I'm dating this new woman. I like her a lot, but she keeps complaining that I still have pictures of my ex-girlfriend on my wall, saying that it makes her uncomfortable, especially when we're having sex. I was with my ex for a while, and we lived together. They're just pictures. What's the big deal?

--Irritated

There's a place for the photographic Museum of Relationships Past, but it isn't the area around your bed -- assuming that your sex partners don't require inflation with a bike pump.

Actual human beings have feelings. They long to be treated with dignity -- to be given the sense that others value them and care about how they make them feel. This would be reflected, for example, in replacing what, to a woman, probably looks like a wall shrine to the ex with pix of your other, less inflammatory loves, like Linda, your family's late Rottweiler.

It's possible that you have some sort of empathy gap -- something keeping you from the usually automatic "fellow feeling." This is a way researchers have described the sort of empathy that involves "emotional contagion" -- "catching" and then feeling an emotion another person's feeling, to some degree. Even if this isn't natural for you, you can bring it into your relationships through "perspective-taking" -- making an effort to imagine how another person feels in a situation. (This is different from imagining how you would feel.)

Research by C. Daniel Batson suggests that trying to feel what another person is feeling leads us to have empathy, "which has been found to evoke altruistic motivation." This means that it motivates a person to behave in kind and compassionate ways. In contrast, though imagining how we would feel if we were in the other person's shoes produces empathy, too, the researchers found that it also produces "personal distress, which has been found to evoke egoistic motivation" -- which is to say, "Me! Me! Me! All about me!"

In general, treating other people as if their feelings matter -- even when you don't share their feelings or think they're entirely legit -- makes for far happier relationships. If you aren't interested in putting in the work to show empathy, you can still have a relationship -- but with an atypical partner. Your best bet is probably a Boston fern -- specifically one advertised to have "durable plastic leaves that are resistant to fading."