This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we take a look at some of the year’s best relationship stories and advice.
It is not yet 7pm on a warm Monday evening in September and the queue for tonight’s event is already hundreds strong, snaking along the crash barriers and stretching up Euston Road.
Inside the Double Standard – the vast ground-floor bar of London’s hip Standard hotel – preparations for the party include large bowls of coloured badges with which guests can silently signal their intentions: yellow means “open to friends only”; red is “open to lovers only”; and blue is “open to both”. There are also stickers with more specificity, including a black one that says “kink”, a pink “LGBTQ+” one and an orange one that says “poly” (polyamory).
At 7pm, when the partygoers stream in, most head straight for the badges and stickers, even before the free drinks. Mostly aged from their late twenties to mid-forties, it’s a notably mixed crowd, both in gender and style. There are women in neat floral dresses, and a few in fetish-lite garb, clean-cut blokes, blokes with beards and a lot of tattoos and edgy haircuts.
If ever a surefire sign were needed that Feeld – hitherto regarded as a niche app for swingers, threesomes and those for whom latex is a lifestyle choice – has now gone fully mainstream, tonight’s social, a free monthly event put on by the app for its members (and replicated in cities including New York, Sydney, Amsterdam and Toronto), is surely it.
Three years ago Kate left her partner of 20 years: a narcissist. Today she has a new partner and a happy life. Her ex is being investigated by the police for his behaviour towards her and a number of other women.
“To strangers and to the outside world he would be the life and soul of the party,” she says. “We looked like the perfect couple.” But for years Kate barely left the house apart from to attend an all-female gym class. Even then her partner accused her of having an affair with the instructor. Taking her children on holiday was a crime in his eyes. So was cooking them food that they wanted to eat, rather than the food her partner thought they should eat. There were rages, sulks. Sometimes he would not speak to her for weeks.
Kate’s partner shows classic traits associated with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). The psychologist Dr Sarah Davies has spent the past decade studying people with this particular affliction and helping their partners escape the toxic relationships they create.
“NPD is characterised by long-term patterns of behaviour and attitudes that centre around self-importance, disregard for others and a pathological need for attention and admiration, together with a distinct lack of empathy,” she explains in her book How to Leave a Narcissist … for Good.
Not everyone who behaves badly is a narcissist, Davies warns - and diagnosing others has become something of a trend.
Read the full story for the real warning signs.
“You don’t realise it’s happening at first, it just... dwindles. A couple of months passed, then I looked around and thought, oh.” Alex, 32, a marketing director from Manchester, had been with his girlfriend for six years. They lived together and were happy, “very happy” in fact, with their sex life. Until suddenly, they weren’t. One sexless week turned into a fortnight, a month, then more.
Alex is not alone. According to new data, 98 per cent of us assume others are doing it at least once a month. In fact, one in five UK adults has not had sex in the past four weeks. Indeed, according to the nationwide survey commissioned by Hims and Hers, 30 per cent of us are having less sex as a direct result of the cost of living crisis.
Alex and his girlfriend are saving to buy a home together. As their costs spiralled, they found themselves “working hard all day, then planning our personal life and future in the evening. All these pressures and uncertainties just started to take over.”
Remove money from the equation and modern life still leaves many of us feeling overstretched and underappreciated. The most recent Natsal survey, conducted in 2010-12, suggested that a third of women aged between 40 and 59 had not had sex in the past month. When researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Glasgow and University College London asked why, they found it had less to do with menopause and more with being the so-called “sandwich generation” – caring for young children and older parents simultaneously, while juggling careers, social lives and housework.
If you’re suffering from a sex drought, here’s how to fix it, according to the experts.
Frances and her wife have been together for more than 40 years, and early on in their relationship they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Then came three children and a series of health issues (along with accompanying medications) that slowly eroded her wife’s libido.
“Her interest just went away,” said Frances, 61, who asked not to be identified by her last name out of respect for her wife’s privacy. “What had been maybe once a week went down to maybe once a month, then maybe once a year. Then at some point, it just stopped.”
For 10 years now, the couple has been in a sexual drought. Frances loves her wife and said their marriage was “strong”. But she also longs for the “mutuality” of sex.
“I find myself fantasising about just about everyone I meet, and I feel guilty for these thoughts,” she said. “I feel like I’m crawling out of my skin.”
Libido differences are a common part of relationships, sex therapists say, and communication is vital.
Here’s how to start the conversation.
“Sometimes I look at my husband and feel he’s a stranger,” says Laura, 55, an architect and mother of two, who lives in Sussex.
“We met when he was in his 40s and I thought that meeting later in life and becoming a mother in my late 30s would swerve some of the ‘growing apart’ issues that friends, who’d married people they’d met at university or in their 20s, were having. Yet I feel that I’ve fallen down exactly the same rabbit hole.
“The lightbulb moment, for me, came about a year ago when my husband and I were ‘together, alone’ – sitting side by side while staring at our phones. I was researching hiking expeditions in Canada, with our future as empty nesters in mind. He was looking at cream leather reclining chairs. I’m pretty sure that our futures will be apart, not together.”
Although she says she is sure that they will separate, Laura is currently grappling with the question of whether it would be so damaging to divorce while the children are still at school that it would be better to stay together until they leave home.
For many couples, their children’s final year at school sparks a moment of reckoning. The move to tertiary education or employment draws a line under one stage of life and signals a new chapter. The question is, will that be together or apart?