Despite what we might think, there are no such things as ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in life. Those who win in some areas will lose in others – and vice versa. The task lies in working out where our true successes and failures lie.

Though each individual is unique, deep down, everyone is searching for the same thing: reassurance – a gift that is within all of our power to give.

It can be hard to know what we really need from a relationship. But the task becomes much simpler if we keep in mind that every relationship requires just three crucial ingredients to work.

“The fundamental idea behind psychotherapy is that we tend to grow mentally unwell because we haven’t been able to think with sufficient clarity about the difficulties in our past, typically in our distant childhoods. Damaging incidents have been locked away, and continue to have an outsized impact on us, but we have no way of going back over them in order to liberate ourselves from their distorting influences. A sense that we are bad or disgusting, acquired in our fifth year, may ruin our chances of fulfilment in our fiftieth…”

Those of us in relationships suffer from an ignorance of what other people’s relationships are really like. We should recognise that episodes of difficulty and ambivalence are not the exception, but the norm.