At the arrivals gate in Frankfurt, a teenage girl waits, scanning the crowd.

Her hoodie says Seoul, her sneakers are from New York, and the book in her hand is in Portuguese.

When her father waves from the baggage claim, she smiles — but she doesn’t switch languages right away.

It’s been two years since she’s seen him, and she’s deciding whether to speak English, the language they always used at home, or his native French, which she picked up during their last posting in Geneva.

It’s not that she doesn’t know which is “right.”
It’s that for her, right depends on which culture she’s in at that exact moment — and she’s in three at once.

Somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of the photocopier, humans discovered two things:

1. Food tastes better when you know how to make it.

2. People are jerks about giving you that knowledge.

We like to think of recipes as acts of generosity—gifts, heirlooms, love letters in the language of butter and spice.

And yet, across cultures and centuries, there’s a long tradition of handing someone a recipe… and somehow making sure it won’t quite work.

It’s the culinary equivalent of giving someone driving directions that almost get them there.

Why Do Some Folks Sabotage Recipes?

Heterofatalism — the belief that heterosexual relationships are structurally doomed to disappoint — is no longer just an obscure academic term.

For many Gen Z women, it’s a working theory of modern romance. And it’s reshaping the way they approach dating, sex, and consent.

Coined by scholar Asa Seresin, heterofatalism isn’t a tantrum or a manifesto.

It’s a quiet conclusion reached after too many underwhelming dates, too many safety calculations, and too much unpaid emotional labor dressed up as fun.

In this worldview, even the best straight relationships carry a familiar imbalance of risk and reward.

And now, it’s influencing everything from dating app use to the quiet rise of the Gen Z celibacy trend.

“Bad juju” is one of those phrases that slips easily into conversation. You might use it when you get a bad feeling about a deal, when someone messes with a lucky charm, or when a friend starts a risky plan you know won’t end well.

But this small, catchy phrase carries a big story—one that spans West African spirituality, colonial history, crime novels, and even modern video games.

The Original “Juju”

In the early 19th century, British and French traders on the West African coast encountered a wide variety of spiritual practices and protective objects.

In Hausa, a widely spoken language across West Africa, jùjú referred to a fetish or charm believed to contain spiritual power (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

Coastal West African French speakers used joujou—meaning “toy” or “plaything”—to describe some of these objects (Harper, n.d.; Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.).

In both cases, juju meant two things:

1. A physical object—often an amulet, charm, or shrine.

2. The spiritual power the object was believed to carry.

By 1823, juju had entered English in this sense (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

You may think your cat loves you. Or at least likes you.

But here’s the sad truth of it: your cat is less like a loyal friend and more like that quiet neighbor who waves politely, notes your every move, and files the information away in a mental folder labeled Useful or Not Useful.

It’s not weighing your moral fiber — it’s weighing whether you’re worth standing up for when the tuna runs out.

Cat owners everywhere have wondered: Do cats judge people the way humans do? Or, more pointedly, does my cat secretly think I’m a terrible person? The answer is more scientific (and more selfish) than you might imagine.

Dog owners have been telling this story forever: “Oh, my dog can tell. He growls at bad people.”

It’s a warm, satisfying belief—our furry sidekick as a moral compass, able to sniff out shady motives faster than a human judge. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel both safe and smug.

But here’s the disheartening plot twist: when scientists actually tested whether dogs can judge character, the results came back flatter than a day-old tennis ball.

A new study in Animal Cognition suggests that pet dogs don’t reliably prefer generous humans over selfish ones.

In fact, they might be more interested in which side of the yard has shade than in who’s offering the snacks.

There are post-apocalyptic films where the relationship is a subplot, something to fill the quiet moments between chase scenes.

The Road is the opposite — the father and son’s bond is the whole movie.

The world is falling apart, yes, but the plot is really just this: one human being, determined to keep another human being alive, both in body and in spirit.

That’s what makes it useful in couples and family therapy. It’s not about defeating the apocalypse; it’s about refusing to let the apocalypse defeat what’s between you.

In Cast Away (2000), Tom Hanks survives a plane crash, washes up on a deserted island, and spends the next four years doing what most of us couldn’t manage for four days without Wi-Fi: staying alive in silence.

There’s no calendar, no conversation, no evidence that anyone even remembers him. His only confidant is a volleyball named Wilson — who, for all his lack of motor skills, turns out to be a more reliable friend than most of us have on Facebook.

If The Martian taught us how to “science” our way through a crisis,

Cast Away teaches what happens when there’s no science left to try. When survival becomes the easy part, and the hard part is re-entering a life that’s gone on without you.

In The Martian (2015), astronaut Mark Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars after his crew assumes he’s dead.

NASA is 140 million miles away, the food supply will run out in weeks, and the planet is an endless expanse of red dust and silence.

It’s not unlike some marriages—barren landscapes, poor communication, and the sinking feeling no one is coming to help.

Watney survives not because of a single act of heroism, but because of thousands of small decisions: taking stock of what he has, innovating under pressure, keeping himself mentally engaged, and refusing to quit.

Those are of the same survival skills couples can use when their relationship feels stranded in hostile territory.

In April 1970, three astronauts found themselves in a situation you wouldn’t wish on your worst Tinder date: floating 200,000 miles from Earth in a damaged spacecraft, oxygen bleeding into the void.

The moon landing was out. The only mission left? Get home alive.

If you’ve seen the movie Apollo 13, you know the beats: the explosion, the frantic calculations, the MacGyvered CO₂ filter made from socks and duct tape.

You also know the moment where panic could have taken over — but didn’t.

That’s a masterclass in emotionally regulated, essential communication, the kind of skill that works in Mission Control… or in your kitchen when your spouse just “accidentally” put the good cast-iron skillet in the dishwasher.

Some couples fight like they’re in a kitchen-sink drama. Others fight like they’re in Jaws — except instead of a shark, it’s a mortgage payment, a teenage son with a vape habit, or the silent accumulation of dishes in the sink.

And most of us, in the moment, handle it with about the same grace as an inflatable raft in a hurricane.

But then there’s Quint.

If you’ve seen Jaws, you remember the scene: he’s half in the bag, singing sea shanties, the boat rocking lazily in the twilight — when suddenly, bang.

The shark slams into the hull. Quint doesn’t flinch, doesn’t panic, and doesn’t start narrating his feelings. He drops the song mid-verse, sits up, and starts issuing calm, precise orders.

No “What the hell is that?” No “Oh God we’re all going to die!” Just:

“Shut off the engine.” “Hooper, get forward.” “Brody, you come with me.”

This, gentle reader, is emotionally regulated, essential communication — the kind that can keep a marriage afloat long after it’s taken on water.

Most people picture the apocalypse as something out there — mushroom clouds, superviruses, maybe an asteroid with bad aim.

But for married people, the end of the world can be smaller, quieter, and a lot closer to home: a pink slip, a diagnosis, a betrayal you never saw coming.

And yet, throughout history, couples have made it through disasters big and small.

Even in the ruins of Pompeii, archaeologists have found skeletons curled toward each other — ancient proof that love sometimes survives the ash.

So what separates the couples who pull through from the ones who can’t?

Science actually has a lot to say about that.