Once upon a time, a breakup was loud.

You changed your relationship status. You boxed up sweatshirts.
You either had a messy friend intervention or a defiant "I’m finding myself" solo trip to Tulum.

Now?

You just archive your wedding photos on Instagram.
Maybe post a picture of your brunch — just you, a mimosa, and the implied absence of betrayal.

Soft launch divorce is here.
And it’s the weirdest, calmest social ritual Gen Z and Millennials have ever invented.

What Is a Soft Launch Divorce?

Forget soulmates.
Forget "Facebook official."
Forget putting a ring on it.

The new romantic currency?
Buying milk together.
Not because you're building a future.
But because, somehow, you both needed oat milk at the same time, and that felt... intimate.

What Are Micro-Commitments?

Micro-commitments are the modern answer to our cultural allergy to labels:
Small, repeated acts of loyalty that simulate relational depth — without triggering existential panic.

Once upon a time, “fasting” meant food.
Now? It means you’re declining the emotional buffet — the bread, the wine, and the text messages from someone who doesn’t know how to spell “available.”

Attachment detox is the deliberate, sometimes reluctant, but ultimately sacred practice of stepping away from relationships that light up your old abandonment wounds like a Christmas tree.

Not forever. Maybe not even out of anger.

But out of a strange, painful kind of loyalty — to your own nervous system.

Once upon a neoliberal timeline, love was free, spontaneous, and just a bus ride away. Now? It’s behind a paywall.

"Relational inflation" is the creeping cultural suspicion that maintaining connection has become unaffordable. Not just financially — though, yes, splitting a $230 first date and pretending it was cute is part of it. It’s emotional. It’s logistical. It’s existential. Even liking someone feels expensive.

And the worst part? We didn’t even notice it happening.

What Is Relational Inflation?

A new study has quietly shifted the center of gravity in our understanding of school shootings.

Published in PLOS One (Nassauer, 2025), the research finds that for most school shooters in U.S. history, guns weren't just tools of destruction — they were early symbols of affection, belonging, and identity.

If that sounds unsettling, it's because it is.

In the grand architecture of marriage research, John Gottman has given us more useful tools than perhaps any other scientist: the Four Horsemen of Divorce, the Magic Ratio, Emotional Bids.

But tucked among these masterpieces, half-hidden behind his sheepish smile, is one of his most profound insights: poop detection.

It sounds decidedly unserious.

But inside the Gottman Method, poop detection isn’t a joke — it’s a relationship survival skill, a first-line intervention against the slow death of intimacy that claims so many partnerships.

It is not the fireworks of romance that keep marriages alive.
It is the small, nearly invisible art of noticing when something smells wrong before the whole house suffused with a foul odor.

Spend five minutes online and you might believe single mothers are either the ruin of civilization or its last remaining saints.

Spend five minutes with actual research — or better yet, five minutes with an actual single mother — and you’ll realize something else:

They're just people.

Doing their best.

Inside systems built to make "their best" feel like it's never enough.

This post isn't going to varnish the truth. Children raised by single mothers face real risks — and real opportunities.

But if you came looking for either pity or outrage, close the tab now.

We're aiming for something rarer: a clear-eyed, warm-blooded understanding.

What the Social Science Actually Shows (And Doesn't).

Single Parenthood Is a Risk Factor — Not a Death Sentence.

A glass child is typically defined as a neurotypical sibling of a child with special needs, who often grows up feeling overlooked, burdened, and tasked with invisible emotional labor.

The metaphor is intentional — glass because these children are seen through (transparent) or expected to be strong and shatterproof (fragile under stress).

But this meme didn’t emerge from nowhere.

Like most sticky cultural ideas, it has deep roots in psychological research, parental grief, sibling dynamics, and the impossible task of distributing attention equally when one child's needs are extraordinary.

Let’s explore the layered history of this meme — and why it matters more now than ever.

One of the most oddly prophetic scenes in Mean Girls isn’t about social sabotage or cafeteria politics. It’s a panicked health teacher standing in front of a blackboard, warning teenagers:

“Don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die.”

It played for laughs, but it captured a real chapter in American culture.

Throughout the 1990s, abstinence education reigned.

Sex-ed classes, after-school specials, and even sitcoms like Boy Meets World or 7th Heaven hammered home one message:

Sex = catastrophe. Better not risk it.

The intention was good.

Teen pregnancy rates were high, and policymakers needed a solution. But the execution? Sometimes fear-based, sometimes shame-based, and almost always incomplete.

At a certain point, success becomes its own insulation.
The gestures that once built connection — mistakes, doubts, the unscripted laugh — are replaced by coordination and polish.
What’s lost isn’t love, but access.

A marriage becomes another achievement: admired, functional, and faintly routine.
Many won’t notice.
But a few will.

And for them, the real work begins:
learning how to be human with each other, again.

A fascinating new study published in The Journal of Sex Research (Kruger et al., 2025) suggests that psychedelic experiences may do more than temporarily alter perception—they may also quietly, sometimes dramatically, shift the way people experience sexuality, gender, and intimate relationships.

Surveying 581 adults who had used psychedelics, researchers found that the majority reported noticeable changes in sexual attraction, gender expression, and relationship dynamics—sometimes fleeting, often lasting well beyond the immediate effects.

Grief may not end at the grave.

A new study suggests that the majority of bereaved souls—whether mourning a spouse or a beloved pet—report vivid dreams or waking sensations involving the deceased.

Far from being rare or pathological, these experiences appear to be a common part of the human grieving process, tightly woven into how people maintain emotional bonds after death.

In fact, people who dream of their lost loved ones are significantly more likely to experience their presence while awake.

This overlap between dreaming and waking encounters challenges older assumptions that such experiences are signs of denial, avoidance, or mental instability.

Instead, they may represent something far more ordinary—and far more vital to healing.