There are few sounds more spiritually destabilizing than a parent attempting to sound casual during a conversation about sex.

It is a very particular kind of American panic.

Somewhere between:

• hostage negotiator,

• substitute health teacher,

• and a man trying to transport nitroglycerin in a soup bowl.

You know the voice.

“Wellllll… as long as everyone is making SAFE CHOICES…”
followed by a laugh so strained it sounds medically supervised.

Meanwhile the teenager is staring at the passenger-side window like a Cold War diplomat preparing for diplomatic collapse.

Some relationships don’t fall apart because people don’t understand each other.

They fall apart because the pattern between them becomes so efficient, so well-rehearsed, that understanding no longer matters.

In my work with couples, there’s a moment I’ve learned to recognize. It’s not loud. No one storms out. No one throws anything that can’t be explained later.

It’s the moment you realize you’re not watching a disagreement.

You’re watching a system.

Same argument. Same pacing. Same emotional turns. Maybe sharper than last time. Cleaner. Faster. Like two people who have stopped improvising and started performing.

If that feels familiar, you don’t need better communication.

You need a better map.

There is a particular tone companies use when they want you to feel safe.

It’s upholstered.
It’s well-lit.
It speaks in sentences like, “your privacy is our top priority.”

And then—so gently you almost admire the choreography—it installs a tracking pixel and asks how you’re feeling today.

I’ve noticed something subtle in my couples work: life partners hesitate not only with each other, but increasingly with systems.

They occasionally pause before answering my intake questions. Not because they lack insight—but because they’re not entirely sure who, or what, is listening.

There is a quiet fantasy running through much of artificial intelligence research. It goes something like this:

We will build a machine that is perfectly aligned with human values.
It will be rational. Obedient. Predictable. Safe.

It will, in other words, behave better than we do.

Now pause there for a moment.

Because if you’ve ever spent ten minutes observing actual humans—at dinner, in traffic, or in a long-term relationship—you may notice something awkward:

We are not aligned. Not internally. Not relationally. Not culturally. Not even across breakfast preferences.

And yet, somehow, we persist.

The research you’ve just handed me—summarized in —leans into that uncomfortable truth with a kind of intellectual shrug and says: maybe the problem isn’t that AI lacks alignment.

Maybe the problem is that we’ve misunderstood what safety looks like.

There’s a version of love people like to believe in—the one where attraction is mysterious, connection is mutual, and everything unfolds with a kind of emotional symmetry.

And then there’s the version researchers keep quietly documenting.

In my work with couples, I’ve seen this second version far more often than anyone would like to admit: relationships that don’t fall apart because of confusion, but because of a difference in what each person is actually optimizing for.

There’s a particular kind of conversation that repeats itself in therapy rooms.

One partner says, “I don’t feel important to you.”

The other responds, “That’s not fair. Look at everything I do for us.”

And if you listen carefully, you realize they are not disagreeing.

They are operating in entirely different economies.

One is speaking in the language of connection.
The other is speaking in the language of advantage.

That distinction—quiet, almost invisible—is the whole story.

The film Song Sung Blue begins small—so small it’s easy to miss what it’s doing.

A man tries on a voice and discovers it steadies him.

A woman watches, then steps in beside him—not out of conviction, exactly, but because something about it brings them into alignment.

It gives them a place to meet that feels clearer than the rest of their life.

At first, it’s light. A shared experiment.
Then, almost without announcement, it becomes a place they can return to.

That shift—quiet, incremental—is the film.

My vocation has taught me that relationships don’t just struggle with conflict or communication. They also struggle with something more fundamental:

how to keep something alive over time.

There was a time—not especially noble, but impressively certain—when the state required a vial of your blood before it would permit you to marry.

Not your vows. Not your intentions. Not even your character, which would have been ambitious. Your blood.

Romance, it seems, once required lab work.

Massachusetts, in its calm, unhurried way, stopped asking in 2005.

The official explanation was practical to the point of anticlimax: screening for syphilis had become inefficient, redundant, and faintly ceremonial in a world where antibiotics exist and public health has learned to aim with more precision.

So the ritual ended.

No speeches. No cultural reckoning. Just a quiet administrative shrug.

But if you linger here—if you resist the urge to move on—you begin to notice something else slipping away with it.

Not just a test.

A kind of weight.

We have insight everywhere now.

We can name our attachment style before coffee.

We can narrate our childhood before lunch.

We can explain our partner’s patterns with the calm authority of someone who has read three books and now regrets it only slightly.

We understand intimacy—conceptually—better than any generation before us.

And yet our relationships feel thinner.
More provisional.
Strangely unable to withstand an ordinary Tuesday.

If you’re reading this out of curiosity, keep going.

If you’re reading this because something in your relationship feels harder to hold than it should—pay attention to what follows.

This is where couples usually wait too long.

This is not because life partners lack intelligence.

It is because intelligence has been asked to do structural work.

And intelligence, for all its elegance, does not stabilize bonds.

It interrogates them.

There is a story John Gottman once told me that I have never forgotten.

He was riding a New York subway reading Abraham Maslow, growing increasingly irritated, until — in a burst of exasperation — he threw the book out the train window.

“The only book I ever threw out a window,” he told me.

Now, one should always be suspicious of stories that arrive already shaped like parables.

Still, this one has the smell of truth.

Because it captures something larger than an anecdote.

It captures a quarrel.

Not just between two psychologists, but between two ways of imagining what saves a human life.

Maslow thought people rise.

Gottman thought people repair.

That is almost a theology.

And if I had to compress their disagreement into one sentence, it would be this:

Marriages rarely fail from insufficient self-actualization; they fail from repeated failures of ordinary mercy.

There is a peculiar modern hunger to turn every difficult personality into a childhood parable.

If someone is controlling, there must have been emotional neglect.

If someone is grandiose, there must have been overpraise.

If someone behaves like a peacock in loafers at a dinner party, we assume mother did something regrettable in 1983.

It is a touching faith.

And possibly a slightly superstitious one.

A striking new twin-family study led by Mitja Back and colleagues has landed like a small grenade in the middle of that story, suggesting narcissism may run in families primarily through genetic inheritance rather than through shared parenting effects.

Now, before anybody starts tattooing “it’s genetic” on their forearm—slow down.

That is not quite what the paper says.

And what it does say is, in some ways, more interesting.

There are stories you summarize at your peril.

This is one of them.

Because if you reduce “Taibele and Her Demon” to a lonely woman is tricked by a man pretending to be a demon,you have described the skeleton and misplaced the body.

The tale is much odder, sadder, funnier, and morally slipperier than that.

And, as with much of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the comedy comes wearing the clothes of metaphysics.

First, the story itself.

There is a recurring mistake in public conversations about sexuality: the assumption that fantasy should map neatly onto real-world wishes.

It rarely does.

Fantasy often expresses tension, paradox, symbolic play, unresolved longings, and imaginative experimentation rather than literal desire.

This distinction matters when discussing recent research on women’s interest in aggressive erotica, women’s use of pornography more broadly, and the striking phenomenon of women developing intense romantic attachments to fictional—and sometimes nonhuman—characters.