Cheesy New Year’s headline goes here (or, JHE’s thoughts on a fresh slate)

Happy 2010, dear readers. I hope you have had a nice break and the holidays did not prove to be too much of a strain on your relationships - despite the fact that, as one wise friend of mine remarked, they are like ‘being caught in an avalanche of festivity and emotional chaos’. If things did go a bit pear-shaped for you and your other half over the holidays, I recommend that you not make any hasty decisions - give yourself some time to settle back into your normal routine before you conclude that his clash with your family over politics, or her awful decision to give you a terrible Christmas time, is grounds for a permanent split.

And now, with a fresh clean new year (or 361 days of one) stretching before you, have you made any relationship-related resolutions? I’m going to be honest with you: I am not sure I entirely approve of them.

While it can be nice to feel that we get to hit the restart button at the beginning of the year (oh, my gym attendance is about to improve dramatically), the temptation to decide that certain things will equal markers of relationship success can lead to some pretty severe disappointment, because these are goals that you simply can’t control on your own (unless, of course, your resolution is to be alone, but then again even that can sometime be easier said than done unless you live in a nice hermit-y place).

Managing relationships just can’t be done in quite the same way as weight loss or debts or whatever: ultimately, no matter how we try to unpack them into something that makes sense, their intrinsic intangibility means that they’ll never be as easy to direct. Which is good, really, because if you take this on board, then you can resolve to relax - and relaxing, in fact, is one of the surest ways to improve your love life.