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.

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.

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.

There are experiments that produce findings.

And there are experiments that become scripture.

Milgram became scripture.

That is rarer, and more dangerous.

Because once an experiment hardens into parable, people stop reading it as evidence and start using it as anthropology.

People obey authority.

Full stop.

A complete theory of civilization, apparently, tucked into 3 words.

One always wants to ask: compared to what?

People also resist authority. Mock authority. Seduce authority. Elect authority. Marry authority. Divorce authority. Project God onto authority. And, in one of history’s least charming habits, outsource conscience to authority.

Milgram was never about simple obedience.

That was the tourist brochure.

Milgram was about what happens when social legitimacy begins to colonize moral perception.

That is a different problem.

And one with longer legs.

There is a new kind of infidelity that doesn’t look like infidelity.

No messages.
No meetups.
No lies that can be easily pointed to and said, there, that’s the problem.

Instead, there’s something far more difficult to argue with:

A gradual shift in attention.

In my work with couples, I’ve started to notice a pattern that doesn’t announce itself dramatically. It arrives quietly, almost politely:

One partner feels less chosen.
The other feels misunderstood.
Neither can quite explain why.

If you’re reading this out of curiosity, keep going. If you’re reading because something in your relationship feels subtly off—less present, less anchored—pay attention to what comes next. This is where couples tend to wait too long.

At some point—and no one announces it—relationships stop breaking.

They start fading.

No fight. No betrayal. No moment you can point to later and say, that’s when it went wrong.

Just a gradual shift where the relationship becomes less central, less alive, less… necessary.

De-vitalized.

In conducting science-based couples therapy, this is the subtle state that risked getting missed most often.

Not because it’s rare.

Because it’s easy to live inside.

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

If you’re reading this because something in your relationship feels flatter than it used to—quieter, easier, but also less alive—don’t skim this part.

This is the phase where most couples decide, without realizing it, whether they are going to recover… or slowly disengage.

Jealousy used to require a story.

You needed rumors, overheard conversations, lipstick on a collar, or the unmistakable silence of a phone that stopped ringing when you entered the room.

Suspicion involved imagination and legwork. It had texture.

Today jealousy often arrives as data.

Someone liked a photo at 11:47 PM.
A follower appears who was not there yesterday.
A location pin briefly disappears.
A message reads seen but remains unanswered.
A familiar name appears repeatedly in story views.

Nothing explicitly happens.

And yet the mind begins to assemble a narrative.

Nowadays, I increasingly encounter partners reacting not to events but to digital signals—tiny behavioral fragments produced by platforms that were never designed to regulate trust between human beings.

These signals accumulate until they form a kind of emotional scaffolding around the relationship.

Let’s call this phenomenon Digital Jealousy Architecture.

If you have ever felt that modern jealousy grows less from what partners do and more from what their apps quietly reveal, you are not imagining it.

Something structural has changed.

There was a time—not that long ago—when a couple having an argument had a limited number of options.

They could argue loudly, argue quietly, avoid each other for three days, or complain to a friend who would listen patiently and then say something devastatingly reasonable like, “Well… what did you say to them?”

The audience was small. The memories faded. The entire episode usually disappeared into the private archives of human embarrassment.

The internet has altered this arrangement.

Now when people experience relationship tension, many of them do something rather unusual: they announce it to the internet before speaking to the person involved.

I have started calling this phenomenon Audience Intimacy.

Once upon a time jealousy left fingerprints.

A lipstick stain.
A mysterious phone call.
A receipt someone forgot to throw away.

Today jealousy leaves metadata.

In my work with couples, I increasingly meet partners who know each other’s battery levels, location histories, and message timestamps better than they know each other’s emotional lives.

They can tell you when their partner left the grocery store, when their phone stopped moving, and when a message was read but not answered.

Ask them how their partner has been feeling lately, however, and the room sometimes fills with a silence so complete it could pass for architecture.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone.

Many modern couples are quietly entering something new.

Something I have begun to call the surveillance relationship.

The surveillance relationship is an emerging dynamic with some modern couples where smartphones quietly transform love into monitoring.