Welcome to the golden age of emotional regulation — where every mom on TikTok knows what a "rupture and repair" is, and every kid has a Ph.D. in "vibes."

But beneath the glowy reels of whisper-voiced bedtime scripts lies a new kind of childhood trauma: being raised by someone who never yelled, but also never really felt.

This is the meme: "My mom didn’t scream. She just clenched her jaw and softly narrated the consequences like HAL 9000."

It started as a miracle.

The idea that we could raise children without yelling, without threats, without rupturing their souls every Tuesday morning in the minivan.

Emotion coaching, as popularized by John Gottman and others (Gottman et al., 1997), told us: name it to tame it. Validate their feelings. Co-regulate. Show up with curiosity.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

If the early 2000s gave us the phrase "he's just not that into you," the 2020s have blessed us with its gender-neutral, psychoanalytic cousin: "he's love bombing you."

It started with good intentions.

Survivors of emotional abuse needed a term to describe the overwhelming attention used to manipulate and destabilize.

But like most useful psychological metaphors, it became a meme.

Now, any bouquet of flowers before date #4 is suspect. And God forbid someone listens to your Spotify playlist and remembers your cat's name.

Let’s begin where all modern love stories do: somewhere between a clinical manual and a TikTok comment thread. “Trauma bond” used to be a serious term.

It was born in the work of Patrick Carnes (1997), who studied the deep psychological tethers between victims and abusers—often in cycles of intermittent reinforcement, power imbalance, and dependency so intense it overrides logic.

Now? It’s shorthand for, "I dated a guy who texted me three times in a row and then didn’t answer my meme." We’ve gone from psychological rigor to pop-psych poetry.

But here’s the messy truth: most of what people are calling trauma bonding is actually some variation of Anxious Attachment, and the confusion is doing damage.

There was a time, not so long ago, when relationships moved from mystery to definition with the slow gravity of handwritten notes and long walks.

Today, your relationship status may be decided by a tagged Instagram post and how many mutuals watch your stories.

Welcome to the era of hard launching the situationship—a public performance of a private ambiguity.

What Is Hard Launching a Situationship?

Let’s start with the radical idea that’s somehow both ancient and futuristic: making babies with someone you’re not in love with.

Not a one-night stand. Not a nuclear family remix.

Just two (or more) consenting adults choosing to co-parent—on purpose—without the performance of romance.

Call it what you want: Platonic Parenting, Intentional Co-Parenting, or The Last Viable Family System Capitalism Hasn’t Monetized (Yet).

In the beginning, there was chaos. And Ritalin said, "Let there be focus," and lo, the child sat still. And there was much rejoicing. For a week.

Let us begin with the grand American tradition of solving complex socio-environmental problems with prescription drugs.

Enter your typical 1990s research psychologist, James Swanson.

A decent man in a lab coat, probably wore corduroy blazers, believed in graphs. He thought 3% of kids had A.D.H.D. and that Ritalin helped.

Not cured. Helped. That was the dream.

Then he blinked, and it was 11%. Now it's 15.5% of adolescents, 23% of 17-year-old boys, and somewhere, a pharma executive is buying his fourth house in Aspen.

If you’ve ever felt like your paycheck isn’t making you any happier—but a minor refund from the IRS did—you’re not alone.

You're just living in the surreal Venn diagram between objective income and subjective financial satisfaction, where emotional well-being is less about the number on your W-2 and more about how you feel about your wallet when you wake up.

A major new study published in the journal Emotion (Hudiyana et al., 2024) found that financial satisfaction—that internal thumbs-up you give your money situation—is a strong predictor of your current happiness.

But income—the actual dollars in your life—is better at predicting how your happiness will shift over time.

So: your feelings matter now. Your money matters later.

And yes, in case you're wondering: it’s more complicated than that.

This just in: marriage might give you dementia.

Also, coffee causes heart disease (until it doesn’t), and walking your dog may reduce your risk of premature death—assuming the dog is not too stressful.

The latest viral headline comes from a study out of Florida State University, which claims that unmarried people—especially the divorced and never-married—may have a lower risk of developing dementia than their married peers.

The story quickly became catnip for algorithmic news cycles and commitment-wary Redditors. After all, nothing sells like the slow erosion of one of civilization’s most resilient social structures.

But what the study actually shows is far more complicated—and, paradoxically, far more validating of why marriage still matters, even if its benefits are misunderstood.

Instagram—our favorite dopamine dispenser disguised as a photo app—has rolled out a fresh batch of rules for teenagers.

And not just the usual “Don’t post nudes, kids” kind of thing. No, this is a full-scale lockdown wrapped in pastel UX and labeled “protection.”

On paper, it looks noble. Heroic, even.

Meta (née Facebook), now desperately rebranding as the cool digital stepdad) has introduced sweeping changes to safeguard its youngest, most vulnerable, and most monetizable users.

But like most things in modern tech: what begins as safety ends as surveillance. And what begins as protection often ends as a quiet war on autonomy—disguised as bedtime notifications.

Let’s unpack the velvet leash.

Money can’t buy happiness.

But it can buy a mattress, an ADHD coach, two therapy apps, a sound machine, and blackout curtains.

And still, you lie awake—remembering that thing you said in 2016. The one that no one else remembers but has somehow become your brain’s favorite midnight feature.

A new study in Emotion (Hudiyana et al., 2024) confirms what most adults sense but can’t articulate without crying: money helps in the long run, but how you feel about money determines how miserable or okay you are right now. It’s the split between income and financial satisfaction, and it maps directly onto how the mind handles time, memory, and meaning.

And no, this isn't just about income brackets and budgeting spreadsheets.

It’s about how your brain metabolizes the future—especially when it’s dark out and quiet and your prefrontal cortex has gone home for the day.

Turns out, nightmares aren’t the cause of your bad sleep—they’re the consequence of it.

That’s the grim little twist served up by a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, which used wearable EEG headbands to track what really happens when the body tries (and fails) to sleep peacefully in the 21st century.

Researchers found that when your night is a series of unfortunate awakenings—tossing, turning, checking the clock at 3:17 a.m. for no reason at all—you’re more likely to be rewarded the next night with a premium-grade nightmare.

And not just a weird dream about your 8th-grade math teacher—no, the real thing: terror, threat, emotional overload, and sometimes enough fear to jolt you awake.

But the nightmare itself? It doesn’t seem to poison the next night’s sleep. At least not directly. Nightmares, it seems, don’t cause insomnia.

Insomnia, on the other hand, might just be the slow-moving train that pulls your psyche into dream-hell the following night. It’s not a loop—it’s a sequence. And your brain is staging the horror film.