The headlines always make it sound like a mystery.

An attractive thirty-something teacher.

A fifteen-year-old boy.

Thousands of text messages.

A devastated school district.

An arrest.

And then the same question appears beneath every news story.

"What was she thinking?"

It's the wrong question.

The better question is:

What kind of world makes this increasingly possible?

Because while we argue about individual women, something much larger has quietly happened.

We have accidentally engineered a society that makes emotional boundary violations astonishingly easy.

The female teacher is simply where we happen to notice it.

The same psychology is unfolding everywhere.

One of the great myths about infidelity is that it begins with attraction.

It usually does not. Attraction is ordinary.

Married people continue to possess functioning eyes.

They meet charming colleagues, notice beautiful strangers, and occasionally discover that an old flame has appeared on social media looking suspiciously serene.

Attraction knocks on the door.

Permission opens it.

A recent study published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy helps explain how that permission may develop.

Researchers examined the connections among relationship quality, attitudes toward casual sex, gender, and the acceptability of infidelity.

Their findings suggest that relationship dissatisfaction does not affect everyone in the same way.

An unhappy relationship may make cheating seem more acceptable, but that shift is partly shaped by a person’s preexisting comfort with sex outside emotional commitment.

In plain English: a deteriorating relationship does not manufacture an entirely new sexual personality. It interacts with the one already there.

That is considerably more interesting than saying unhappy men are more likely to approve of cheating.

It is also considerably less convenient.

There is a famous joke among statisticians that accidentally explains why perfectly good marriages sometimes drift into unnecessary misery.

The joke goes something like this:

Day 1: Scientists investigate whether red jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

Day 2: Scientists investigate whether orange jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

...

Day 19: Scientists investigate whether purple jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

Day 20: Scientists investigate whether black jelly beans cause acne.
Result: A statistically significant result!

Headline:
"Scientists Discover Black Jelly Beans Cause Acne."

The humor is that the researchers tested 20 different colors.

Even if none of the colors actually causes acne, statistical theory predicts that if you perform enough independent tests using the conventional 5% significance level (p < .05), eventually one of them will appear "statistically significant" just by random chance.

The black jelly bean wasn't necessarily special.

Every generation develops its own explanation for why relationships lose their vitality.

We blame stress.

Children.

Technology.

Work.

Pornography.

Social media.

Now, increasingly, we blame certainty.

In a thoughtful recent profile in The Atlantic, Faith Hill revisits Esther Perel's influential argument that modern couples often sacrifice desire in their pursuit of security.

We seek predictability, transparency, and emotional safety, even though eroticism has always depended on uncertainty, playfulness, and the recognition that another person can never be fully known.

Hill suggests that America's declining sexual interest may be part of something larger—an "eroticism shortage" rooted in a broader discomfort with ambiguity.

I think that's an intriguing observation.

I also think it points toward a deeper problem.

Not an eroticism shortage.

A curiosity shortage.

She says this while checking her engagement analytics, negotiating a sponsorship with a cookware company, editing her fifth video of the day, reviewing affiliate sales, answering emails from her manager, and scheduling tomorrow's content across four social media platforms.

If irony burned calories, Tradwife TikTok would disappear overnight.

A fascinating new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterlyexamines one of the internet's fastest-growing subcultures: the "tradwife" influencer.

The researchers weren't interested in judging women who choose to stay home, homeschool their children, or bake sourdough bread. Those are legitimate personal choices that millions of families make happily.

Instead, they asked a far more interesting question:

How do social media influencers package traditional gender roles into a profitable digital business?

Their answer tells us as much about Instagram and TikTok as it does about marriage.

David Crosby never called it Blue Space Therapy.

In fact, I doubt he would have.

Sailors rarely describe what the sea gives them in therapeutic language. They simply say they need to get back on the water.

They need to hear the wind. They need to sail.

Therapists, on the other hand, reach for words like emotional regulation, differentiation, secure attachment, attention restoration, and environmental psychology.

Often, we're describing the same experience.

For nearly forty-five years, David Crosby returned to the same wooden schooner whenever his life became too loud.

Through extraordinary musical success, devastating addiction, prison, recovery, illness, and redemption, one constant remained: Mayan.

The story isn't really about a famous musician who owned a beautiful boat.

It's about why one human being kept returning to the same place to become himself again.

Every generation has its villain.

Once upon a time it was the shiksa.

Today it's TikTok.

Or ChatGPT.

Or therapy.

Or California.

Or Jordan Peterson.

Or Harvard.

Or Fox News.

Or MSNBC.

Or "that woman."

Or "those friends."

Or the damned phone.

The names change.

The emotional process does not.

Edwin Friedman saw this almost forty years ago, although many readers missed what he was actually saying. His famous essay, The Myth of the Shiksa, was never really about Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women. It was about something infinitely more interesting.

It was about the remarkable human ability to mistake the carrier of anxiety for its cause.

That insight may be even more important today than when Friedman first wrote it.

There is an awkward moment that arrives in nearly every marriage.

One spouse says,

"You've changed."

The other replies,

"No. I'm finally being myself."

Sometimes that's a triumph of maturity.

Sometimes it's an announcement that someone has started listening to podcasts.

The difference matters.

Psychology has a wonderfully clumsy phrase for genuine maturity: Differentiation of Self.

It sounds like something assembled by a committee of professors who were paid by the syllable.

The phrase deserves a better publicist.

Because buried inside those three words may be the single most important idea ever developed about adult relationships.

Not communication.

Not attachment.

Not love languages.

Not boundaries.

Differentiation.

If you only read three thinkers on the subject, make them Murray Bowen, Edwin Friedman, and David Schnarch.

Bowen built the architecture. Friedman carried it into leadership and culture.

Dear Daniel,

I recently watched the Netflix film Office Romance, which made me think about the broader issue of romantic relationships in the workplace.

I've also noticed that several publications—including HR Magazine, People Management, RM Magazine, and LinkedIn—have been discussing workplace relationships, often in the context of real organizations dealing with the benefits and risks of employees dating each other.

In addition, Forbes published workplace romance statistics on July 1, 2026, suggesting that romantic relationships between coworkers remain surprisingly common.

Given all of this attention, I'm curious about your perspective.

Do you think workplace romances are generally a good idea, or do they create more problems than they're worth?

From your experience as a marriage and family therapist, are there psychological dynamics that people—and employers—often overlook?

I'm not seeking personal advice or counseling. I simply thought this would make for an interesting discussion.

Kind regards,

Monica

There is an old piece of dating advice that refuses to die.

"Just assume they like you."

Walk into the room with confidence.

Smile.

Relax.

Act as though attraction is already underway.

Like many clichés, it survives because it contains just enough truth to be dangerous.

A new study suggests that believing someone likes you really does change your experience of dating.

It just doesn't change dating in the way most people think.

The researchers discovered something much more interesting than another argument for confidence. They uncovered the difference between confidence and accuracy—and those two qualities don't always travel together.

Confidence made people more romantically interested.

Accuracy made people more romantically attractive.

Those are very different psychological skills.

History has a wicked sense of humor.

It waits patiently until we become absolutely certain about something...

...and then produces a receipt.

Take the name Tiffany.

If I told you there was a Lady Tiffany walking through England sometime around the year 1200, you would probably smile politely and assume I'd confused the Crusades with a jewelry store.

You would be wrong.

The historians would be right.

Derived from the Greek Theophania, forms of the name Tiffany appear in medieval England centuries before Shakespeare, centuries before Columbus, and centuries before anyone associated the name with little blue boxes and Fifth Avenue.

A novelist who placed Lady Tiffany in a meticulously researched medieval village would almost certainly receive letters from readers pointing out the "mistake."

The mistake would belong to the readers.

Historians have a name for this peculiar collision between truth and expectation.

They call it the Tiffany Problem.

For years we've asked the wrong question.

When someone compulsively watches pornography, has repeated affairs, can't stop scrolling dating apps, or feels driven by sexual urges that repeatedly damage relationships, we instinctively ask:

"Why is this person so sexual?"

It's a reasonable question.

According to a fascinating new study published in the Journal of Sex Research, it may also be incomplete.

The researchers weren't primarily interested in how much people desired sex.

They were interested in something far less obvious:

How well people understand their own minds.

Psychologists call this mentalizing.

It may be one of the most important psychological abilities you've never heard of.