After Breaking up, Can We Still be Friends? [This was my first newspaper column, done in the 1970's. I still believe it, and our society still doesn't.]              Reader: My lover and I are breaking up a 16-month-long relationship. I want to hang onto this as a friendship, but he says it can’t be […]

  REVERSING UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS It seems to me that most Americans have one or more people somewhere in their family or friends that they just can't get along with.  The way it feels is like, "I just don't feel comfortable around them.  I can't be myself.  They make me feel and act crazy, so I […]

  EMOTIONAL INFIDELITY vs. EXCESSIVE JEALOUSY             Of all the columns I’ve written, this is the one I’ve had the most requests to send out.  Now because of social media, the following is a much longer version of the column I first wrote years ago.  Though it will talk about marriage, it is also meant […]

Should We Be Getting Married?  Or Not? Good love relationships reach a tipping point:  Is it time to put our wedding plans into gear, and put them into the trash can and break up? Here's a good way to move a good love relationship off a plateau, and decide if it's time to commit or quit.  In […]

  Love's New Rituals Long ago in a faraway place called 20th century America, when lovers would get serious about their relationship, they would usually announce to the world that they were “going steady" (or, "going together"), and then if all went well, that they were engaged to marry, ideally even to "enter holy matrimony" […]

The Four Seasons of Love Before Marriage  Another post here shows how love relationships work a lot like other living things—children, pets and houseplants. Like fruit trees, they grow through the cycle of seasons, and the time before marriage seems to me a cycle of four seasons. A problem in most relationships is that the partners […]

Seven Lessons about Relationships from Mother Nature             We are fortunate to live in an agrarian community, particularly in Kentucky where the crops and foliage all around us go through four such gloriously distinct seasons. Some of the things we see in the natural world around us teach us a lot about living things that […]

Are you Growing in Balance? By Dr. Paul Schmidt   Just as inability for sick Americans to find safe and affordable health care has created a crisis in our society, ignorance among single adults about how to find safe and affordable relationships has created a crisis for them.   They are suffering through relationships that make […]