THE CHESTNUT HILL INSTITUTE

We need your help with a new project

We are working on a project on trust in people’s close relationships — how it’s formed, how it’s broken, how it’s restored. And that’s something you know a lot about, which is why we need your help. Please email us at DrFoster@ChestnutHillInstitute.com to tell us your thoughts or experiences about trust in your relationships, past or present. In particular, we’d love it if you’d tell us something about: (more…)

Journalist asks more questions about the falling-in-love stage

This is part two of a blog about falling in love that we started last time.

Q:  Is there something about the time we live in that makes people want to dive into relationships (maybe because there are less obstacles)? (more…)

Journalist asks about the falling-in-love stage

We sometimes wonder if the questions journalists ask come out of their own personal lives.  Hmmm…  Well, we just don’t know.  But it’s fun to speculate.  Anyway, here is the first part of an interview by a journalist who seemed very interested in the falling-in-love stage of relationships and why it makes us so stupid and so vulnerable.  And this is timely, because it is Spring, the time of year when people fall in love, go crazy, and screw up their lives…except when everything works out just fine. 

The basic question is: Can you use your head to save your heart?  Should you?  (more…)

Solving the male apology deficit: How to say you’re sorry

We’ve recently talked about why guys don’t apologize and what you can do to get them to apologize.  But now let’s fill in the one big piece missing.  How to save time and heartache by apologizing right in the first place.  (more…)

Solving the male apology deficit: How to get a guy to apologize

A few days ago in a blog called Why do men hate to apologize? we tried to look under the hood of men’s seeming reluctance to apologize.  (Of course it’s not even certain that men are reluctant to apologize: maybe they’re just pissed at being asked to apologize so often.  But that’s another blog to come.)  For now, let’s get practical.  How do you get your guy to apologize?  (more…)

Journalist asks, “Are women OK with dating less educated men?”

They say you are what you eat.  It is perhaps even truer that you are who you date.  The question today comes from a writer from a major broadcast news organization.  She had seen a U. S. Census report that said that more women are holding advanced degrees than men.  As a matter of fact, women are also graduating from college at a higher rate than men these days.  Her question was, What does this mean for dating?  Are women OK with dating blue-collar men or men who are less educated than they are?  (more…)

How fear of loss makes us losers

I just read a New York Times article that tells us something very important about how to make good decisions and manage our lives better.  (more…)

Solving the male apology deficit

Look, I’m not a big fan of making a big deal about male/female differences.  We are much more similar than we are different.  (More and more people are coming around to this view.  Just today in an interview in today’s NYTimes magazine Martha Stewart said, “I don’t think in a male or female way. I don’t differentiate between male and female. I never have.”)  But still, it seems to me that there is one area where men stand out: they don’t seem to like to apologize.  Apologies for men are like male menstruation: a guy will bleed, but you have to force it out of them.

At least that is the way it seems.  Has anyone ever counted?  Maybe it only seems that way because women are always pointing out so many things for men to apologize for.  Maybe men apologize a lot; they just have trouble getting ahead of the screw-up curve. 

Anyway, on the assumption that men don’t apologize much, I’ve got three theories why this is so. (more…)

Understanding the so-called “mid-life crisis”

In our book When Good People Have Affairs we talk about the issue of the mid-life crisis.  That’s what many people think is to blame for affairs.  It’s not so much a way of letting the cheater off the hook—“He wasn’t responsible; he was crazy!; he was having a mid-life crisis!!”  It’s more an unwillingness to look at the relationship as the source of much of the difficulty.  In fact, it’s only a mid-life crisis affair if distress over aging is the main reason for having an affair a person wouldn’t have had otherwise.  And so the mid-life crisis affair is one of the rarer of the 17 different kinds of affairs we talk about in When Good People Have Affairs. 

Still, talk about affairs leads people to wonder about the whole issue of the mid-life crisis.  And that’s why we got this question from a journalist yesterday. 

Q:  As a contributing editor of a popular magazine, I’m working on an article about how to survive your partner’s crisis (midlife crisis, quarterlife crisis, or other crisis).  You thought everything was fine, but now your partner has doubts about everything in his life, including your relationship.  What can you do as a partner?  How long should you be supportive and understanding, and when is it time to set clear limits?  How can your relationship survive, and how can you stay sane while your partner is losing his/her mind? (more…)

Ripped from the headlines!:  Reporter interviews Mira yesterday

Mira was interviewed by a journalist yesterday.  The subject, as so often in these trust-challenged times, is When Good People Have Affairs.  And here’s what we think is the best quote.  Mira said, “For many people, only an affair has the ability to change the most desiccated landscape on the planet: the inner landscape where hopes of love and romance and passion and connection feel as if they’ve dried up and gone away forever.”  Now here’s the raw Q and A:

Q:  Your advice is extremely reasonable, and very much the voice of the therapist. Do you think that people would be able to distinguish between your 17 types of affairs? When you’re madly in love, it’s often so hard to see reason… (more…)