From Couples Therapy to “Ciao”, the Italians are known for doing everything in style. The New York Times recently reported on Italy’s first divorce fair, held in Milan.

It turns out a divorce fair isn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. It’s just a couple of thousand people streaming into the basement of a hotel, and checking out lawyers, dating agencies, and something called a divorce planning agency. Well, if you had a planner for your wedding, why not for your divorce.

Elizabetta Poveldo who wrote the NY Times article, points out some extraordinarily

Many people go into couples therapy with a simple objective. Change my partner!! Please!

Usually they aren’t looking for a younger model, with fewer wrinkles and a smaller waist-line. They just want their couples counselor to deliver them back the same old partner with some tweaks. Then everything would be great!

Now let’s put aside for a moment the idea that the goal of going to see a couples therapist is to change your partner. Imago couples counseling takes a different perspecitve on that which I can talk about in other posts. Today, I just want to talk in general about the idea of changing anyone, or even changing their opinion.

You wouldn’t fight with your marriage counselor would you?
It turns out that actually most of us do just that.  It’s a subtle and unconscious fight.  Couples therapists call it resistance. 
It’s actually a natural and unavoidable part of the marriage counseling process.  I go and see a stranger, and the plan is to tell them all [...]

When I first had marital problems, I hated the idea of seeing a marriage counselor.  Even when my divorce lawyer gave me a card for marriage counseling services I threw it away as soon as possible. 
So what was it I had against marriage counselors?
In my mind I imagined sitting with my hostile wife in the [...]

Ah! Valentine’s Day – once dedicated to the patron saint of love, but it seems that the patron saint of greed might be elbowing his way in. Ever had that experience? Well, here’s another approach from Imago.

With so many relationship problems in the world, we could do without a new one. But according to Leslie Kaufman writing in the New York Times saving the planet might mean ditching your relationship.

My wife follows my blog, and asked me the other day if I felt we needed relationship help. “It sure sounds it from the way you write your posts” she said. “Is everything OK?”

Imago Dialogue for couples is something quite specific and quite structured. At least, its best for it to be structured when you are just learning it, and whenever the subject is hard. Oh! We’re talking about the field of intimate relationships- the subject has a tendency to be quite tricky, don’t you find?!

Weiner travelled to the world’s happiest places and told WorldHum that “Many countries around the world seem to grasp this notion that happiness is relational—that we derive much of our joy from our connections to other people

In these interactive Relationship Quizzes, instead of checking off boxes on a form, you get to talk with an Avatar, who sympathetically asks you about some of your past emotional experience, especially in the home where you grew up.