If you want relationship help, where do you start? There’s often quite an emotional barrier to picking up a phone and saying to a stranger “My relationship could do with some help.” It’s hard enough to even say it to yourself.

Online marriage counseling meets Sienfeld! “The Marriage Ref” is a TV show produced by Jerry Seinfeld where couples reveal their relationship problems, and a referee steps in to say who wins. Now there’s an online version. And you can be “the marriage ref”. Or you can reveal your own disputes and see which side the world votes for. Want to try it – just go to http://couplesspark.com/.

For those of you new to validation, this is what we call the second main step in a dialogue. First you would mirror your partner, carefully repeating back what you had heard. And then you “Validate”, which doesn’t mean any form of clerical processing, but just simply saying “You make sense, and the reason you make sense is…”