Some people are allergic to peanuts. Others, to bee stings.

And then there are those who flinch at the mere suggestion that it’s time to empty the dishwasher.

For partners living with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) or ADHD, the everyday expectations of life—polite requests, chore lists, dinner invitations—can feel like psychological land mines.

They may deeply love their spouses. They may want to comply.

But the moment a request hardens into a “should,” something ancient and involuntary lights up the threat circuits of their nervous system.

In 2022, I presented on this topic at the American Family Therapy Academy, making the argument that demand avoidance is not a moral failure, not laziness, and not oppositional defiance dressed up as neurodivergence.

It is, in many cases, a form of autonomic defensiveness—a state-triggered protection against perceived coercion, especially in folks whose nervous systems have learned to equate structure with danger.

Strangling a partner during sex has leapt from niche BDSM play and Japanese shibari clubs to bedrooms and college dorms on nearly every continent.

Large‑scale surveys show that the practice—often marketed online as edgy “rough sex”—is now common in anglophone countries and rising fast elsewhere.

Yet biomedical data keep reminding us of an inconvenient truth: there is no physiologically safe way to compress someone’s airway or carotid arteries for pleasure.

In a culture hyper-aware of injustice—where microaggressions can spark think pieces and emoji use is a political act—you’d think we’d be past the idea that only women can be victims of abuse.

But a new study in Psychology of Men & Masculinities suggests otherwise.

The researchers didn’t just find implicit bias—they built a scale to measure it. It’s called the Intimate Partner Violence Myths Toward Male Victims (IPVMM) scale, and its message is clear: we’re still not taking male victimization seriously—and sexism is to blame (Russell, Cox, & Stewart, 2024).

Once upon a time, a girl wanted to be loved.

Then she wanted to be worshipped.

Now she wants her Amazon wishlist fulfilled by Tuesday, three affirmation texts a day, and a boyfriend who opens her car door and processes his childhood trauma.

Welcome to the era of the Princess Treatment—a glitter-soaked relationship meme that asks, “What if love felt like concierge service?” and answers, “Only peasants pay for their own parking.”

At first glance, it seems like harmless romantic fantasy.

At second glance, a hyperfeminine rebellion against hookup culture.

But at third (and let’s admit, most nasty) glance, is it a shimmering mirror held up to the bloated face of American Cultural Narcissism?

Not so fast. We can see this in a much kinder light.

There’s a man somewhere right now in couples therapy, trying to explain to his partner that he isn’t “emotionally unavailable”—he just never learned the language. He doesn’t lack feelings. He lacks a grammar.

The irony is he’s not alone.

In 2025, something is shifting. The old cultural story—“men don’t feel”—is finally giving way to a richer, more dangerous truth: men do feel.

Deeply. Frequently. Often with confusion. Occasionally with terror.

The question isn’t if men feel. It’s whether they’re allowed to say what they feel without being shamed into silence or theatricality.

This is not about softening men into sainthood or turning every dude into a walking TED Talk on childhood trauma.

It’s about building emotional fluency: the capacity to notice, name, and navigate internal states—and communicate them with enough clarity that someone else doesn’t have to decode the aftermath.

It starts innocently. A raised eyebrow, a tone that comes too sharp, a forgotten appointment. The partner with trauma flinches—not visibly, but somewhere deep and involuntary.

The other partner, perhaps raised in emotional safety, is confused: What just happened? I only said I’d be five minutes late.

This is trauma mismatch.

And it is not rare. It is becoming one of the most quietly destabilizing forces in modern couples therapy.

One partner’s nervous system lives in a battlefield. The other grew up in a library.

They fall in love. They move in. They try to split chores and build a life. But the nervous systems don’t match—and so intimacy becomes a series of misfired signals and accidental injuries.

There is a quiet revolution happening in the world of psychology, and it begins not in our thoughts or values but in the vagus nerve.

Where we once asked, “Why did he do that?” we now ask, “What state was his nervous system in?”

This is not to absolve wrongdoing. This is not some soft-focus relativism.

This is a shift—one that moves moral reasoning away from the cold marble bust of Kant and toward the pulsing tissues of mammalian co-regulation.

Because before we can make an ethical decision, we must feel safe enough to consider one.

In the words of poet Jericho Brown:
“Compassion is something we practice in our breathing.”

It turns out the breath, quite literally, makes us human.

Why Is monogamy whispering its way back in? What a quaint development for 2025. Because nowadays everyone has a poly friend. Or three.

Relationship structures come with menus.

“Monogamish” is a lifestyle, not a phase. We’ve got flowcharts for fluid bonding agreements, Google Docs for jealousy protocols, and a booming TikTok market for explaining how to manage six partners with two full-time jobs and a kombucha starter.

But amid all the spreadsheets and sacred slings, a new voice is emerging. It’s quieter, less judgmental than the moral purity of the past. Less purity, more poetry. Less “one man, one woman,” more one person, one universe.

This isn’t a return to 1950s constraint. It’s a philosophical return to erotic containment—an intentional, almost mystical monogamy that says: What if choosing one person over and over again is the actual thrill?

Or, How Gen Z Learned to Ghost Their Parents Without Smashing a Single Plate

In another era, family estrangement arrived with the drama of a stage play: slammed doors, shouted ultimatums, maybe even a birthday party ruined by a bottle of wine and some long-simmering truths.

But now? Estrangement has gotten quiet. Sneaky. Bureaucratic, even.

Adult children are walking away not in rage but in silence. They stop answering texts. They miss a few birthdays.

They “forget” to return a call. Over time, the thread wears thin. Then one day, the parent realizes they’ve become someone their child used to know.

Researchers call it “low-contact.”

Reddit users call it “voluntary orphaning.” Parents call it betrayal. And therapists? We're calling it a symptom of something bigger.

Why Now?

Covert narcissists kick down the door shouting, “Behold, it is I!” slipping in through the mail slot, borrowing your sweater, and softly complain it itches.

Thanks to TikTok therapists and hashtag diagnostics, clinical offices are now crowded with clients carrying self-applied labels—and lawyers wielding affidavits that read like DSM-5 karaoke.

The term "narc" has become the internet’s new four-letter word, while in real life, judges wrestle with a murky question: where does diagnosable personality disorder end and plain old spite begin? (Seo & Kim, 2024)

Why Now?

“We did the work. We cried. We repaired. Now what?”

For many couples, therapy ends not in collapse or triumph—but in a strange, quiet plateau.

They leave the therapist’s office with a set of tools, a few shared phrases (“is this a protest behavior?”), and maybe even a laminated communication card.

But in the months that follow, the intimacy starts to dull like a kitchen knife used without sharpening. The rituals fade. The conflict patterns sneak back like raccoons through a back fence.

Welcome to the post-therapy plateau.

This under-discussed stretch of time—after therapy ends but before change is fully lived-in—is becoming a serious topic of inquiry among relationship researchers and clinicians.

And the best minds in the field are starting to ask: How do couples keep growing when the therapist isn’t in the room anymore?

If you’re depressed and skipping breakfast, science has something tepid and interesting to say: they might be related.

But not in the way your grandmother insisted when she told you, “No toast, no future.”

A new study out of Hong Kong (Wong et al., 2024) suggests there’s a statistically significant—though clinically modest—link between skipping breakfast and depressive symptoms in young people.

The mechanism? Impaired attentional control, which might be the scientific equivalent of staring into space while someone tells you your GPA is tanking.

But before we panic and declare war on empty stomachs, let’s consider what this research really tells us—and what it doesn’t.

We will explore this from two angles: with compassion for the human condition and suspicion for our overeager interpretations of weak correlations.