Amit Kumar

Really good, happy, long-term relationships seem to depend on maintaining a sense of equal mattering in order to successfully continue.

I've been married for more than 35 years, and I confess that after the glow of feeling in love wore off, it turns out that my husband and I have completely different ways of communicating how we matter to each other.

But I'm wondering if it's possible that

Making another person feel that they matter to you is a skill that can be learned and that requires mindfulness and maybe some work in order to improve.

came home and was complaining about a boy who kept sending her text messages.

And she's learned that this boy has a crush on her and she is nice to him at school and he's trying to learn Italian and she speaks Italian.

And my daughter was struggling with how to read.

make it clear to him that she wasn't interested in him, but also to be kind.

And I think we have this sort of growth of this kind of, I guess, incel is a kind of sloppy way to describe this culture of boys who feel entitled to women's attention and then very angry when they aren't seen by them.