There are people who enter relationships hoping to be deeply known.

Then there are people who enter relationships hoping things remain emotionally manageable, strategically calm, and preferably free from unnecessary vulnerability.

A new study suggests those differences are not random personality quirks. They may reflect fundamentally different expectations about intimacy itself. 

The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, examined how Dark Triad personality traits, attachment styles, and romantic beliefs shape what people expect from emotional closeness in relationships. 

And honestly, it explains a surprising amount about modern dating.

Some people are searching for emotional connection.

Others are essentially trying to run intimacy through Risk Management.

The modern couple increasingly attempts intimacy the way Americans now attempt everything else: distracted, overstimulated, mildly performative, and while looking at a screen.

Which brings us, inevitably, to a peer-reviewed study on sex in moving vehicles. 

Not parked cars. That was another civilization entirely.

That was the era of milkshakes, cigarette jackets, and teenagers pretending a drive-in theater existed primarily for cinema appreciation.

America once approached automotive romance with at least the ceremonial dignity of a Sinatra song.

Now we are discussing oral sex at highway speed while someone checks notifications and tries not to sideswipe a Subaru.

Progress is complicated.

A recent study published in The Journal of Sex Research found that nearly one-third of surveyed college students reported engaging in sexual activity while riding in or driving a moving vehicle. 

And beneath the comic absurdity sits a surprisingly important psychological truth:

This is not really a study about sex in cars.

It is a study about the collapse of sustained attention in modern intimacy.

That is the real subject hiding underneath the steering wheel.

There are certain historical figures who remain safely in the past.

And then there are figures who continue wandering forward through history like unresolved psychological material.

Hildegard of Bingen belongs firmly in the second category.

Every few years modern culture rediscovers her with fresh astonishment:

the medieval abbess who seemed to understand ecological imbalance, nervous-system exhaustion, institutional corruption, spiritual numbness, attentional fragmentation, and the peculiar emptiness that emerges when a civilization becomes materially sophisticated but psychologically disordered.

Which is unsettling.

Because Hildegard was writing in the twelfth century.

Long before smartphones.
Long before mass media.
Long before industrial capitalism.
Long before social platforms engineered explicitly to fracture human attention into profitable shards.

And yet her writing often feels less like medieval mysticism than cultural diagnosis.

Partly because Hildegard understood something modern civilization keeps trying very hard not to understand:

Human beings can become spiritually exhausted while remaining highly functional.

In fact, advanced civilizations may become especially vulnerable to this condition.

America now contains millions of people carrying around tiny private revenge films in their heads.

Not plans, necessarily.
Not manifestos.
Often just flashes.

A face.
A humiliation.
A fantasy of force arriving where helplessness used to be.

Researchers recently found that 7.3% of adults in the United States have seriously thought about shooting another person at some point in their lives.

That translates to roughly 19.4 million people. More than 8 million reported having these thoughts within the last year alone. 

Violent intrusive thoughts themselves are not rare, and most people who experience them are not dangerous. The researchers explicitly note that most people never act on these fantasies. 

But the scale still matters.

At first, everyone thinks their loved one is finally getting better.

They are awake earlier. Talking more. Laughing again.

Cleaning the kitchen at midnight with the concentration of a Renaissance sculptor restoring the Sistine Chapel.

They suddenly have plans, visions, momentum.

They are calling old friends. Starting ambitious projects. Explaining cryptocurrency with the emotional intensity of a medieval monk describing divine revelation.

The family feels relief.

After months of depression, exhaustion, withdrawal, or hopelessness, the sudden energy can feel miraculous.

Then the spending begins.
Or the rage.
Or the affair.
Or the 3:12 a.m. manifesto about destiny.
Or the terrifying certainty.

And this is where families often realize they are no longer dealing with ordinary confidence or recovery.

They are dealing with acceleration.

There are those who approach religion with humility, uncertainty, gratitude, and the uncomfortable awareness that they are not the center of existence.

And then there are some folks who approach religion like they are negotiating upgraded seating with the universe.

The distinction matters.

Because one of the more interesting findings emerging from personality psychology is that narcissism does not necessarily make people less religious.

In some cases, it may simply reorganize religion around the needs of the self.

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that narcissistic traits were associated less with deeply internalized faith, and more with forms of religious engagement driven by emotional regulation, status, entitlement, and external rewards. 

That finding clarifies something many people have observed privately for years.

Some people use religion to become less self-centered.

Others use it to become spiritually decorated versions of exactly who they already are.

Some psychology books become more than books.

They become emotional operating systems.

Folks do not simply read them.

They begin interpreting their marriages, panic attacks, insomnia, emotional triggers, digestive systems, dating patterns, and nervous system reactions through them.

Therapists quote them.

Friends recommend them quietly after divorces.

Strangers discuss them in coffee shops with the gravity usually reserved for war memoirs and religious conversion.

The Body Keeps the Score became one of those books.

And its author, Bessel van der Kolk, became one of the most influential figures in modern trauma psychology.

There was a brief and beautiful moment in American life when your ex could simply be disappointing.

Not abusive.
Not spiritually parasitic.
Not “a dark triad avoidant energy harvester with anxious-preoccupied supply dynamics.”

Just disappointing.

Maybe selfish. Maybe immature. Maybe emotionally unreliable in the way certain men become emotionally unreliable after discovering crypto, intermittent fasting, or a podcast involving “high value masculinity.”

Maybe a little grandiose. Maybe constitutionally allergic to accountability.

Maybe somebody who could discuss your attachment wounds in exquisite detail while simultaneously forgetting your birthday.

Ordinary heartbreak once had the dignity of ambiguity.

The internet has corrected this problem.

Now people emerge from six-week relationships speaking as though they survived a hostage negotiation conducted by a spiritually carnivorous attachment wizard.

Your former boyfriend is no longer emotionally immature.

He is now:

“a narcissistic empath vampire.”

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’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.

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.

Psychology, like fashion, has seasons.

There was the era when everything was repression.

Then codependency.

Then trauma.

Now attachment.

We have reached a point where forgetting to unload the dishwasher can sound suspiciously like an abandonment wound.

This may be progress.

It may also be inflation.

Which is partly why this new study interested me. It proposes something almost unfashionably simple: childhood psychological abuse may erode not only later trust, but a person’s sense of belonging, which in turn may diminish relationship satisfaction.

That lands differently.