A Practical Guide to the Psychology of Relationships: Build a Loving Partnership (Practical Guide Series)

by John Karter

it has been said that we never see people as they truly are. Authority figures are frequent triggers for this kind of distortion.

My wife and I no longer have anything in common but our differences. Oscar Wilde

A person who never received proper mothering in the sense of love, caring and attention and has consequently developed into an insecure adult lacking in self-esteem, is described as being ‘insecurely attached’.

The attraction of opposites and reproductive potential came out as relatively unimportant.

The irony is that people with lack of self-esteem will often compulsively seek relationships in an attempt to get the positive affirmation they need to make them feel ‘okay’. However, what they frequently get caught up in when they enter into a relationship is a phenomenon that is sometimes known as ‘elastic band syndrome’.

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. Woody Allen

the old adage which says: ‘Men seek love through sex and women seek sex through love’ has a degree of truth in it.

we might intend to remain faithful to our partners, but there are many factors luring us, urging us, or even predisposing us to do the opposite.

Fisher disputes this, offering four reasons why adultery could have been biologically adaptive for our female ancestors. First, a diversity of male partners could provide a woman with a variety of practical and material benefits for her and her offspring; second, adultery was a form of insurance in case a woman’s primary partner died or left; third, if a woman had a partner who was defective physically or emotionally, she could ‘upgrade’ her genetic line by having children by a more viable male; fourth, having children with a variety of partners, increased the likelihood that some of them would survive fluctuations in the environment.

‘Even in those cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.’

In their book, Why Women Have Sex, psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss debunk the idea that women do it for love and men for pleasure. The main reason women have sex, they discovered, is pure physical enjoyment: orgasms, and plenty of them.

In basic terms, the Oedipus complex refers to feelings connected to a child’s wish to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate that of the same sex.

the myth of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother without knowing that they were his parents.

Love isn’t finding a perfect person. It’s seeing an imperfect person perfectly. Sam Keen

Anna’s words highlight a basic truth: to a greater or lesser extent, we all love in different ways.

The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Scott Peck

Psychologist Robert Sternberg formulated the ‘triangular’ theory of love, which stipulated three components – intimacy, passion and commitment.

He suggests that love ‘only develops to the degree to which intimacy does, to the degree to which each partner is prepared to reveal concerns and needs to the other and to be vulnerable to that other’.

As for passion, it is often said that sex rather than love is the glue that holds relationships together;

we must remember the words of Benjamin Disraeli, who said: ‘Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.’

I shall end with a delightful little extract from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne that encapsulates this sentiment: ‘Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh!” he whispered. “Yes, Piglet?” “Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”’