Attraction, dating and relationships
Most dating advice is somebody’s opinion with confidence added.
This is the other kind. Every claim here names the study behind it, says where the evidence stops, and resists the urge to turn a correlation into a rule. Where a questionnaire helps more than a paragraph, there is a free one — scored in your browser, with no email field anywhere.
Or the new one: the relationship satisfaction test — and the three things besides satisfaction that decide whether people stay. There is also the conflict style test: do you press, or do you go quiet?
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Long pieces, not listicles. Most run past two thousand words because the honest version of these questions does not fit in five bullet points.
MindsetWhy the Honeymoon Phase Ends: What Is Measured and What Is Folklore
Satisfaction does decline, slowly for most couples. The neurochemical story everyone repeats rests on two brain scans of 34 people and one blood test.
MindsetCan Attachment Styles Change? How Much Moves, How Slowly, and What Moves It
Yes, and the real version is slower than the genre promises: rank-order stability over ten adult years sits near .50, and not all movement is progress.
MindsetWhat Builds Attraction Over Time: Why Who Seems Desirable Changes With Acquaintance
Agreement about who is desirable decays as people get to know each other. Almost everything worth saying about attraction over time follows from that.
MindsetThe Habits of Couples Who Stay Together: What the Longitudinal Research Measured
Personality barely predicts who lasts. What two people do on ordinary days predicts a great deal - though less precisely than the famous numbers suggest.
DatingDoes Distance Make You Like Someone More? What the Evidence Says
Absence does raise how much you like someone, by withholding what would revise the estimate. At least a third of long-distance couples split after reuniting.
MindsetLove or Anxious Attachment? How to Tell the Difference
From the inside they feel the same. They come apart in your body, in how long reassurance lasts, and in whether the intensity needs uncertainty to survive.
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Why so few articles, and why they are long
This site carries a small archive on purpose. A piece goes up only when every claim in it traces to a source you can open, and the ones that have not cleared that gate are held back rather than shipped to inflate a page count. What we publish is listed in full on the sources page, the rules we write under are on the editorial policy, and where AI is used in the process is spelled out in the AI disclosure.