Why this section is here
It is the backbone of the site. A life as a couple goes through the same stages for almost everyone —
you meet, you live together, you marry or you do not, you start a family, and sometimes you separate —
and each stage raises very concrete questions that nobody answers at the right moment.
The other sections orbit this one: sexuality, because it is part of living together; health, because
contraception, fertility and addiction decide much of the rest; astrology, because people turn to it
precisely when they meet someone or expect a child.
A couple's whole life, in order
Before the stages, three ways in that are played rather than read: the
love compatibility test, presented as the game it is,
the knowledge quizzes and the
tests and tools.
This section then follows a couple's life from start to finish. It comes in two sets:
meeting someone, from choosing an app to the first date,
and living together, which covers everything after —
the couple day to day, the
family when it arrives, and
separation when it comes. Alongside them sit
healthy living, because it decides a good deal of the
rest, and the site country by country, for readers who search
by country rather than by topic.
What is documented is kept separate from what is opinion. Where research says something
solid about couples, it is said; where something is merely a custom, that is said too. There
are no recipes here: lists of techniques age badly, mechanisms can be explained.
In practice each page answers a question that comes up at a precise moment: where and how
to meet someone, how to marry and under what property regime, how to arrange childcare and
what each option really costs, how to separate without it taking ten years, and what to do
together on a spare Sunday. The legal pages and the
names serve those same moments.
Every page in this section
The full structure of Advice — sub-sections, pages, sub-pages and country pages — is on the site map, which lays out the whole site the same way.
