A long time ago, when I used to date, I had a pet theory about how to make dating a little less arduous: the ‘One Drink Bailout.’ It was published as a guest blog for a fellow blogger – who, incidentally, wrote me a beautiful guest blog on crushes in return – but his blog is now offline, so the post has disappeared. It’s one of the posts I’m asked about most often, and today someone told me they were trying to find the link but couldn’t, so I said I’d repost it here. I wrote it back in 2012 so I’m not sure how it’s aged, but if you like it feel free to add it to your dating profile if you’re sick of spending long evenings on dates you know aren’t going anywhere.

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What’s on your shopping list of ‘ideal qualities in a partner’? Sexy? Funny? Clever? Absurdly wealthy or sultry and mysterious? I used to have a long list of things I thought I needed from someone. But the thing I care most about now would never have made my list when I was younger: kindness.

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I often joke that I’m ‘lazy in bed’, but I’ve never really considered what I mean by that. Someone asked me recently to explain it, so I thought I’d have a go. And like many of the assumptions we make about sex, sometimes examining the belief reveals a truth that’s far more interesting.

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You! Yes, you! You should go to relationship counselling! OK, maybe not ALL of you, but most of my traffic comes from search so the majority of you are reading this because you googled ‘relationship counselling’, wondering if it was something you should try. Maybe you have worries about relationship counselling and you’d like me to assuage them. Maybe you’re just curious about what goes on behind the counsellor’s door. Or perhaps you’re already convinced that you want to do it, but you need (or your partner needs) that final nudge before you take the plunge. If that’s what you’re after, I’m here for you. Here are five valuable things I got from relationship counselling.

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For a while I’ve been contemplating a series of blog posts in which I argue, essentially, with myself. Taking on some of the bad arguments or terrible opinions I had years ago, which still exist on these pages for everyone to see. Every time my autotweet widget spits out something from the archive, I cringe in anticipation of what my past self said, ready to be embarrassed today by what I said five years ago. I’m not alone in this: we’ve all said things in the past that we don’t agree with today. And we all have to consider how we deal with embarrassing stuff when confronted by it, years later. Should we edit old blogs that we no longer agree with?

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