In the spring of 1963, a sixteen-year-old Lesley Gore recorded “It’s My Party.”

The premise was simple enough.

It is the narrator’s birthday. Her boyfriend, Johnny, disappears for a while with her friend Judy. When Judy returns wearing Johnny’s ring, the birthday girl understands what has happened.

She cries.

What else could she do?

The remarkable thing about “It’s My Party” is not that a teenage girl cries after being publicly humiliated. Crying is probably the most psychologically sensible thing anyone does in the entire story.

The remarkable thing is that the song grants her permission.

“It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to” is usually remembered as petulance—an adolescent stamping of the foot. But it also contains a primitive declaration of emotional ownership.

This is my party.

These are my tears.

You do not get to tell me how I should feel about what has happened to me.

The girl cannot stop Johnny from leaving. She cannot stop Judy from returning with his ring. She cannot prevent the other guests from carrying on as though the evening has not become catastrophic.

But she can refuse to perform happiness for their convenience.

“If you were me,” she tells us, “you would cry too.”

She is not merely collapsing. She is making a case.

For a girl in 1963, that was not nothing.

The Outer Banks are beautiful in the slightly unnerving way of places that have killed a great many people.

The beaches are wide. The dunes hold their pale line against the Atlantic.

Pelicans pass overhead with the composure of creatures that have not spent much time reconsidering their marriages.

And beneath the water lie the ships.

These waters are called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Storms gather quickly. Currents collide. Sandbars move.

The coastline rearranges itself without consulting the charts.

A captain could possess a sound vessel, an experienced crew, and a respectable understanding of the sea—and still strike something that had not been there the last time anyone looked.

This is the first uncomfortable thing shipwrecks know about marriage:

The map can be accurate and still become useless.

Today, I am in the Outer Banks looking for sea glass.

This is an occupation requiring very little intelligence and a surprising amount of attention.

You walk slowly at the waterline, looking down.

Brown glass is pretty common. Green is better. Blue can produce an excitement wildly disproportionate to the monetary value of the glass in question.

The best pieces are cloudy and smooth.

They did not begin that way.

A newly broken bottle is sharp, transparent, dangerous.

Only after years in the water does glass acquire the softness we prize: rolled through sand, thrown against shells and stone, buried, uncovered, carried offshore, returned again.

The frosting on its surface is damage accumulated exquisitely slowly.

Its rounded edges are evidence of collision.

What we pick up and call beautiful is glass altered by what happened to it.

There are places in the Outer Banks where Blackbeard is difficult to avoid.

He is on flags and T-shirts. He appears on signs, mugs, restaurant walls, and the assorted merchandise through which Americans convert dangerous men into charming local economic activity.

Three centuries have been good to Blackbeard.

They have been less good to Edward Teach.

Teach—or Thatch, or one of several spellings that appear in the historical record—was the man generally believed to have become Blackbeard.

We know surprisingly little about him.

There is no known diary in which he explains himself.

No collection of intimate letters.

No memoir.

No reliable account of what frightened him, whom he loved, what embarrassed him, whether he regretted anything, or what he thought about when nobody was watching.

We know the beard.

We know the guns.

We know the smoke.

We have almost completely lost the man.

Perhaps that is simply what three hundred years does to a life.

A great many couples arrive in therapy with a reasonable-sounding complaint:

“We aren’t happy anymore.”

It feels like a diagnosis. Usually, it is closer to a receipt.

Happiness tells us something about what has already been happening inside a relationship.

It reflects whether two people feel safe, connected, respected, purposeful, and sufficiently free to remain themselves.

Couples often respond by trying to produce happiness directly.

They schedule date nights. They book a vacation.

They buy concert tickets and sit beside each other privately wondering whether the parking was worth it.

None of this is foolish. Pleasure matters. Fun matters.

Novelty can interrupt the administrative trance into which long marriages sometimes drift.

But happiness cannot be ordered as a separate marital service.

It tends to appear after certain conditions have been created.

A new consensus study on positive mental health offers a useful distinction—and may help explain why some couples remain unhappy despite trying so hard to become happier.

Robert Heinlein spent much of his career designing improved arrangements for the human race.

Improved governments. Improved armies. Improved sexual customs. Improved marriages. Improved methods for occupying other planets, where presumably nobody would insist upon bringing the same tedious rules from Connecticut.

His novels considered communal families, plural marriages, nudism, sexual freedom, and the possibility that jealousy might be one more primitive habit intelligent people could learn to outgrow.

He was fascinated by relationships constructed deliberately rather than inherited wholesale from parents, priests, and county clerks.

Then, in 1948, he married Virginia Gerstenfeld.

They remained together for forty years.

It was not quite the domestic conclusion one might expect from the great speculative engineer of unconventional love. Heinlein imagined households populated by several unusually attractive adults sharing affection with astonishing administrative efficiency. What he created for himself was more concentrated: an intensely bonded marriage to one brilliant, disciplined, indispensable woman.

The man who kept redesigning marriage in his fiction appears to have found his greatest freedom inside a partnership of two.

Hermann Hesse became a patron saint of the 1960s without having the good manners to remain alive for most of them.

Young Americans like me discovered Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian and recognized a fellow traveler: suspicious of authority, hostile to bourgeois conformity, interested in Eastern spirituality, and convinced that the authentic self was hiding somewhere beyond the reach of parents, pastors, employers, and anyone wearing a necktie.

At the time, I was less interested in his marital history.

This was understandable.

The counterculture preferred its prophets wandering beside rivers, not negotiating childcare with an exhausted wife.

The same young readers like me who struggled with the notion that love should be free also tended to believe it should be easy—an arrangement history has not often managed to provide.

Hesse married three times. Some might suggest that Hesse displayed a degree of Avoidant Attachment.

The marriages were very different, but together they revealed something central about him.

He longed for intimacy, depended upon it, and repeatedly experienced its ordinary demands as an encroachment upon the sovereignty of the self.

He wanted love.

He was less enthusiastic about somebody being there.

There is a particular sort who can enter a room, notice what everyone else has missed, announce that the future is arriving early, and persuade three people to finance it before lunch.

We often call this soul an entrepreneur.

At home, the terminology may be less admiring. Let me explain.

A recent study published in Acta Psychologica found that narcissism and psychopathy were associated with stronger entrepreneurial tendencies.

This does not mean entrepreneurs are psychopaths, despite what several former business partners may be muttering into their coffee.

It does suggest that qualities rewarded in entrepreneurial life can become complicated once the founder comes home.

Confidence becomes certainty. Risk tolerance becomes unilateral decision-making.

Vision becomes a household government in which one adult receives divine transmissions and the other is asked to “get on board.”

The business calls this leadership.

The marriage calls it “whatever.”

At an estate in New York’s Hudson Valley, seven successful professionals gathered to discuss what success had done to them.

They came from banking, marketing, healthcare, consulting, and technology.

They had titles.

They had money.

They had arrived.

The difficulty was that arrival felt surprisingly similar to being trapped.

The retreat, described by Lauren Weber in The Wall Street Journal, cost $4,000.

It was organized by Punks & Pinstripes for leaders seeking change.

The participants ranged from their mid-30s to their late 50s. They talked, meditated, and lay on the floor for a sound bath.

Corporate America had apparently become so exhausting that accomplished people were now paying four figures to lie down together and consider hardware stores.

A bank vice president said that a person can acquire the title and the money only to discover that the achievement feels hollow.

A marketing director said she was tired of waiting every day for the day to end.

A hospital executive whose position had been eliminated imagined opening a hardware store or becoming a science teacher.

When he pictured that life, he said, his nervous system relaxed.

This was not a gathering of people who had failed.

Failure might have made the problem easier to name.

These were people who had succeeded long enough to wonder whether success had been the problem.

The American job market is improving.

The economy added jobs for four consecutive months.

The unemployment rate declined to 4.2%.

The large numbers were behaving themselves.

Nearly two million Americans remained outside the celebration.

According to a recent report by Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, these workers had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.

In June 2026, the long-term unemployed represented 27.3% of all unemployed Americans—four percentage points higher than a year earlier and near the highest level since the labor market was recovering from the pandemic in 2021.

The labor market can improve without improving for you.

This is one of the cruelties of economic statistics.

The chart rises.

The applicant remains seated at the kitchen table, adjusting a résumé for a position that will receive hundreds of applications.

A construction-company manager in Alaska recently fired a 24-year-old employee.

The young man had arrived late—or not arrived at all—four times during his first week.

The conversation was brief.

A few hours later, the manager had to fire him again.

This time, he spoke with the employee’s mother.

She called to request another chance for her son. When the manager declined, the conversation became heated.

The employee had been dismissed.

His mother had filed the appeal.

This incident appears in a recent report by Ray A. Smith in The Wall Street Journal about parents entering the professional lives of their adult children.

They are contacting hiring managers. They are submitting applications. They are attending interviews and lingering just outside the camera’s view during Zoom calls.

They are asking why their children were not hired.

Some are calling employers about benefits, negative feedback, and disappointing performance reviews.

A few are calling in sick for their adult children.

Apparently, adulthood now comes with authorized representation.

On a rainy morning in Austin, twelve young people sat on couches in an Airbnb and considered why their parents wanted them to work.

Their families were worth, collectively, $7 billion.

The question was not whether they would survive without employment. That question had been settled before they entered the room.

The question was what work might provide once money had removed the requirement for it.

The young people offered several answers.

The money belonged to their parents. Work taught the value of a dollar. Work gave a person purpose.

Purpose was the preferred answer.

It was also the only thing their parents could not place in trust.

The gathering was described by Juliet Chung in The Wall Street Journal.

It was organized by R360, a membership group for families worth at least $100 million.

These young folks were in college or in their twenties. They ate eggs in the morning.

They listened to presentations about entrepreneurship and real estate.

They prepared for a startup-pitch competition. They played pickleball. A private chef cooked rib-eyes.

They had come to learn how not to be ruined by money.

This is a problem that sounds indecent when stated plainly.

Most parents worry about tuition, rent, medical bills, and whether a child will find work that pays enough to make adulthood possible.

These parents had already solved those problems.

They were left with another.

What happens to a child when necessity itself disappears?