It's a need that begins on the first day of our lives and continues until we take our last breath. In a culture where we can pull money from a machine and never interact with a human bank teller, walk on a crowded sidewalk without meeting another's eyes, and call telephone assistance only to get information from a computerized voice, it's truly possible to be alone in a crowd. National surveys, in fact, find that a quarter of all Americans say they've felt lonely in the last month. And if they don't confess to feeling lonely, two-thirds of Americans say that having close relationships with other people is always on their minds. We wonder the same thing.
Relationships can be downright complicated.
For starters, our own family, the people we love most, hold the potential for causing us the most pain. The friends we trust most sometimes fail us the worst. Then there's the mystery of relating to the opposite sex. As educators and counselor who have studied many of the intricacies of human relationships, we can't give up. And through Relationships , we've decided to get involved.