, we absolutely adored each other.

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.