What do you do at the beginning of an affair, when the newly discovered love your life, who is in every other way an attractive, nay admirable, person, asks with an eager puppy-dog expression, “How do you like this shirt? Doesn’t it look great?” In my case the shirt in question assaulted the retina with [...]

Admit it, haven’t you been wondering after all these years in therapy why you’re not getting any better…why you still can’t get a decent job, apartment, mate, or sell your screenplay? The best kept secret in shrinkdom is that, like gynecologists who go into their speciality because they hate women, shrinks go into theirs because [...]

Even though it seems to be one of those harmless social pastimes, like bemoaning the state of the subway system, giving advice can become a dangerous addiction.

Bless your lucky genes, size 10, that you’re not a size 20—then you too would be stuck with Lane Bryant.

In every workplace, there are congenial, supportive colleagues…and then there are the other kind—the ones you fantasize about while pummeling the punching bag at the gym. Is there an officemate sabotaging your success? Here, a primer on how to handle the most common culprits.

Anyone who’s ever been single and longs to be coupled has been warned that desperation is the kiss of romantic death. Every woman who’s ever pined away night after night wishing there was a man in her life knows what the problem is with this type of advice: How can you not look desperate when [...]

Despite heaps of evidence to the contrary, we insist on assuming that love, unlike more earthbound emotions, is made up of mysterious molecules that pass from one person to another, the sizzle of these sex-laden atoms rendering us helpless to resist. Or something like that.

I don’t know if it’s hereditary, but some of us seem to have a mutant gene that drives us to fix friends up, even against their will—almost as if it’s in our nature to rebel against the notion that people can find love on their own. I, for one, am convinced they need me to [...]

Since my divorce, Shadow’s been my security blanket. If you care about me and want to be my friend you’ll understand that.

O.K., so my parents were Communists. But at least they believed in something. I never thought I would feel nostalgic about Communism. As a 60′s activist and child of lefty parents, I once took as gospel beliefs that now seem quaint: human beings are basically good; if people, not capitalists, owned the means of production, [...]

No one could believe we were actually doing it. Two lifelong city dwellers, neither of whom had ever survived without regular psychotherapy, who didn’t know the difference between leaders and gutters, or what a septic tank or forced air heat was or how to fix absolutely anything were leaving New York city to buy a [...]

My mother always hated religion but she brought me up to be a good Jew and a spiritual person. She fervently believed in tikkun olam repairing the world. She taught me that spirituality is about what you do, not what you believe.