A Little Dating Wisdom: How to Avoid Crack Dealers

A staggering number of dating disasters can be traced to unconscious (automatic) choices. Self-awareness is crucial when it comes to changing bad attraction patterns, and very few forces push us to the edge of romantic disaster quite as quickly as reflexive, mindless decision making—except, of course, stubborn, conscious decision making.

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Talk Free Relationship Fix #1: Touch

We’ve always attributed special powers to touch. Our cultural imagination is teeming with images of catastrophic or transformational contact, both sacred and profane. God reaches out to touch Adam and offers the spark of life. Midas touches the world and all becomes still. A mother holds her child’s hand for the very first time and her entire world—everything around her—changes all at once.

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Five Ways to Stay Close after Kids

As promised, here’s a selection of some of my favorite post-kid intimacy enhancers. Ultimately, I learned all of them from my work with couples over the years, but each one of them is also heavily informed by my personal experience. I could probably launch a whole blog devoted to this topic,  but in the mean time, here’s something to kick things off.

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Kids Will Save Your Marriage!

The headline you’ll never see. The news for couples with kids is generally pretty bleak. We’re inundated by messages that children can be the death of a good relationship. That’s bad enough. But what’s even more troubling is that the reasons cited often ring true. Kids invade your bedroom.  They rule your schedule. They dictate where you go and how you spend your time.

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Shacking up without Breaking Up: Eight Steps You Should Take before Moving in Together

Living together can kick off a rich, new phase in your relationship.  It can also spell the end of things if you’re not careful. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it— the pros and the cons: Loves eggplant and Joss Whedon—check. Good communicator—check. Organizational skills of a three-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder—mostly minus (in fairness, the initial glow of infatuation might be raising your threshold for chaos a bit).

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