John Gottman’s research on marriage is unsettling because it forces us to abandon romanticized ideas of love and acknowledge something far less poetic: relationships are governed by observable, measurable behaviors.

In his Love Lab, where he and his team analyzed thousands of couples, he identified four distinct behaviors that reliably predict the collapse of relationships with over 90% accuracy (Gottman & Levenson, 1992).

He called them The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling. They do not announce themselves with dramatic breakups or passionate betrayals. They whisper, erode, and rot relationships from the inside out.

What makes them particularly insidious is that they often masquerade as normal—many couples engage in them for years without realizing they are cultivating resentment.

This research is provocative not just because it is predictive, but because it challenges the myth of catharsis—the idea that fights clear the air, that venting relieves pressure, that explosive arguments cleanse a relationship.

The truth is far less comforting: it is not the big fights that end relationships. It is the mundane accumulation of small, negative interactions over time.

If you’ve ever suspected that the euphoric glow of “I do” fades faster than the wedding cake gets freezer burn, you’re not wrong.

Research suggests that marriage delivers a noticeable happiness boost—but only for about two years.

After that, couples tend to return to their pre-marital baseline, meaning that whatever level of existential dread or mild optimism you had before tying the knot is more or less where you'll land afterward (Lucas & Clark, 2006).

This might sound like a cosmic joke, but psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill—the idea that humans adapt to positive and negative changes and eventually return to a stable level of happiness (Brickman & Campbell, 1971).

This means that while marriage might feel like a life upgrade at first, your brain is busy adjusting and whispering, “Okay, what’s next?”

But before you start composing a strongly worded email to your wedding officiant, consider this: the happiness decline post-marriage is not universal.

Some research suggests that marriage does offer long-term benefits—just not in the way Hollywood rom-coms would have you believe.

Ah, the age-old question: How often should couples be having sex to be happy?

If you’re expecting a magic number, brace yourself for disappointment. A 2015 study (Muise et al., 2015) found that the actual frequency of sex doesn’t significantly predict happiness in long-term relationships.

Instead, what really matters is feeling desired by your partner. That’s right—being wanted trumps the act itself.

This has all sorts of amusing and existentially troubling implications.

For one, it suggests that sexual satisfaction isn’t just about bodies bumping together at a socially approved cadence but rather about the deep-seated human need to feel special, chosen, and, let’s be honest, a little bit worshipped.

It also means that the couples diligently tracking their weekly “intimacy quota” may be missing the point. You can check off as many obligatory Wednesday night romps as you like, but if your partner secretly feels about as desired as a tax audit, the relationship still suffers.

So, what’s the takeaway?

So, Your Partner is Your Greatest Psychological Test? Fun.

If you thought marriage was about love, trust, and Sunday morning coffee runs, think again. In reality, it’s a front-row seat to your deepest, most repressed wounds—all conveniently triggered by the person you promised to cherish forever.

According to Carl Jung, we spend much of our lives rejecting and projecting this shadow onto others, and in relationships, our partners often bear the brunt of this unconscious baggage.

The good news? If approached consciously, shadow work can transform your marriage into a tool for deep healing rather than a battlefield of past traumas.

In this post, we’ll explore how shadow work fits into leading couples therapy models, including Gottman’s research, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Developmental Model, and Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy (RLT)—because your relationship isn’t just about love; it’s about growth.

If you’re in a committed relationship, congratulations: you’ve entered an unlicensed, high-stakes experiment in psychological self-discovery.

Your partner, through no fault of their own, will inadvertently trigger every unhealed wound, unmet need, and childhood trauma lurking in the depths of your unconscious.

This is not a bug; it’s a feature.

Carl Jung believed that deep within our psyche exists the shadow—the disowned parts of ourselves that we repress because they don’t fit our preferred self-image.

We’d like to think of ourselves as kind, rational, and generous, yet we’re also capable of cruelty, pettiness, and selfishness.

We push those less flattering qualities into the shadow, where they ferment and mutate into projections. In relationships, this means you’re not just reacting to your partner—you’re reacting to what they awaken in you.

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of brushing your teeth, minding your own business, when suddenly—BAM—you vividly recall that time in third grade when you called your teacher “Mom” and then spent the next six months contemplating faking your own death to avoid further humiliation.

Congratulations, you’ve just experienced a memory pop—your brain’s equivalent of an unwanted jump scare.

Memory pops are those random, often unbidden recollections that surface for no apparent reason, completely hijacking your train of thought.

They arrive without warning, like an eccentric uncle showing up to Thanksgiving uninvited, and often with about the same level of emotional subtlety.

But why do they happen?

And more importantly, can you make them stop? Science has some answers, but like most things involving the brain, they range from “It’s complicated” to “We’re honestly just guessing.”

T

rigger warnings—once the domain of online forums and academic syllabi—have seeped into the world of art, serving as a kind of emotional hazard sign before viewers encounter potentially distressing content.

But what if, instead of protecting us, these warnings actually diminish our experience of art?

A new study in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts suggests that content warnings might do just that, lowering aesthetic appreciation while increasing negative emotional responses.

Irony abounds in this study. Not a single participant in the study avoided looking at the supposedly distressing artwork. Not one.

A fresh study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has added another wrinkle to our understanding of conspiracy beliefs: they don’t just make people paranoid about shadowy elites controlling the world—they also shift how they interpret social inequalities.

It turns out that when folks buy into conspiracy thinking, they are less likely to blame disadvantaged groups for their struggles and more inclined to see the wealthy and powerful as, well, up to something.

This research complicates the usual hand-wringing over conspiracy theories.

While conspiracy beliefs have been linked to irrational thinking, political extremism, and even public health skepticism (Douglas et al., 2017), this study suggests they might also serve a peculiar function: challenging the American idea that success and failure are purely based on individual merit.

In other words, conspiracy theorists may not just be tinfoil-hat-wearing contrarians—they might also be (accidentally?) questioning the myth of meritocracy.

A new study confirms what every suspicious lover, every Facebook snoop, and every rom-com antagonist already suspected: if you imagine your partner cheating, you’re going to feel jealous.

And when jealousy sets in, you’re more likely to either drown your partner in affection or quietly install emotional barbed wire around them.

The research, published in Evolutionary Psychology, suggests that humans—sophisticated primates that we are—have evolved to respond to even hypothetical threats of infidelity with an intricate mix of tenderness and tyranny.

But before we pat ourselves on the back for being highly evolved, let’s be clear: this study isn’t uncovering the secrets of the universe.

It’s positing that, yes, we get a little unhinged when we think our mate might stray.

The same way one might clutch a bag of Doritos a little tighter after hearing about a chip shortage, our nervous system reacts to infidelity threats with protective instincts—some of them more useful than others.

Supporting a partner through cancer can feel like steering a ship through stormy, uncharted seas—challenging, unpredictable, yet navigable with the right tools.

Together, couples can not only survive this difficult journey but emerge stronger and more deeply connected than ever.

Caring for a partner with cancer often involves emotional stress, physical exhaustion, and immense responsibility.

Research emphasizes that caregiving spouses frequently experience elevated stress levels, heightened anxiety, and increased risks of depression (Kim, Shaffer, & Carver, 2019).

Acknowledging these pressures openly is the first critical step toward managing them effectively.

Parenting with cancer isn't just tough; it's like navigating a sudden uncharted storm without a compass.

Raising kids under normal conditions already requires heroic effort, a dash of humor, and perhaps a mild caffeine addiction. Add battling cancer into the equation, and the journey suddenly feels like trying to change a tire on a moving vehicle.

These souls have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing their wings on the way down. When cancer crashes into a parent's life, that's exactly what they must do.

It’s 1858, and Senator James Henry Hammond is boldly defending slavery before the U.S. Senate.

He's not embarrassed. Not even a little.

Instead, he proudly declares what historians now call the Mud Sill Theory.

To Hammond, society was a grand house built upon a foundation—a mudsill—of permanently enslaved people whose suffering enabled civilization for the privileged few.

“In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” Hammond said without blinking an eye. “Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement” (Hammond, 1858).

What a flawless distillation of the Cultural Narcissism of his place and time.

Pretty chilling, isn’t it? But surely, we’ve moved past such backward thinking. Right?

Not so fast.