There is not one person alive who has not got an unfulfilled ambition or perhaps the ghosts of an earlier relationship that didn’t work out. We’re all carrying unfinished business and some of us are better at making peace with that than others.

At some point of our lives, many of us will stake stock and could be alarmed at what our life has become, and that can be a motivator for positive change.

No matter how in love with your partner you are, everyone gets crushes, those feelings generated at the beginning of a relationship. They are not real. Yes, those feelings are delicious and experts say they are similar to those feelings cocaine give you – when you feel they fancy you and you fancy them and ‘who cares about old fuddy-duddy at home?’ It’s easy to be seduced by that and it’s is very understandable. But it’s easy to forget that those feelings don’t endure. Sooner or later the new person will become ordinary in your eyes.

Amy, the main character in Marian Keyes‘s latest book, The Break, is committed to personal growth. She is short of money and she’d love to have a therapist, but can’t afford one, so she turns to Psychologies magazine! It’s a great help to her in explaining her actions and her motivations. I read Psychologies because I’m interested in unconditional wellbeing and exploring that tension between accepting my limitations, but not locking myself into one place.

Hear the full interview with Marian Keyes below, and read the interview in the current issue of Psychologies (November 2017).

More about The Break: 

Amy’s husband Hugh says he isn’t leaving her. He still loves her, he’s just taking a break – from their marriage, their children and, most of all, from their life together. Six months to lose himself in south-east Asia. And there is nothing Amy can say or do about it.

Yes, it’s a mid-life crisis, but let’s be clear: a break isn’t a break up – yet… However, for Amy it’s enough to send her – along with her extended family of gossips, misfits and troublemakers – teetering over the edge.

For a lot can happen in six-months. When Hugh returns if he returns, will he be the same man she married? And will Amy be the same woman? Because if Hugh is on a break from their marriage, then isn’t she? The Break isn’t a story about falling in love but about staying in love. It is Marian Keyes at her funniest, wisest and brilliant best.

Read more in the current issue of Psychologies