Humans who barely understand themselves are tasked with raising future generations.

It soon becomes self-evident that a troubling reality emerges: some parents never grow up.

Instead of being wise, nurturing figures, they remain emotionally stunted, reacting to stress with all the grace of a teenager whose phone just died.

This is not a new phenomenon. Cultural Narcissism has always taken suseptible souls.

Ancient mythology is riddled with narcissistic, vengeful parents (hello, Cronus).

Shakespeare built entire tragedies around emotionally immature authority figures.

Today, we just have TikTok compilations—30-second masterclasses in dysfunctional parenting.

But unlike in Greek mythology, where you could just overthrow the gods, modern psychology insists we use science-based coping strategies instead.

So, let’s consider the emotionally immature parents—what causes their behavior, how they impact their children, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

The school bus pulls up, the doors swing open, and your child, rather than sprinting toward it with a backpack full of half-eaten granola bars and forgotten permission slips, clings to the doorframe like a cat avoiding a bath. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

School refusal—a phenomenon where children experience extreme distress about attending school—has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What was once an occasional occurrence has now become a full-blown crisis, with many parents scrambling for solutions.

Love, like the universe, is expanding at an accelerating rate, and nowhere is this more evident than in same-sex relationships.

As society wrestles with the notion that love is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, same-sex couples are out here doing the equivalent of relationship jazz—riffing on the old structures, improvising new ones, and sometimes setting the entire concept of monogamy on fire just to see what happens.

Let’s dive deep into the trends shaping modern same-sex relationships, armed with social science, and the ever-present sense that we are all just fumbling toward connection in the dark.

If modern romance were a car, most couples would be driving it straight off the lot with no manual, no maintenance plan, and certainly no idea how to handle unexpected breakdowns.

That’s why premarital and pre-separation counseling are two growing trends in 2025.

These counseling modalities both reliably save souls from unnecessary heartache—or at the very least, reduce the number of emotional tow truck calls.

Human attachment has always been a messy experiment. Couples have been given many blueprints for success: passion, communication, therapy, yoga retreats, and an unwavering ability to pretend that their partner’s snoring is "kind of cute."

Enter gentle partnering, a philosophy that asks: what if, instead of just gritting your teeth through conflict, you treated your relationship with the same tender, patient approach as one might with a particularly sensitive houseplant?

In an age where therapy has become as customizable as a Starbucks order—"I’ll take a half-caf attachment repair with a sprinkle of somatic reprocessing"—it was only a matter of time before someone came up with Cultural Family Therapy (CFT).

This, dear reader, is what happens when family therapy meets anthropology at a cocktail party and decides to birth an intellectual lovechild over too many glasses of decolonized wine.

CFT purports to integrate transcultural psychiatry, which is a dignified way of saying: "Your problems aren’t just yours; they belong to your ancestors, your nation, and possibly the entire geopolitical history of your ethnicity" (Kirmayer, 2012).

While acknowledging cultural influences in therapy is important, CFT externalizes problems to such a degree that it risks undermining personal agency (Bourdieu, 1977).

The modern couple, be they married, cohabitating, or entangled in a situationship, eventually faces one inescapable fact: one of them wants sex more than the other.

It’s a universal constant, like entropy or the fact that socks vanish in the dryer. If you are in a relationship where this is not true, congratulations, you are either newly in love or one of you is lying.

For centuries, humans have insisted that love is chemistry—a cocktail of hormones, pheromones, and unconscious signals that tell us, "This person is The One."

But recent neuroscience suggests that it’s not just about chemistry—it’s about synchrony.

Brain-imaging studies show that couples in strong relationships literally synchronize their brainwaves during deep conversations (Pérez et al., 2019).

When two people are emotionally attuned, their neurons fire in harmony, creating a kind of neurological duet.

For centuries, poets, philosophers, and marketing executives have sold us the idea that love is a mystical force—an invisible connection between two souls, transcending time and space.

Science, as usual, has a much less poetic but more useful explanation: Love is built, quite literally, through effort.

A groundbreaking study by Norton, Mochon, and Ariely (2012) found that people place more value on things they helped create—a phenomenon known as the IKEA Effect.

Originally tested with poorly assembled furniture and lumpy origami, this principle applies just as powerfully to romantic relationships.

Monogamy, for all its virtues, comes with a wildly misleading premise: If you’re happy, you won’t cheat.

This assumption has fueled self-help books, therapy sessions, and late-night tearful conversations over lukewarm coffee. It’s also completely wrong.

A massive study by Selterman et al. (2021) found that plenty of people in satisfying, loving relationships still cheat.

Not because their partner is failing them, but because they’re chasing novelty, self-exploration, or the fleeting thrill of being desired by someone new.

In other words, monogamy isn’t about happiness. It’s about values, impulse control, and how many chances you get to betray your partner without being caught.

Couples therapy has a timing problem.

Older American couples tend to treat it like a Hail Mary, something to try when the relationship is already circling the drain.

But research shows that therapy is only effective if couples go before their problems reach a point of no return (Gottman & Silver, 1999).

By the time many couples actually book an appointment, they’ve already spent years stockpiling resentment, emotionally disengaging, or outright fantasizing about life without each other.

The biggest relationship killer isn’t conflict, boredom, or even infidelity.

It’s waiting too long to fix what’s broken.

When people imagine the secret to lasting love, they tend to think big. Grand romantic gestures. Passionate declarations.

The kind of sweeping moments that make it into movies—the airport chase, the surprise engagement, the violin-accompanied apology scene.

But John Gottman’s research tells a very different story.

According to his Love Lab studies, what actually predicts whether a couple will last isn’t how often they declare their love, but how often they turn toward each other in the smallest, most mundane moments (Gottman, 1999).

What does that mean?

It means that the way you respond to something as trivial as “Hey, look at that bird” has a bigger impact on your relationship than a dozen candlelit anniversaries.