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Avoidantly Attached, Actively Childfree: How Parental Bonding Shapes the Choice to Opt Out of Parenthood
The decision not to have children used to be whispered. Now it’s algorithmic.
And increasingly it’s not just about climate anxiety, career freedom, or rising egg prices. It’s also about attachment.
A new large-scale study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Glass & Fraley, 2025) has found that adults who report avoidant attachment toward their parents are significantly more likely to identify as childfree—not childless by circumstance, but by conscious choice.
Meanwhile, those who show anxious attachment to parents are somewhat less likely to opt out of parenting altogether.
This isn’t about blaming moms.
It’s about understanding how early emotional bonds quietly contour adult life—and why, for some, the idea of raising children doesn’t stir longing. It stirs alarm bells.
The Quiet Power of Parental Warmth: How Childhood Affection Shapes Personality, Worldview, and Well-Being
You can’t hug your child into a Nobel Prize.
But you might just hug them into becoming a more open, conscientious, and optimistic adult.
New research published in American Psychologist and Child Development suggests that maternal warmth—simple, sustained affection in childhood—has ripple effects far into adulthood.
Beyond genetics, poverty, or neighborhood risk, it’s warmth that predicts how children come to see themselves and the world around them.
And no, this isn’t just attachment theory with better branding.
It’s longitudinal twin studies and cross-cultural evidence converging on the same quiet truth: Love isn’t just nice—it’s developmentally catalytic.
Do You Call Your Partner Your Best Friend? You’re in the 14% Minority—Here’s Why That Might Matter
In a culture where we’re told to “marry your best friend,” it’s surprising how few people actually do.
According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, only 14.4% of adults in committed romantic relationships in the U.S. identified their partner as their best friend.
The rest? Either they called someone else their best friend—or didn’t include their partner as a “friend” at all.
That’s not a failure of romance. It might be a quiet revolution.
Queer Theory for Straight Couples: How Ivy and Ben Subverted Heteronormativity Without Even Trying
Ivy and Ben met on Hinge. Or maybe it was Tinder.
Either way, they weren’t looking to dismantle the patriarchy—they were just trying to find someone who wouldn’t ghost after three dates and who had a normal relationship with their mother.
Now five years into marriage, Ivy makes more money, Ben folds the laundry, and they both silently judge couples who use the term “hubby.”
They’re a progressive straight couple. They compost. They communicate. They have a shared Google Calendar called "Us."
But lately, something’s been gnawing at them.
The fights don’t make sense. The chores feel lopsided. The sex is… scheduled. They're not in crisis, just stuck in a version of marriage that feels strangely pre-written.
Ivy jokes that they accidentally bought the deluxe starter pack of heteronormativity at Crate & Barrel.
Enter queer theory—not as a sexual identity, but as a relationship philosophy.
Chrononormativity Collapse: When Your Relationship Has Its Own Time Zone
Some couples operate on Greenwich Mean Time. Others on Pacific Standard.
And then there are the ones on Emotional Dial-Up with Seasonal Attachment Drift.
Welcome to chrononormativity collapse—that curious, under-the-radar phenomenon where love doesn’t follow a script. Or a calendar. Or your therapist’s deeply color-coded worksheet.
Chrononormativity, a term coined in queer theory, refers to society’s not-so-subtle pressure to live—and love—on schedule.
Think: date, cohabitate, marry, breed, brunch. It’s the Apple Watch of intimacy: sleek, demanding, and quietly judgmental.
But here in the ruins of pandemic-era solitude, housing market absurdity, and polyamory hangovers, couples are going rogue.
They’re not breaking up—they’re falling off the timeline. And they’re often better for it.
The Occasion of Preverbal Exhaustion
I’d like to discuss why some autistic adults lose speech under stress—and what that silence Is saying
There’s a silence that isn’t peaceful.
It arrives mid-conversation. Mid-meeting. Mid-meltdown.
You reach for words, and they dissolve like sugar in hot water. You know what you mean, but your mouth isn’t returning your calls. You stare. Nod. Maybe write. Maybe blink.
You are not confused.
You are not stupid.
You are nonverbal now—and the world has no idea what to do with that.
Welcome to the under-explored, deeply misunderstood, and surprisingly common phenomenon of preverbal exhaustion in autistic adults.
The Rise of Stimming Visibility On TicTok: Why Autistic Self-Regulation Is Finally Getting the Spotlight It Deserves
For decades, stimming—short for self-stimulatory behavior—was something autistic people were taught to suppress. The flapping, the rocking, the finger-flicking, the pacing.
It was pathologized, medicalized, punished, or politely ignored. At best, it was seen as an “inappropriate” coping mechanism. At worst, a symptom to be extinguished.
Then came TikTok.
And suddenly, stimming went viral.
What Is Stimming, and Why Does It Matter?
Is There an Autism Aesthetic?
There’s a mood board quietly taking over your algorithm. It’s soft, low-contrast, possibly pastel, maybe even a little VHS-glitchy.
It loops. It rocks. It never yells.
And it just might smell faintly of lavender essential oil and unfinished tasks.
Welcome to the autism aesthetic: not just a vibe—an act of survival.
This isn’t about stereotypes (no Rain Man cardigans or Big Bang Theory quirk-core).
This is about how autistic people are reshaping digital and sensory spaces to reflect their lived, felt, regulated reality.
And it’s happening with the kind of subtlety that makes neurotypicals scroll by and say, “Huh, that’s calming,” without realizing they’ve just walked into someone else’s nervous system.
Let’s saunter in.
Loving While Anxious: Navigating Romance with Social Anxiety and a Neurodivergent Brain
Let’s talk about love, panic, and the tiny mutiny of being yourself.
Falling in love when you're neurodivergent and socially anxious is a bit like trying to waltz with a fire alarm strapped to your chest.
You want closeness—but your body sometimes treats it like an ambush.
You crave connection—but also fear melting into a puddle of misread facial expressions, sensory overload, or an emotional hangover that lasts three business days.
And yet, neurodivergent souls aren't unlovable—they’re just out here trying to find love while running a very different operating system. It's not a dating problem. It's a translation problem.
What’s Actually Happening: When Social Anxiety Meets Neurodivergence
Managing Social Anxiety While Neurodiverse
Imagine walking into a room and feeling like every eye is a microscope.
Now add the disorienting static of a sensory system tuned to frequencies others don’t even register. For neurodiverse individuals, social anxiety isn't just fear of judgment—it’s often a physiological storm, a moral performance, and a full-time job of masking.
Managing social anxiety while neurodiverse isn’t about trying to become someone you’re not. It’s about noticing, accommodating, and gently renegotiating the terms of engagement with a world built for different brains.
This post explores what social anxiety looks like in neurodiverse lives—ADHD, autism, giftedness, sensory processing differences—and what science, lived experience, and therapeutic insight say about navigating it.
A Modest Guide to Autistic Romance
If traditional romance feels like navigating a maze blindfolded, autistic romance offers a clearly lit path—complete with well-marked signs, rest areas, and amusing commentary along the way.
Forget about roses, cryptic glances, and surprise dinners; autistic love is about radical honesty, thoughtful structure, and sensory-safe cuddles.
The Devil Behind the Eye: Living with Male Pattern Cluster Headache
Not a migraine. Not a choice. Just the cruelest headache known to medicine.
A Pain So Precise It Has a Schedule
If you're here, it's likely because someone you love—or you—wakes up in the early morning hours, heart racing, one eye watering, skull imploding from within. You may have been told it’s a migraine, or sinuses, or anxiety. It’s not.
This is male pattern cluster headache—a neurological disorder so excruciating it has earned the name “suicide headache.” It’s rare, it’s underfunded, and it is catastrophically misunderstood.
This post is here to tell the whole truth about it, including the latest research on treatments from mainstream medicine to psilocybin microdosing, and to give both sufferers and their loved ones practical tools and deep understanding.
I’ve lived with Male Pattern Cluster headache for the past 37 years.