Daniel Dashnaw 11/9/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/9/26

Alpine Divorce: When Your Partner Becomes a Spectator

There are less alarming places to discover that your relationship is in trouble than halfway down a mountain.

The kitchen has advantages. Chairs. Running water. Somewhere to put the terrible cup of tea.

“Alpine divorce” has become an online name for being left behind by a romantic partner during a hike or other outdoor excursion.

The circumstances described under that label vary enormously.

An inconsiderate companion walking ahead and someone deliberately leaving a partner without essential supplies require different accounts of responsibility.

But the phrase has acquired force because it describes a recognizable fear: discovering that the person you relied on no longer considers your welfare part of the plan.

Its history begins with a marriage from which neither spouse could readily escape.

Its contemporary meaning concerns the withdrawal of care while another person still depends on it.

And there is a further possibility worth considering.

Sometimes the partner who leaves stays close enough to watch.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26

Everybody Wants a Village. Can I Stay Saturday?

“I’m coming into town for a concert. Any chance I could stay Saturday night?”

You might be delighted.

You might have a sick child, a studio apartment, an early shift, or a life partner who has already hosted three of your college friends and has specifically asked you to stop running the alumni annex.

You can say no.

But before answering, consider what your friend has risked by asking.

You now know they would like something from you. They have given you the opportunity to disappoint them.

Friendship becomes more interesting at precisely this point: when affection takes the form of a request someone is free to refuse.

What does friendship permit us to ask anyway?

Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26

The Apocalypse Still Has Croissants

The apocalypse did not arrive Tuesday.

Tuesday was busy.

There were emails before breakfast, a warning light in the car, three articles explaining that democracy had entered its final eighteen months, and a text from the pharmacy announcing that the prescription was ready.

The coffee machine worked.

This was reassuring.

By noon, a city was burning somewhere on the phone.

A woman demonstrated a skin-care routine beneath it.

Someone had discovered a new reason the economy was fake. Someone else was selling linen pants.

At six, a couple argued about whether they had enough money to replace the dishwasher.

The world did not end.

It became slightly more difficult to explain.

That is the unsettling achievement of M. John Harrison’s Booker-shortlisted novel The End of Everything.

As Hillary Kelly observes in The Atlantic, Harrison discards the most comforting convention in apocalyptic fiction: the Event.

There is no clean detonation separating before from after. No morning when the survivors step outside and discover that the ordinary rules have been officially canceled.

The government barely functions. Europe has somehow been mislaid.

Strange entities have occupied the Lloyd’s of London building. Geography has become unreliable.

People still eat croissants.

They throw parties. They argue about history.

They improvise small economies inside the remains of the large one. They use familiar language to domesticate conditions that should be impossible to normalize.

The apocalypse does not interrupt ordinary life.

It becomes ordinary life.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/7/26

Draw the Marriage: When Two Life Partners Remember Different Relationships

Most couples arrive in therapy with a history.

They also arrive with an argument about the history.

One partner believes the marriage began deteriorating after the children were born.

The other remembers those years as difficult but fundamentally loving.

One believes an affair destroyed a healthy marriage.

The other describes years of loneliness before the betrayal. One remembers a period of silence as abandonment.

The other remembers it as the only available way to prevent constant conflict.

They agree that something happened.

They do not agree on when it began, what it meant, or which version of the marriage deserves to be called true.

This is how ordinary disagreement becomes narrative warfare: a struggle over whose interpretation will become the official account of the marriage.

Couples therapy often moves quickly toward the present.

What happens when you argue now? What cycle organizes the conflict? What fear is activated? What behavior needs to change?

These are important questions.

But sometimes the present cannot be understood until the couple can see the relationship across time.

A newly published study suggests a deceptively simple method:

Ask someone to draw the course of the relationship.

Not describe it.

Draw it.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/6/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/6/26

The Losses Nobody Brings a Casserole For

Imagine getting laid off on Thursday and finding three former coworkers at a trailhead on Saturday.

One brings coffee. One picked a route that requires no ambition whatsoever.

Somebody has already muted the company Slack.

A group hike after a layoff is among the examples in a recent Harris Poll holiday trends briefing.

The pollster reports that 43% of its Gen Z respondents said they had created a ritual for a loss that usually goes unmarked, compared with 15% overall.

One survey gives us a glimpse of a practice, with no way to tell whether it’s growing.

Still, I keep thinking about the trailhead. Somebody had to pick one.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/4/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/4/26

Talking About Sex Without Betraying Intimacy

A new study finds women want more sexual conversation with friends. How do we make room for honesty while caring for the person who isn’t in the room?

We have built a culture in which a stranger can explain twelve sexual positions on your phone before breakfast, yet a grown woman may struggle to ask a close friend whether anyone else has stopped wanting sex.

The internet has everything except someone you trust.

A new study on women’s conversations about sex puts some research behind that peculiar arrangement.

Women reported wanting more sexual conversation with close female friends than they were having. They also anticipated negative reactions if they introduced subjects their friendships generally avoided.

There is a useful story here about sexual shame, friendship, and the loneliness of having ordinary questions about your own body.

There is also another person in the story.

Your partner.

Possibly sitting across from your best friend at dinner, unaware that the best friend has already attended the briefing.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/3/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/3/26

Nowadays Even the Minotaur Is Weary

Imagine the Minotaur at the end of a long day.

He puts two cups on the table when he hears footsteps. Nobody has ever stayed long enough to use the second cup. One evening a girl does.

There is a novel in what happens next.

There is also a twelve-second video in which the girl sits down, the music swells, and somebody writes over the image: He would kill for her.

Perhaps the novel has room for a second question. What happens when she wants to go home?

Daniel Dashnaw 11/2/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/2/26

What If Your Marriage Has Been Borrowing Against Later?

The argument is about a vacation.

One partner wants to book it. The other wants to wait until next year, when the money looks better, the house needs less work, and everything has settled down.

They have been waiting for things to settle down since the Clinton administration.

Then comes the question:

“How many good years do you think we have?”

Now they are talking about the vacation, the marriage, and death. The travel agent is equipped for only one of these.

For years, “later” may have helped this couple get through difficult circumstances.

It allowed them to raise children, care for parents, pay bills, and believe their relationship would eventually receive the attention it deserved.

But perhaps they never agreed on what later meant.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/2/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/2/26

Your Marriage Cannot Be Your Parents’ Retirement Plan

Caring for aging parents requires generosity. Committing your partner’s money, home, and future requires their agreement.

Your father announces that he will eventually move in. Your mother assumes you will handle the appointments. Your partner learns about both arrangements after they have apparently been ratified.

Nobody remembers a meeting.

Somehow, your marriage has acquired a retirement division.

The trouble usually begins with a sentence that sounds beyond criticism: They’re my parents.

Yes. They are. Their needs matter. So does the person whose life you are volunteering.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/1/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/1/26

When Being Needed Replaces Being Known

Let’s discuss the emotional burden of becoming a parent’s confidant.

The child knows when to ask.

They can tell from the way a cupboard closes whether this is a good evening for mentioning the school trip.

They know which parent needs reassurance, which subject will reopen the marital argument, and whether their own disappointment can safely enter the room.

Adults call them mature.

Sometimes they are describing a child who has learned to check everyone else’s emotional weather before deciding whether to have any of their own.

In some families, this attentiveness earns a privileged position.

The child becomes the trusted listener, the indispensable companion, the person who understands.

“You’re the only one I can talk to.”

It sounds like intimacy. For a child, it can become an assignment without an end date.

A child can be exquisitely attentive to a parent and almost entirely unknown by that parent.

Daniel Dashnaw 11/1/26 Daniel Dashnaw 11/1/26

The Disappearing Parent

Long before Americans worried about having fewer children, American novelists were worrying about the adults already in the room.

The houses were occupied. The schools were functioning. Fathers went to work. Mothers remembered birthdays. From a sufficient distance, the arrangements looked reassuring.

Then someone wrote a novel about what it felt like to grow up inside them.

Postwar American fiction repeatedly enters households where something essential is difficult to find: an adult who can speak honestly, accept responsibility, and remain emotionally available when family life becomes disappointing.

These novels offer no census of American parenting. They examine something a census cannot: the distance between occupying a role and becoming trustworthy within it.

The disappearing parent is sometimes standing right there.