Fear of Intimacy

Commitment Issues: Why Some People Have Them and Others Don’t

Adam is smart, talented and attractive. He’s successful in business and has an exciting lifestyle. He’s a winner, everyone agrees…except his ex-girlfriends. Any one of them can tell a story about Adam that includes disappointment or betrayal. Adam is not malicious. Like anyone else, he wants intimacy… but only so much. If things get too… Read more »

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Just Be Kind: The Only Relationship Advice You’ll Ever Need

You may already be rolling your eyes at the vast oversimplification of this title… and if you were to go back to read the many articles I’ve written on relationships, you’d know that I don’t think the secret to romantic success can be boiled down to one simple piece of advice. However, if people ask… Read more »

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5 Ways You’re Rejecting Love

Most people don’t naturally think they reject love, but the question really isn’t whether we do or not, it’s how much we do and why. I’ve talked a lot in previous blogs about the reasons so many of us are, to some degree, afraid of love, but here I’ll explain the ways this fear manifests in our… Read more »

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Are You Single for the Right Reasons?

There is nothing wrong with being single. In fact, one of the most important lessons someone can learn is that they can be a whole and happy person on their own. A failure to recognize this can drive people into relationships that don’t satisfy them or that even make them miserable. Moreover, when their decision… Read more »

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How to Deal with Relationship Anxiety

Our relationships can be our deepest source of joy, but they can also be a breeding ground for anxious thoughts and feelings. Relationship anxiety can arise at pretty much any point in our romantic lives. For many single people, just the thought of being in a relationship can stir up stress. If and when they… Read more »

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7 Reasons Most People are Afraid of Love

What keeps us from finding and keeping the love we say we want? Around this time last year, Virgin Mobile USA proclaimed Feb. 13 to be “National Breakup Day.” They did so after conducting a survey in which 59 percent of people said that if they were looking to end their relationship, they would hypothetically do so… Read more »

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Why Do So Many People Respond Negatively to Being Loved?

Love — kindness, affection, sensitive attunement, respect, companionship — is not only difficult to find, but is even more challenging for many people to accept and tolerate.  In my work with individuals and couples, I have observed countless examples of people reacting angrily when loving responses were directed toward them. One man felt a flash… Read more »

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Angry at Love

Most of us aspire to find love. It is unquestionably one of the most important goals of our lives. Because of this nearly universal truth, it isn’t always easy for people to grasp the fact that most of us are also angry at love. It is often the case that no matter how long we… Read more »

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Why You Should Be the One Who Loves More

There is always a lot going on between two people in a relationship. But very often, much of what goes wrong in a relationship has to do with what’s going on in our own minds. Most of us have a constant dialogue running in our heads, analyzing our relationship and informing us on how to… Read more »

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How to Fix a Relationship

“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love When it comes to our relationships, the expectation of a perfect union or… Read more »

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