Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages books have helped so many couples. It’s so valuable to recognize that showing your love by being helpful can fail if your mate feels especially loved when she hears praise and enthusiasm. She may even take helpfulness, in the absence of the praise and enthusiasm that signified love and safety in her early years, as criticism of her ability to take...
Today, I read a sad Insider essay by Danielle Campoamor. She titled it “My partner and I have been together for 4 years — here’s why we will never get married.” I felt awful for Danielle. She’d been raised with two parents, a violently abusive father and a mother who put up with the abuse for twenty years before she divorced him. Not a great way to learn about love...
As a lot of you know, I’ve been working with Barbara Sher, author of all those great books on how to live a life you love, for a dozen years or so. She taught me the incredible power of saying “I want ____, but I don’t know how to _____.” If you go silent for a bit after saying this, most people will do mental somersaults to help you find a way around your obstacle...
There’s an article by Gemma Hartley getting a lot of attention this week. The title is Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up. I find myself crying for Gemma and for all those women posting on social media that they, too, are fed up and nearing divorce. The tears come because I remember exactly what this feels like. It was 1986 (I can’t believe it was 31 years ago...
Congratulations to the state of New York for its new law, signed this past Tuesday. No longer can 14, 15, and 16-year-olds in the state get married or, in many cases, be forced to marry, and those who are 17 will still need their parents’ or a judge’s consent. Obviously, this protects children, especially girls forced into marriages to significantly older men. It also protects...
