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On Love — On loving and being loved

• [article] BDSM as a lazy ideology — 17 Jan 2025
  BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
• [article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III — 27 Sep 2024
  This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just <em>stop bothering them with all their pedantry</em> and just let them be who they are.”
• [article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II — 20 Sep 2024
  I guarantee, no matter how sexy traditional gender roles are to you, that you do <em>not</em> want to be like Gray’s ‘men’.
• [article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. I — 13 Sep 2024
  Not only is there is absolutely no difference between men and women in how they complain or offer criticism, but the ‘men’ Gray describe could be used as textbook example of people with social anxiety.
• [article] Our success is not our own — 23 Jun 2022
  The success of the people we surround ourselves with directly influences our performance and sense of accomplishment. It’s worth paying attention to how we balance this, both with those more successful but also those less.
• [article] The value of relationship control — 13 May 2022
  ‘Control’ isn’t always a bad thing in a relationship. In fact it’s necessary. We always have a level of control over our partners, we must just use it with their approval, and to meet their needs as well as ours.
• [article] Explaining group dynamics — 29 Mar 2022
  Group dynamics are often thought to be a complicated thing to explore. But a 50-year-old model explains much of it with only three things: a need for Belonging, for Affection, and for Control.
• [article] The true meaning of family ties — 24 Sep 2020
  It’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of. This article is about the latter.
• [article] The loneliness epidemic — 20 Sep 2020
  One in five people are lonely. This is not trivial. Loneliness is emerging as one of the greatest threats to physical and emotional health. And it shouldn’t be, because unlike many of our most intractable problems, this one seems so solvable.
• [article] Folie à deux: the madness of two — 10 Sep 2020
  Folie à deux is a striking phenomenon, but poorly understood. It seems to me that it might be just one misleading face of social isolation.
• [article] On Emotion — 31 Jul 2020
  Emotion is an impossible term to define. Seems important though, so let’s try anyway.
• [article] On attraction and love — 13 Mar 2020
  Much is written on the subject of attractiveness. It has become synonymous with beauty. Attractive celebrities, attractive influencers, attractive art. And through this myopic lens, attraction becomes something ugly. Something that people have or do not have. Something to be jealous of. Something to be torn down. But it doesn’t have to be. It can actually be something very beautiful indeed.
• [article] Attractiveness might be more about the environment, than about you — 23 Aug 2018
  There are a number of things that occur naturally in our environment that can alter the attraction we feel for people. These things might seem small, but they have an outsize influence on our preferences for people.
• [article] Coming together - the pattern of friendship and love — 12 Jun 2018
  Making and keeping our connections to others remains one of the fundamental arts we learn in life. And having a stickybeak into other people’s relationships is one of the fundamental past times. But if there’s one thing psychologists are good at, it’s identifying patterns in the way people behave. In that spirit, this model describes the process of people coming together used in the counselling office and by counsellors people-watching over coffee that’s quite beautiful.
• [article] The most powerful way to get someone to like you, is to like them first — 23 Apr 2018
  One of our most powerful urges is to be liked. Strange to find, then, that one of the most powerful influences on our likeability is whether others think we like them—‘reciprocal liking’.