This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at all things sex and relationships.
‘A big red flag’: Advice for your kids
!["What you've not prepared for is that your [child] will fall in love with someone and that someone will henceforth be the only voice in their heads." Photo / Duong Huu, Unsplash](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/3ANPUEI2KBGJDOILC3J7BQMKJI.jpg?auth=56394708f64a3a7604381813e2f8c837f852badb189222424db8e7dc82740b41&width=16&height=9&quality=70&smart=true)
Just when you think your kids have got it together, they fall in love, writes Shane Watson.
There’s something no one ever tells you about parenting (or in my case step-parenting), which you only discover once you think you’re out of the woods. No sooner are you congratulating yourself on having children who can just about function in the world, and just when you’re starting to believe that all your hard work might have paid off and the young adults are turning out OK, you stumble upon the giant hole in your plan.
What no parent of YAs ever considers is the arrival on the scene of a significant other. You know it will happen of course, but nothing prepares you for the wholesale transfer of power, overnight, to a total stranger.
What you’ve not prepared for – and clean forgotten since you were their age – is that your YA will fall in love with someone and that someone will henceforth be the only voice in their heads. Up to this point parents are still the people whose opinion matters most. Just. And then, one day, we’re not. And someone called Fred or Mary is the person in charge of your YA’s future, until they part and go on to Fred or Mary 2.
This is absolutely fine, providing Fred or Mary are good news. But if this turns out not to be the case, that’s when you long to remind your YA of some rules about relationships that, if ignored, will come back to bite them when they have three kids under five.
Read Shane Watson’s full column here.
I’m 44 and single. Can a scientist get me a date?
Jane Mulkerrins is allergic to self-help books and refuses to use dating apps. Could dating expert Logan Ury have the answer to her romantic drought?
I’m 44 years old and I’m single. This doesn’t make me unhappy or embarrassed or worry that there’s something fundamentally flawed or broken about me. Most of the time, I don’t give it much of a thought because being single is my default. I’ve spent far more of my adult life not in a relationship than in one. I fall in love hard but seldom, and while I’m not opposed to the idea of a long-term partnership, marriage has never been an ambition of mine.
It’s probably not a huge shock to learn that I’m allergic to self-help books and dating “experts”. Recently, however, I came across Logan Ury, a Harvard-educated, Google-trained behavioural scientist and the current toast of the dating/self-help industry. Endorsed by the groundbreaking psychotherapist and podcaster Esther Perel and with a new hit podcast of her own, This Is Dating, produced by Perel’s team, Ury runs dating boot camps as well as one-to-one coaching. She is the dating app Hinge’s director of relationship science as well as the author of the bestselling, provocatively titled How to Not Die Alone (subtitle: The surprising science that will help you find love).
She agrees to give me a truncated coaching course.
The truth about mid-life sex
As Emma Thompson’s new film shows, you can still have great sex after menopause, you might just need a little extra help to get there.
Female pleasure is suddenly in the spotlight, thanks to Thompson’s new film, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. And not just any old female pleasure, but mid-life pleasure and orgasms. In the film, 63-year-old Thompson plays a widow, Nancy, who hires an escort in an effort to recapture her lost youth and experience some of the sex she has missed out on.
Nancy’s sexual awakening is a delight to watch, as she presents her young beau with a list of “goals”. But what about for the rest of us? Can sex really get better with age, or is it all downhill after menopause?
Sharon Walker asked the experts.
The dangerous divorce years
Many couples don’t make it beyond their 40s; a decade where relationships seem to hit a romantic cul-de-sac and end up in divorce.
Often these couples had successfully surmounted the hard baby years of sleepless nights and endless nappy changes, but ran aground when their children were in their tweens or early teens – an age when life should become easier, but when many marital differences surface.
So why exactly do plenty of relationships hit obstacles once couples reach midlife? And how can you navigate them?
Read all about how to protect your marriage here.
How to recover from a sex drought
Is lovemaking in a long-term relationship a dying art? Are committed couples suffering a sex drought?
It’s a sensitive subject, and one that is easy to worry about. But Kate Moyle, sexual and relationship psychotherapist and host of The Sexual Wellness Sessions podcast, notes that frequency isn’t the best way to gauge the state of play. “People can be having enjoyable sex, but just not very often,” she says. “We’re constantly trying to objectively measure sex – which is a subjective experience.” And we do it by amount – “that’s actually not a great measure of our sex lives”.
Read five ways to escape a sex drought here.