Modern dating is often performance art.

We meet each other not as people, but as pitch decks—digitally optimized, emotionally suggestive, and always ready for a soft launch.

Personality is stylized. Pain is formatted. Even intimacy has a visual language now, complete with filters and flashbacks.

Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) feels quaint by comparison.

He assumed we took off the mask in private.

These days, the mask has become a second skin. There is no backstage. You’re either performing or you’ve disappeared.

The cultural logic is clear: in order to be loved, you must first be recognizable.

That means clean lines, catchy references, and an aesthetic that tells the other person what kind of love story you’re selling.

Let’s be honest. We didn’t fall into situationships—we sprinted.
We told ourselves this was modern love: low-commitment, vibe-heavy, let’s-see-where-it-goes. It's non-threatening.

It's flexible. It's the human version of a late-stage beta release.

It also kind of sucks.

Recent studies confirm what most people already know deep in their gut: situationships are emotionally draining.

A 2023 report from Hinge Labs found that nearly 80% of young adults feel burned out by undefined relationships (Hinge Labs, 2023).

The very vagueness that promises freedom often delivers confusion, unmet needs, and a slow erosion of trust in ourselves and others.

This is not an upgrade. It’s a relationship with no steering wheel and no brakes.

In a study that reads like the diary of a quietly unraveling suburban home, researchers peeked under the hood of 235 families and found something unsurprising—but still worth saying out loud: when Mom’s feeling unloved, she’s more likely to swat Junior’s behind.

And Dad? Well, he’s apparently still fine watching SportsCenter.

Published in Developmental Psychology (that’s the journal, not your Aunt Linda’s Facebook rant), this study suggests that when couples argue like middle schoolers with mortgages, it doesn't just ruin dinner—it subtly changes how mothers discipline their kids.

Not consciously, mind you. It’s sneakier than that.

Let’s say you’re a mother standing in the frozen food aisle while your child has an existential crisis over the shape of dinosaur nuggets.

You feel judged. Inadequate.

Not just by strangers, but by some deep internal critic who sounds suspiciously like your own mother.

If you’ve ever felt that your parenting manual is missing a chapter—on how to feellike a good parent—you're not alone. And now, we have science to thank for explaining why.

A new study out of Belgium (Delhalle & Blavier, 2024) gives us a tidy psychological nesting doll: inside some struggling parents are anxious partners; inside those anxious partners are wounded children.

And while this may not come as a shock to anyone who's lived through both a dysfunctional childhood and a chaotic PTA meeting, what’s novel here is how clearly the mechanism was tested and statistically verified.

You probably think your breakup started with that final screaming match over the dishwasher. Or maybe it was the quiet sigh she gave when you forgot her birthday again.

But chances are, according to new research, the end began years ago—like a slow leak in the hull of a ship no one wanted to patch.

In a striking meta-study drawing from four national datasets and more than 15,000 romantic implosions, researchers Janina Larissa Bühler and Ulrich Orth (2024) uncovered a two-stage pattern of decline in romantic satisfaction that eerily mimics the psychology of dying.

Yes, dying. As in: terminal decline.

It seems relationships, like human bodies, often betray their ending long before the official flatline.

Teen girls on TikTok are looking into the camera with the intensity of Joan of Arc. Their lips say “Yes you can.” The text over their heads says things like:

• “Go out with him. Age is just a number.”

• “Meet him tonight. You only live once.”

• “Send it. He’s different.”

Cue the applause. Cue the likes.

Cue the algorithm dragging more and more girls into this odd little confidence cult where empowerment gets weaponized into a gateway drug for exploitation.

The #YesYouCan trend wants to look like a pep talk. But for many mental health professionals, it reads more like a pamphlet for digital grooming.

The first generations of Americans diagnosed with autism in childhood are now entering old age.

Yet eldercare systems—Medicare, senior housing, memory care—were never built with neurodivergent aging in mind.

Autism. ADHD. Sensory processing disorders. Dyspraxia.

These don’t disappear with age. They evolve.

And the support systems that served these individuals in youth and adulthood often vanish in old age. The result? A silent crisis of unmet needs—and a dawning recognition that eldercare must evolve, too.

It usually starts with something sweet.

A baby’s first wobbly step, recorded on a phone. A photo of a child asleep in the car seat after a long day at the beach.

A TikTok with a pretty piano track and a soft-focus toddler meltdown. These moments feel private—but they’re not.

Welcome to sharenting, the modern art of broadcasting parenthood.

And right next to it, making sourdough and arranging little flowers in milk-glass vases, we find the tradwife—a woman who’s not just choosing domestic life, but doing so with intention, aesthetic elegance, and sometimes a ring light.

These two trends may seem different, but together they raise important questions: what happens when motherhood becomes a performance?

Who benefits when domestic life is publicized? And how do we honor both privacy and choice in a culture that rewards constant visibility?

Franz Kafka never had children.

But if he had, he might have written something eerily familiar to modern mothers scrolling TikTok: a scene in which the father is present but not quite involved, lovingly useless, narratively adjacent.

In today’s digital parenting memes, he’d be the guy holding the diaper bag like a defeated sherpa while the mother sprints behind a tantruming toddler.

This phenomenon has a name now: passenger parenting.

It’s not exactly negligence. It’s not even intentional.

It’s more like a kind of soft resignation—a sleepwalking through fatherhood. And while it’s getting laughs online, it’s costing families something real and measurable.

In the final year of his life, Franz Kafka—forty years old, frail from tuberculosis—was living in Berlin with Dora Diamant, the woman who had brought light into his darkest years.

He had at last found love, and some measure of peace, if not health.

Each day, he walked slowly through the gardens of Steglitz Park, a place of green quiet where the world seemed gentle enough to bear.

One afternoon, as he and Dora walked, they came upon a little girl sitting alone, her face hidden in her hands, sobbing.

Kafka knelt beside her and asked softly, “Why are you crying?”

“My doll is lost,” she whispered. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

Moved by her sorrow, Kafka offered to help her search. The three of them looked together, combing the bushes and paths, but the doll was nowhere to be found.

At last, Kafka said, “Let’s try again tomorrow.”

When the girl returned the next day, Kafka met her with a letter.

“It’s from your doll,” he said.

By the time you’re 22, your frontal lobe is just barely open for business, your student debt has metastasized into a personality trait, and you’re beginning to suspect that your so-called adult life might be an elaborate payback plan for how your parents raised you.

Welcome to Italy, land of espresso, existential dread, and—if recent research is to be believed—overprotective parenting that can quietly fry your nervous system.

A recent study by Italian researchers Martina Smorti and colleagues (2024), published in the Journal of Psychology, took a magnifying glass to the Italian family dynamic and discovered something unnervingly elegant: the way your parents bonded with you—whether they coddled you like a houseplant or cared for you like a sentient being—echoes forward into your adult life through the neurotic relay race of anxiety and anger.

Let’s be honest: crying at weddings, baby showers, graduation ceremonies, or during the last 10 minutes of a Pixar film shouldn’t make sense.

And yet there you are—bawling into a cocktail napkin because someone else said “I do.”

WTF? These are happy moments, so why is your body leaking saltwater like it just lost a dog?

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s your brain’s fault.

And like most things involving the human brain, the reason is a gloriously chaotic cocktail of biology, memory, and social survival strategies dressed up in a tuxedo of neuroscience.