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The seduction survey (see separate tab above) is now open.  The aim of the survey is to try to understand what are the factors, tendencies and behaviours that are conducive to an active sex life in modern long-term romantic relationships. The survey is anonymous and takes about five minutes.  I hope that the questions themselves will be useful to you as they cover a broad array of tendencies.  Click here to take the

“Love, at the very heart of a couple relationship, is a state that is often far from realistic – it can be full of idealisation, blurred boundaries, fantasy and illusion”.  Julie Friend

Finding who the other really is often brings surprises, some of which are gratifying whilst the others challenging.  And so, it seems to me that love alone is not enough for a fulfilling relationship – what is required is that we recognise and respect a sense of purpose in the other that is beyond the relationship, that we cherish the other’s deepest values and dreams.

In an article in the New York Times, the writer Jonathan Franzen wrote that “the prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.  And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetised dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived”.

I believe that the capacity

Every relationship has hidden promises within it, ones that are seldom talked about.  During the lifetime of every relationship, some of these promises are kept and some are broken.  If we don’t talk openly about the broken silent promises we risk behaving like two warriors fighting each other with invisible weapons.

This is a fun and creative video describing what happens in our bodies during sex.

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be”.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being”.  John Joseph

A context in which time is a commodity – as happened during and post industrialisation – efficiency and productivity are goals in themselves and activities that don’t adhere are seen as undesirable and problematic. Thus we get labels such as procrastination, lack of commitment, instability, flakiness or simply laziness.

A context in which, for whatever cultural reasons, men are dissuaded from expressing the full range of human emotions, will naturally lead to limited expressions. For some, the range is so

Change, resistance and loss

In my previous post I wrote about the various factors that I believe make up psychotherapy and their contribution to its success.

Successful therapy is a subjective concept and hard to measure, it depends on what people say about how they feel.  Often, people come to therapy because they want to feel good and therapy can help in achieving that. Aside from feeling good, therapy has another purpose, to help people bring about