Understanding bonds, your own included

Satisfaction is not enough to explain why people stay. A model published in 1980 adds two factors, and accounts for situations common sense judges irrational.

Every couple runs on a contract nobody wrote or reread. Its clauses are discovered the day one of the two breaches them.

An argument does not stop when the arguments are exhausted. It stops when a gesture is accepted, and that gesture obeys precise rules.

No woman has ever changed her name by marrying, in French law. What she acquires is something else, and the distinction has very concrete consequences.

They are reputed to be doomed. The available work does not confirm it, and the critical moment is not the one people think.

Almost every couple declares itself in favour, and the timetables tell another story. The gap is not explained by hypocrisy.

We reread the first weeks the way we reread a detective novel, looking for clues. Most of them were not clues.

The result has been constant in the literature for fifty years, and it is regularly misreported. What it says exactly deserves spelling out.

Two people can share four evenings a week without seeing each other. What counts is not the duration but what is called joint attention.

The procedure is the same for everyone, with a few extra documents and a check the law frames strictly. What the administration can do, and what it cannot.

Support is rarely what we think. Part of what is offered with the best intentions produces the opposite of the intended effect.

Almost all research on couples rests on a handful of questionnaires. Knowing what they ask changes the way the results drawn from them should be read.

Say everything or say nothing, leave space or close the distance: the recommendations cancel each other out. This is not a flaw in the field, it is its nature.

A specific set of measures has been built up over fifteen years. Its fastest remedies are also the least known to those they concern.

Dates, rituals and conventional gestures are readily mocked. Yet they fulfil a precise function, and their absence is noticed more than their presence.