Despite popular perceptions of the ageing process, some research has found that improvement in either physical or mental health in later life is not only possible, but common.

One 12-year study found almost half of the 11,000+ seniors participating either got faster at walking (linked to better outcomes in older age) or performed better in cognitive tests more than a decade after their 65th birthday.

Which begs the question: can individual habits make improvement, or decline, more or less likely?

Of course, some conditions and health concerns are beyond people’s control. But speaking to HuffPost UK, endocrinologist Dr William Hsu, chief medical officer at L-Nutra, said there are a few habits which “consistently stand out”.

The study we talked about earlier found that typically, people who had a more positive view of ageing were more likely to see improvements after 65.

So, perhaps it’s not a surprise that Dr Hsu said: “One of the most important things I have observed is that the people who become healthier with age do not treat decline as inevitable.

“They pay attention to what their bodies are doing, make intentional changes, and measure whether those changes are working.”

Strength training is a great way to protect your joints, muscles, and bones as you age, thus preventing the risk of falls and fractures.

And, Dr Hsu told us: “Muscle is not only important for strength and mobility. It is one of the body’s primary sites for glucose disposal and plays a central role in metabolic health.

“The people who remain strong as they age tend to prioritise resistance training, adequate protein, and regular daily movement.”

The expert added that challenging yourself with bigger weights or more intense workouts as you progress is key here.

Dr Hsu said that people who improve with age usually “know their blood pressure, fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1C, cholesterol, waist circumference, and body composition, and they pay attention to how those markers change over time”.

That way, he stated, they can focus on their body’s overall trends rather than trying to rely on one specific marker.

“A result can fall within the ‘normal’ range while still moving in the wrong direction. The trajectory often tells us more than one snapshot,” he said.

Diets rich in fruits, veg, nuts, pulses, beans, whole grains, and legumes and lower in processed and sugary foods and red meat have long been associated with a longer, healthier life.

“These foods support glucose regulation, cardiovascular health, the gut microbiome, and healthy ageing,” said the doctor.

And while you might have heard that protein is key for good health, the expert revealed: “The healthiest older adults consume enough protein to preserve muscle, but they do not allow a singular focus on protein to displace the plants and fiber that provide broader metabolic benefits.”

Indeed, one study found that too much protein seemed associated with negative health effects among sedentary older people.

“The point is not to minimise protein but to get enough of the right amino acids from plants, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains, with fish or a modest amount of other protein where appropriate, so that muscle has the building blocks it needs without overshooting into growth signalling that accelerates ageing,” Dr Hsu clarified.

“Exercise is one example: the body becomes stronger in response to a manageable stress followed by adequate recovery,” the doctor said.

“Nutrition may also be structured this way,” he continued, pointing to the fasting mimicking diet (FMD), which has been shown to lower people’s biological age.

To be clear, Dr Hsu said, “this is not about chronically restricting food”.

“It is about using a defined, time-limited intervention and then returning to nourishing, sustainable eating,” he said.

Bear in mind, though, that not everyone is suited to this eating style. Frail, breastfeeding, or pregnant people, as well as those with some health conditions or who are on regular medications, are advised to avoid the pattern; speak to your doctor if you’re not sure.

And going too long without food (16-18 hours a day) is linked to a higher risk of gallstones. Longevity expert Dr Valter Longo said a 12-hour fasting/eating split is “very common among people who have record lifespans”, and “seems to match both science and tradition”.

“Attention and cognitive capacity benefit from use. People who remain mentally engaged tend to keep learning, maintain meaningful relationships, protect their sleep, exercise regularly, and reduce the constant digital interruptions that fragment attention,” added Dr Hsu.

“The brain responds to many of the same inputs that support the rest of the body, particularly movement, metabolic health, sleep, and social connection.”

Reading and engaging with challenging brain puzzles have been associated with a lower dementia risk, while maintaining great relationships can help you live longer overall.

“Healthy ageing,” the doctor ended, “is not simply the absence of deterioration. I have seen people gain strength, improve blood sugar and cholesterol, reduce visceral fat, and become more physically capable later in life. The body retains a meaningful capacity to adapt.

“The goal is to give it the right inputs, assess the response, and continue adjusting over time.”

When Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother were murdered with a hatchet in their Massachusetts home in 1892, the 32-year-old became the prime suspect.

Although Lizzie was later acquitted of her crimes, the case has continued to fascinate people, and is still being discussed more than a century later.

Now, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology series, Monster, has brought Lizzie’s gruesome story to the forefront yet again – albeit with some creative license applied.

Starring Ella Beatty alongside Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall, true crime fans have been tuning in to watch the fourth iteration of Monster, which explores themes of female rage and repression, in their droves.

But how did the Monster team go about bringing The Lizzie Borden Story to the small screen in all its gore-filled glory?

Here are 19 behind-the-scenes facts you probably didn’t know about Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s creation…

After seasons following Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez and Ed Gein, Monster’s showrunners felt like it was time for a woman to take centre stage.

“[It] just felt like we owed it,” co-creator Ian Brennan told People in August. “We’d sort of over-indexed on men for the series, and it just felt like this was the right time and the right subject to look at to look squarely at the idea of female rage.”

After the team decided they wanted a woman to lead season four, they soon discovered they had a smaller pool of female killers to select from.

In the end, Ian said that he and his collaborators wound up settling on Lizzie Borden because, while she is “enigmatic as a historical figure” and the case of her family’s murders is infamous, little is really known about the woman herself.

“When we began to dig into the research, I was just immediately taken with how much I felt for her and how much I got why she did what she did,” he recalled.

“There was something that was really, really, very likable about her as a person despite the crime that I think she likely committed because she was sort of a caged animal.”

He added that Lizzie was a “product of a time [when] it was really difficult to be a young woman”.

The third season of Monster, The Ed Gein Story, jumped back and forth in time, connecting the killer to Nazi Ilsa Koch and the actor Anthony Perkins, who played a character inspired by Ed Gein in Psycho.

Similarly, while the fourth series of Monster centres mostly on Lizzie Borden, it does also feature two notorious female killers from very different eras.

The Lizzie Borden Story links its central figure, who was born in the 1800s, with Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century noblewoman nicknamed the Bloody Countess, and Aileen Wuornos, a serial killer who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990.

Ian felt that incorporating these two women into the story added a “third dimension”, telling People: “It just made it come alive all the more.”

Ella Beatty has also explained why the two unconnected murderers make an appearance in the series.

“The show is exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with,” Ella told Tudum, adding that the showrunners were keen to explore how female rage connected Aileen and Lizzie.

“Every season of Monster has been an exercise in understanding the person’s psychology. Are they born or are they made?” she added. “I knew from the beginning that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were really interested in exploring what brings a woman to the point of violence.”

Co-creator Ian also highlighted the idea of female rage when talking about the show’s multi-generational subplots.

“We were able to look at rage, female rage, and women who kill as less of an aberration throughout time than actually a throughline and an aspect of our species and existence in society,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in September.

“The cages that we put women in and the things they will do to get out of those cages was really interesting.”

Regular Ryan Murphy collaborator Sarah Paulson was chosen to star as the real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos.

“She’s an unbelievable actor who does so much preparation and physical work. It was my first time working with her and I was stunned by what happens when she comes out on set,” director Max Winkler told The Hollywood Reporter.

“My favourite scene that she did – because it really allowed her to improvise a lot – was the scene with her having her final meal,” the director admitted, revealing he cried when watching her perform Aileen’s sentimental last moments. “Just the mixture between protective strength and unbelievable vulnerability,”.

Sarah also already had a working relationship with Ella, having previously acted with her in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play Appropriate, for which she won a Tony Award.

“We met doing a play together three years ago and became very close. She was such a part of the creative process for me from the very beginning,” Ella enthused to Tudum.

“We cast a super wide net and nobody could do it until we saw her,” co-showrunner Ian told Tudum.

He added: “They say you can tell within the first five seconds if the actor has the role, and that was completely the case here, after watching very good actresses try.”

The actor – who is the daughter of Hollywood icons Annette Bening and Warren Beatty – immediately felt connected with Lizzie Borden when the project first came her way.

“I remember making the audition tape and thinking, ‘I understand this person’,” she told Variety.

“When I found out that I had gotten the part, I was over the moon and also really scared. I felt a huge responsibility to the part, to the anthology, to the real person,” she added.

“I think immediately I just wanted to start working on it. How does she move? How does she dream? How does she think? How does she speak? How does she blink?”

Little to nothing is known about Abby Borden, other than the fact she was killed by her stepdaughter more than 130 years ago.

Played in Monster by Rebecca Hall, Lizzie’s stepmother is portrayed in the series as deeply unhappy, displaying cruelty toward her stepdaughter and frustration in her marriage.

This characterisation was largely created by the writers, due to how little has been recorded about Abby Borden.

“There’s very little about her out there, and I could already tell from reading the script that Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy had taken liberties and created a character that they were interested in for this show,” she told Collider. “So I felt like the only thing I could do was do the same thing,”

Rebecca admitted the lack of public information about her character gave her freedom to create something “unique and specific”, deliberately trying not to take inspiration from past depictions of “evil stepmothers” from fairytale lore.

The Golden Globe nominee looked to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to create Abby’s specific accent.

“When I was thinking about the accent, which I wanted to be not really from anywhere as much as just Abby, I kept thinking about those mid-Atlantic accents that actors created in the 1930s that didn’t actually exist but had this sort of affect of like, ‘I’m extremely posh and elitist’,” she added to Collider.

“We had such a great time working on the last season. It was just a joy,” Ian told People. “Charlie, you just can’t get enough of it. He’s so lovely and has such a great presence on set, and it just felt like, ‘Oh, this is perfect for him’.”

The showrunner was particularly impressed with Charlie’s range and ability to make any character sympathetic, no matter how evil they were.

“He just rounds out every character with this deep well of sympathy that really filled out what could otherwise be a stereotypical bad dad,” Ian added. “He really filled [the character] out in such beautiful detail.”

While people already knew plenty about Ed Gein before Monster dedicated a season to him, comparably, the same could not be said for Andrew Borden.

However, this proved to be a positive thing for the actor playing him.

“[I was] liberated from the responsibility of playing a historical figure because there’s just not that much known, and so we were able to invent him to a certain degree,” Charlie told People. “It’s a real fertile playground for actors to come into this world.”

While there are no reports of Andrew Borden having had a stutter in real life, this was a trait that felt right to Charlie when he was reading the script.

“There’s one moment in the script that [the writer] wrote in that he sort of has a stutter, but it’s in a moment of sort of emotional duress,” he explained to CBR.

The Sons Of Anarchy actor explained that “that stutter in that voice just started to present itself to me” as he continued “running back” to the script and “exploring it further”.

The cast and crew of Monster couldn’t film the show inside Lizzie Borden’s real home, as the rumoured haunted house is now a bed and breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“I couldn’t believe that,” Monster co-showrunner Ian Brennan admitted about the discovery of the house’s new lease of life as a B&B. “It’s stunning.”

As a result, the scenes set in her house were actually filmed on a purpose-made set in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the subplot involving Elizabeth Báthory was filmed in a castle in Rome, rather than Báthor Castle, where the countess lived in real life, about 170 miles from Budapest in a town called Nyírbátor.

“We had shot season four, most of it, in LA,” cinematographer Michael Bauman told CBR back in January. “But we have about five weeks of work [in] Rome. There are lots of castles here, and that’s mainly the reason [we filmed there].”

The team behind Monster loved Vicky Krieps so much in The Ed Gein Story, they cast her twice in the follow-up. She appears as both Bridget and Countess Elizabeth Báthory in season four of the anthology.

Vicky was chosen to play the rebellious maid who introduces Lizzie to hair dye and sex toys first.

“The way Ryan thought of it, she’s almost like a Mary Poppins that comes out of nowhere, who can be anyone from any time,” Vicky told Vanity Fair about Bridget. “Ryan said, ‘It’s women-driven, feminist, lesbian, dirty, unapologetic’.”

During filming, the show’s creator then offered her another role, as the bloodthirsty countess in the fantasy flashbacks.

“That was all shot in Italy, so we knew that that would be at the end of the schedule anyway, and we just couldn’t think of who would do it or who seemed right,” Ian explained to Tudum.

“It was Ryan’s idea. He pitched it to her and she loved it. Now it seems like such an obvious choice, but it actually came very late in the process.”

The new episodes of Monster reunited co-stars Vicky Krieps and Charlie Hunnam, who both starred in season three as Ilse Koch and Ed Gein.

Having worked together before, Vicky knew she could push Charlie in the scenes they shared.

“[We] joke a lot on set to make it fun or to just push each other in the scenes. Like, how far can we go? What can we do?” she told People at the New York City premiere last month. “We had a fight scene together, and he said, ‘You know, you can really go for it.’”

She recalled: “I’m saying, ‘But I’m really strong.’ He says, ‘That’s fine,’ and he’s really strong, so he doesn’t mind.”

Things escalated even further when Charlie fell to the floor, only for his co-star to spit on him.

“He gets up, he’s like, ‘What? What did you just do? You just spat on me. You can’t do that,’” she recalled.

A miniseries about a young girl acquitted for the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother might not sound like a natural comedy, but Ryan Murphy wanted the tone of season four to be much lighter than Monster’s previous outings.

“I felt like the tone was slightly different from [The Ed Gein Story],” Charlie told Entertainment Weekly. “It was a little more irreverent, a little more sort of bonkers, theatrical, [a] little bit more comedy, tonally than the past season that I had done. So it just felt like a fun opportunity.”

Rebecca saw her role as the villainous stepmother as a chance to unleash her comedic side.

“I’ve never played a true out-and-out villain,” she told Variety. “I just loved on the page how funny she was. It just felt like such an opportunity to be both funny and scary at the same time, which is an interesting tonal challenge.”

Director Max Winkler also confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the show is intentionally comedic, which presented its own challenges.

“It was really challenging to make because a lot of it is comedic, with the insane way that people wrote and spoke and had expectations for women in that time period,” the Love Story director explained. “Which is not that long ago…”

He added: “1890 is so laughably insane, and the fact that there’s still some crossover to it today and that half of the internet thinks that we should go back to that way of life? It lends itself to make fun of it.”

“Sometimes the blood on my face was hand-painted with makeup brushes,” Ella told Tudum. “Sometimes it was literally poured onto me. Sometimes it came from what’s called a blood rig. So every time I would slam an axe onto the blood rig, fake blood would shoot out onto my face and body.”

Describing the process as both “realistic” and “messy”, she also shared a little behind-the-scenes hack for how they removed the blood with “a healthy dose of shaving cream”.

When blood isn’t being splattered in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the cast had puke and diarrhoea to contend with.

Most notably, the episode Strong Kitty is definitely not one for the squeamish – with Abby and Andrew Borden unknowingly sitting down for a meal of spoiled oysters, resulting in them projectile vomiting and running to the bathroom before long.

The crew spent much time and energy creating the gross scene, with director Max recalling to The Wrap: “That was a very messy, difficult day, but I am very pleased with how it turned out.

“Jack Price – our editor on that episode, was incredible in finding the musicality of it all.”

To make that gross scene as realistic as possible, they hooked Rebecca and Charlie up with subtly-disguised tubes, which the prop team filled with a disgusting orange liquid to recreate projectile vomiting.

“Rebecca has a very hard time being around vomiting and said very early that she is inclined to vomit if she’s around it,” the director explained to The Wrap. “So that was my biggest fear, protecting Rebecca.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he added: “Rebecca did one of the bravest things, because it’s a real thing, her thing.

“She was like shaking, so her courage to do that and to trust me… we tried to do it as quickly as possible, and it pays off because she’s so amazing in it. Intricate dinner scenes are always challenging.”

It wasn’t any easier for Charlie, who “ate the oysters that were canned because we needed them to be super big”.

“Charlie was a hero that day, but so was Rebecca,” Max said of his cast during his interview with The Wrap.

Charlie told Entertainment Weekly that he’s “kind of a germaphobe”, making the scene particularly unpleasant to film for him.

“Even if it’s fake vomit, being covered head to toe in vomit and diarrhoea for the day did not seem like a particularly enjoyable experience,” he shared. “And, indeed, it wasn’t.”

Luckily, Rebecca didn’t find it as bad as she was worried it would be.

“It was so funny and preposterous, and nothing was remotely like real vomiting, actually,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “It turned out that my biggest challenge was maintaining a straight face when the camera was on me, because I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more.”

Season four’s final moments focus on Aileen Wuornos’ execution. As she sits in the electric chair, she sees Lizzie and Maggie beckoning her towards the light.

“I always knew the last shot was going to be Aileen’s body and the curtain closing to match the ornate beautiful curtain of the fairytale version of ‘Lizzie was this crazy person!’ and then the actual reality,” director Max told The Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, Ian told Tudum: “In a way, Lizzie has a happy ending, and Aileen didn’t. She didn’t get away with anything. So it felt right to land on her and give her, if not a happy ending, one that is satisfying.”

As the show concludes, I Know by Fiona Apple plays. The director explained to The Hollywood Reporter why he felt the Grammy winner’s music was perfect for that final scene.

Describing the artist as “someone else who’s been objectified for being incredible and brilliant and talented”, and had a “back turned on her for being difficult or traumatised or whatever”, Max added: “That song, that moment of an artist I admire so much helped me kind of close the loop.”

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is available to stream on Netflix now.

You probably don’t need an expert to tell you that alcohol messes with your body, especially when you’re well past your 20s. Alcohol can make you more anxious as you age, for example (hello, “hangxiety”) and just generally make you feel worse – including more tired.

If a night out is starting to lead to a night in much quicker than usual, or drinking isn’t fun anymore because you feel sleepy instead of silly, you’re not alone – and there’s a scientific reason.

Ahead, addiction experts share why drinking alcohol is more likely to make you feel tired when you’re older, other effects you might notice and when they typically show up.

We’re looking at one main answer here.

“Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and the brain becomes more sensitive to its sedating effects with age,” said Dr. Urvi Natha, a licensed clinical psychologist with Oro Recovery and the founder of Shanti Recovery and Wellness.

That’s because of changes in body composition. “As we age, lean body mass and total body water decrease, leaving less volume in which alcohol can distribute,” said Dr. Amy Swift, a psychiatrist and the deputy medical officer at Silver Hill Hospital.

This starts earlier than you might guess, too.

“Starting around age 30, we lose about 3% to 8% of our lean muscle mass each decade,” said Dr. James Sherer, an addiction psychiatrist and network medical director at Hackensack Meridian Health Addiction Service. “Fat tissue then replaces the lost muscle mass.”

If you think the tiredness may make it easier for you to fall asleep, not so fast. To make matters worse, even though you’re sleepy, you probably won’t sleep well. Talk about a double-whammy.

“While alcohol might make you pass out, it destroys sleep quality by blocking REM (rapid eye movement) and deep restorative sleep,” Sherer explained. “Because natural sleep architecture already becomes lighter and more fragmented as we age, adding alcohol guarantees you will wake up exhausted, irritable and physically fatigued.” (Side note: “Junk sleep” or fragmented sleep is also linked to 172 diseases.)

There’s also the fact that older individuals may be more likely to have additional health issues or take more medications.

“Medications, sleep apnea and other medical conditions can compound the problem,” said Dr. Lucas Trautman, an addiction psychiatrist with American Addiction Center.

He recalled patients reporting they slept a full seven or eight hours after drinking, but still waking up exhausted.

“Alcohol may facilitate unconsciousness, but unconsciousness and healthy sleep are not physiologically equivalent,” he said.

Feeling extra tired isn’t the only complication you’ll notice. As mentioned earlier, anxiety is a major one. Doctors also listed the following:

• Alcohol can worsen high blood sugar.

• Taking more medications means more possible interactions with the alcohol. This could contribute to increased drowsiness, dizziness or the medicine being less effective, to name a few examples.

• You may continue to lose sight of the severity of your drinking.

• You’re more likely to notice cognitive effects, particularly with balance and memory. The former contributes to a higher risk of falls and fractures.

• The aftereffects can be more pronounced and disruptive the following day.

• Alcohol can affect multiple parts of the body in multiple ways, such as contributing to dehydration, worsening GERD and triggering atrial fibrillation. It’s also a carcinogen.

There’s no particular age when you’ll notice those shifts, experts say. Plus, other factors are still at play, like body composition, health profile, gender and what you ate that day.

However, Swift has noticed that people in their 40s typically find that alcohol “goes to their head” more quickly, and she noted that physiology backs that up. Sherer has heard of people experiencing this as early as their mid-30s.

Natha added that different life stages can bring different effects from alcohol. Generally speaking – and unfortunately – you’ll notice the tiredness worsen. She said that young adults can recover from that most quickly, then middle-agers, then older adults.

Even for young adults, these side effects can be problematic, though.

“A younger adult may tolerate dehydration and a disrupted night of sleep and still function reasonably well the following day, [but] that does not mean the alcohol had no biological effect,” Trautman clarified.

Sherer spoke more about the effects that middle-aged people often experience. “People in this age bracket often report that drinking makes them immediately sleepy, and the lingering fatigue from disrupted sleep lasts well into the workweek,” he said. “This is when the infamous ‘two-day hangover’ appears.”

Trautman added that those individuals are more likely to notice impaired concentration, irritability, fatigue and reduced exercise performance.

By the time you reach your 60s and 70s, Sherer said, alcohol “functions heavily as a sedative,” and your aging body “simply cannot process” as much alcohol safely. Trautman noted “a more consequential effect” on balance, reaction time, blood pressure, cognition and medical safety.

These age-related changes show up when people are getting sober from alcohol, too.

“In addiction treatment, this contrast can be striking,” Swift said. “A 20-year-old drinking 10 beers daily may show little evidence of withdrawal, while a 60-year-old drinking a bottle of wine each day may require medically supervised withdrawal management.”

So, while it may be annoying, it’s true: alcohol has worsening effects on the body as we get older. It’s just not worth it.

“While our drinking habits may stay the same, as we age, their impact on our bodies grows more profound,” Natha concluded.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re “too young” for it, however.

“I have seen severe consequences of alcohol use disorder in people who are remarkably young,” Trautman said. “I have treated patients in their mid-30s who already had liver failure and other advanced medical complications related to alcohol. That clinical reality challenges the idea that serious alcohol-related disease develops only in old age or only after many decades of drinking.”

A lot of dating content focuses on everything that’s wrong with modern romance, and, to be fair, there’s plenty to talk about.

From women sharing horror stories about first dates to bizarre dating trends like Shrekking, it can be hard to stay optimistic about the state of dating in 2026. Dating can be a minefield of rejection, ghosting and the occasional terrible date.

But amid all the disappointments, there are also moments that restore your faith in love. For many people, that’s the moment they realise they’ve found “the one”.

It’s the question we ask our partners: When did you know I was the one? It’s the TikTok videos we watch before inevitably redownloading dating apps. It’s a question we’re desperate to know when someone announces their engagement – along with whether we should dread a destination wedding.

And it’s the subject of countless Reddit threads, where strangers share the exact moment they realised they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with someone.

The answers are rarely what you’d expect. Sometimes it’s a grand gesture or a life-changing event. More often, it’s an ordinary moment their partner probably doesn’t even remember.

Together, they reveal something about what makes love feel certain, and why recognising “the one” is usually less about a perfect moment than an accumulation of small things.

Of course, as tempting as it is to recreate these stories and hope your partner suddenly has their own epiphany, that’s probably not how it works. Some things can’t be engineered. Also, it tends to be more about the person themselves than their partner.

Here are seven men on the moment they realised their partner was “the one.”

“Our first anniversary stands out as one of my favourite memories. I remember wondering whether he’d get me a gift or do something sentimental. He’s never been someone who’s big on taking photos or making grand romantic gestures, so for a moment I questioned whether I should bring anything myself.

“In the end, I decided I wanted to do something special regardless of whether he had planned anything. I spent hours making a scrapbook filled with memories from our first year together, and we’d booked dinner at the same restaurant where we’d had our first date. As I walked over to the table, he spotted the wrapped scrapbook under my arm, laughed, and said, ‘I think we had the same idea,’ pointing to a scrapbook he’d made for me.

“The fact that he’d secretly spent hours making something so creative – despite insisting he’s not a creative person – completely caught me off guard. … It wasn’t really about the scrapbook itself. It was the thought that we’d both independently decided to express our love in exactly the same way. In that moment, I remember thinking: this is someone I want to spend a very long time with.” – Floris Muller

“We weren’t even exclusive yet, but a woman came up to me at a party and flirted with me. My instinct was to find her attractive, but then I found I wasn’t flirting back. I wasn’t even trying to keep the conversation going. There was only one woman I wanted to flirt with, and three years later, she’s still the only one.” – Toby M.

“I stayed up until 2am texting him when I had a really early flight. I spent the entire next day exhausted, but I didn’t even regret it. Realising I would rather be tired and talk to him said enough for me.” – Adam Jones

“One of the first times I thought, ‘I could do this for the rest of my life,’ was my first birthday after we got together. From the very beginning of our relationship, she’d always said she was an all-in kind of person, and the gift she gave me made me realise exactly what she meant.

“A few days before my birthday, she told me to pack a small bag for the weekend. I assumed we were going somewhere nearby. On the morning of the trip, she woke me up early, had a coffee ready for me – which, if you know me, is essential – blindfolded me and put me in the car. When she finally took the blindfold off, we were at the airport.

“It turned out she hadn’t planned a weekend close to home at all. She’d secretly taken my passport and packed it without telling me. I didn’t even know where we were flying until we were boarding the plane, and she’d somehow convinced airport staff to let me through security without showing me my boarding pass, so the destination stayed a surprise.

“We ended up spending an amazing weekend in Budapest. More than the trip itself, it was the thought and effort she’d put into creating the surprise. That was the moment I realised she wasn’t someone who’d ever settle for a generic gift voucher, she was the kind of person who wanted to create unforgettable memories.” – Marty Hoogerland

“I didn’t feel nervous around her. It went against everything people told me about ‘butterflies’ or ‘sparks,’ but she was the first person who made me feel calm and comfortable. I didn’t rehearse what I would say, I just enjoyed myself.” – James Tate

“I knew my partner was ‘the one’ when I stopped looking for ‘the one’ and started being more open-minded about the kind of partner I was looking for. ’The one’ is Disney movie bullsh*t. On paper, Sonia and I aren’t compatible, our interests and family backgrounds are very different. But we’ve made it work. What makes us so brilliant is our ability to work through those differences, understand each other’s point of view, and learn from each other. We choose each other, every day. When I look back on our relationship, the thing I’m most proud of is how we’ve worked through difficult conflict situations and come out stronger.” – Tom Stroud

“For me, there wasn’t a specific moment I knew she was ‘the one.’ I knew she was something special on our very first date across the Ticket to Ride board game laid out before us, but as for knowing she was ‘the one,’ to me this came in the form of her showing up for me over time, being there for me, putting a smile on my face on a bad day, and showing me there’s more to life than work. All of this built up, and I knew this was the right fit and she was ‘the one.’” – Bryan H.

A cabinet split has erupted after Angela Rayner condemned home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s immigration crackdown.

The communities secretary said Mahmood had “changed the goalposts” by making it harder for foreign social care workers to live in the UK permanently.

In a further headache for Andy Burnham, a former cabinet minister said he was not doing enough to boost economic growth.

The deep divisions which remain within Labour came to the fore again on the eve of the party’s annual conference in Liverpool.

Mahmood’s reforms will increase the timeline for permanent residence in the UK from five years to 15 years for foreign social care workers, and will apply to all those who have come to the country since 2021.

Speaking to The Times, Rayner said she stood by her previous criticisms that the changes are “un-British”.

Asked if she had changed her views, she: “Especially in regards to the carers, who were asked to come to this country to care for some of our most vulnerable and then we changed the goalposts years down the line, I think that’s very disruptive.

“I do have concerns about that … when you ask someone to come here and look after your most vulnerable and they spend years dedicating themselves, moving their lives here to look after our loved ones.”

But culture secretary Lisa Nandy backed Mahmood, telling Radio 4’s Today programme: “I don’t think that we’ve ever had an automatic right to citizenship for most people who come to the UK from overseas.”

She said the Home Secretary is trying to “balance the respect and gratitude that we all feel to people who come to this country, who make a contribution” with the need for an immigration system the public can have confidence in.

Meanwhile, former science secretary Peter Kyle – who was sacked by Burnham when he replaced Keir Starmer as PM – said the government needed to do more to grow the economy.

He said that should include slowing down the rollout of new rights for workers.

Kyle told the BBC: “We might need to look and have honest conversations with unions about how we sequence some of the rights going forward in order to make sure that we get growth into the economy in the shorter term.”

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