Understanding bonds, your own included

You think a disagreement has been settled; it resurfaces six months later, identical. That repetition is not a failure: it is the rule, and it has been measured.

The phrase has become the announcement of an imminent break-up. Yet it describes an ordinary way of functioning, one that has nothing to do with disengagement.

Residence is set with the mother in a large majority of cases, and the law provides for that nowhere. Understanding the gap means distinguishing what is adjudicated from what is agreed.

A study covering more than ten thousand couples compared the predictive value of everything research thought it knew. Its conclusions are disappointing, and instructive.

We judge our relationship against those we believe we are observing. The problem is that we are not comparing what we think we are comparing.

Banned for seventy years, confined to fault for a century, settled without a judge since 2017: the history of the exit from marriage throws light on what is expected today of the entrance.

Sharing a home is a test distinct from the feeling, and there is nothing automatic about it. Part of what gets attributed to the couple in fact belongs to domestic organisation.

The longer a relationship lasts, the more we believe we can guess what the other is thinking. Confidence in that reading increases; its accuracy does not.

To be understood, to be approved of, to obtain a decision: three different requests that the same conversation claims to satisfy. They are not obtained the same way.

It is blamed for the end of most stories. Yet repetition produces attachment as much as it dulls it, and research knows which of the two, and on what conditions.

Created in 1999 amid a parliamentary debate of rare violence, it is today entered into mostly by different-sex couples. Something its designers had not foreseen.

Believing that a successful relationship is recognisable from the start protects against a bad choice and costs dearly afterwards. Two opposing ways of conceiving a couple, and what is known about them.

It is treated as a character flaw or as proof of love. It is above all a signal, and decoding it means separating what one observes from what one concludes.

Carrying out a task and remembering it exists are two distinct jobs. The second is invisible, and that is what makes its division so hard to discuss.

Every relationship installs a list of subjects no longer raised. It forms without a decision, and what it contains says more than what gets said.