Relationships

Evidence-Based Best Practices for maintaining friendships and love relationships between your partner and family.

"But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls." -Khalil Gibran

Since the Internet is full of relationship advice, developing this page is a low priority. However, every bit of evidence suggests developing relationships should be your highest priority if you want to be happy.

Whose Relationship Advice Should You Trust?

Determining who is going to provide good relationship advice is more important than any specific advice that could be provided here. There's entirely too much information overload when it comes to this subject, so the most important thing to know is how to separate the signal from the noise. Critical thinking is your friend.

For example, Andrew Huberman offers a lot of relationship advice, but recent revelations about his personal life have undermined most of it. The fact that he doesn't always practice what he preaches is hardly unique to him, and there may be some "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" going on. At the same time, there are plenty of great content creators out there without these shortcomings who are saying the same things. Long story short, the Huberman video offering relationship advice on this page has been replaced.

In general, those with well-intentioned and informed advice will tend to offer it for free, and promote relationship models that prioritize mutual respect, compromise, and open communication.

Internet Strangers Don't Care About You

Too many people believe they can get impartial advice from anonymous strangers on the internet. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Relationship advice columns were a staple of the newspapers, which have now been replaced with social media. When you wrote a letter to Dear Abby, you got a response from someone who offers relationship advice professionally. When you ask a forum of strangers on the internet, you are likely to get advice from teenagers who have never had a long-term relationship. Teenagers have unlimited time, and a huge propensity for trolling. You should assume anyone on the internet is under 16 years old unless proven otherwise.

Besides the teenager problem, there are other biases in play:

These people have no concept of your relationship or partner outside of your post.
You are only posting because there is a problem, so they only know you by that problem.
They have no investment in the relationship whatsoever.
Most people are there for the drama, not to help people, though many would deny it.
If you want to break up, just do it. Why do you need strangers to talk you into it?

If you ask social media about a relationship issue, the only advice you can expect to receive is to break up and go no contact. This is the default response for romantic relationships, friendships, and even family.

This isn't to say that there aren't situations where this is the appropriate response. But, our current culture prioritizes independence and intolerance of toxic behavior over commitment, loyalty, forgiveness, and the idea that people can grow and change. This has not always worked out in favor of love.