Picture This

I've been making a lot of web sites for therapists lately, and in many ways the content of all of them has been pretty similar - this is what I offer, this is where I'm located, this is what counselling's all about, and so on.

One thing that not every counsellor agrees on, though, is whether they want a picture of themselves on their site. I think it's a good idea, it gives potential clients a bit of a sense of the person they might be working with, but this is the very thing that some people don't feel at all happy about. They don't want to be judged by what they look like - they want potential clients to come to a decision based on what they read rather than what they see.

I think this is an interesting point - do we judge a book by its cover, or do we simply feel more ready to open the book once we know what the cover looks like?

Enduring Love

The Enduring Love project looks interesting -

The Enduring Love? research project is an exciting development in the study of personal and family lives in contemporary Britain. Much recent policy, academic and professional research has focused on the causes and effects of relationship breakdown, but many heterosexual and same sex couples also remain together for significant periods of time. In some ways, then, these couples appear to sit outside a growing tendency towards serial or transitory relationships. To understand more about couples who stay together, our research will focus on the meanings and everyday experiences of long-term relationships. However we will not be presupposing that such relationships are uniformly loving or straightforwardly associated with contentment. The project will rather be concerned with what helps people sustain relationships and how cultural myths, such as finding ‘the one’ and living ‘happily-ever-after’, are understood and reconciled by adult couples whose own relationships may fall short of these romantic ideals.

- and you can find out more on their web site