So you’ve booked your first couples therapy session.

Congratulations—you’ve just done one of the bravest and most grown-up things a couple can do (right up there with signing a joint Costco membership).

Now, naturally, you’re panicking. What actually happens when you walk into that office—or click that Zoom link? Will it be like marriage court with a referee in sensible shoes?

Will the therapist crown a winner? probably not.

Couples therapy isn’t a punishment. It’s more like a lab. A slightly awkward lab where the experiment is your relationship, and the scientist is taking notes on how you argue about loading the dishwasher.

The holidays are over. The decorations sag, the bills arrive, and many couples quietly decide: this marriage has run its course.

Welcome to January—often called Divorce Month.

Every year, family lawyers and financial advisors see a surge in inquiries once the calendar flips.

Barron’s reports that advisors are often the first stop—sometimes even before lawyers—because divorce is as much about money as it is about emotion (Barron’s Advisor, 2025).

Why January?

“Bed rotting” isn’t just a meme—it’s a cultural mirror.

Officially defined in February 2024 by Dictionary.com as “the practice of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.

The phrase has taken off across TikTok, Instagram, and every group chat where someone admits:

I haven’t left my bed in 14 hours.

At its core, bed rotting is about withdrawal. But whether it’s withdrawal for self-care or avoidance is the ongoing debate.

Most people imagine the collapse of desire as something loud—affairs, slammed doors, maybe someone weeping dramatically in the driveway.

But the real story is quieter. Millions of Americans are simply… not doing it. Welcome to the sex recession, where intimacy has oddly gone missing, and no one seems to know quite how to find it again.

How Bad Is the “Sex Recession”?

The Institute for Family Studies reports that only 37% of adults aged 18–64 were having sex weekly in 2024. In 1990, it was 55%. If this were Wall Street, we’d call it a bear market in desire.

Among young adults, the story is worse: 24% of those aged 18–29 said they hadn’t had sex at all in the past year—double the rate from 2010. That’s less a dry spell than a dust bowl.

And this is not just a young person’s issue. Married couples, cohabiting partners, and middle-aged professionals all report declines. The drought is as democratic as it is dramatic.

Everyone warns you about postpartum depression.

What no one tells you? The hard part might blindside you at five months—long after the casseroles have stopped coming, when the world assumes you’re “back to normal,” but your brain feels like soup.

The truth is, postpartum mental health isn’t just about depression.

It’s a wide spectrum: postpartum anxiety, postpartum OCD, postpartum bipolar disorder, postpartum PTSD, and the dreaded postpartum brain fog—sometimes worsened by thyroid or iron problems.

Let’s walk through why five months postpartum can feel like a perfect storm, and what that really means for mothers.

Most couples start out with romance, adventure, and maybe a suspicious number of tapas dates.

But sooner or later, love moves from fireworks to spreadsheets—whether that means managing bills, blending families, or just figuring out who actually remembered to buy toothpaste.

This is where relationships shift into something bigger: a strategic partnership.

Not in the soulless corporate sense, but in the “we’re building a life together, and we need systems that don’t collapse under the weight of laundry” sense.

The good news?

Research shows that thriving couples look less like fairytale romances and more like resilient organizations.

They have shared vision, fair division of labor, healthy repair after conflict, and clear future planning (Gottman & Silver, 2015; Karney & Bradbury, 2020; Rusbult, 1980).

The even better news? You don’t need a Harvard MBA to get there. You just need a little structure—and maybe this something like this modest little questionnaire.

Marriage has never stood still. Once, it was about livestock, land, and alliances.

Then came the companionate marriage of the early 20th century—partnerships built on friendship and shared domestic roles.

By the mid-20th century, we wanted “expressive marriage”—our spouse should be our best friend and the main source of personal fulfillment.

Finally came the soulmate era, where your partner was expected to be lover, therapist, co-parent, life coach, and eternal roommate.

It was a beautiful fantasy. It was also quite impossible.

The soulmate model promised everything and delivered little more than a sense of ongoing disquietude.

Now, a quieter model is emerging—the strategic partnership marriage.

It’s less about destiny and more about design. Less about waiting for romance to carry the load, more about building a system that keeps love alive in a world of relentless distraction.

If you’ve ever felt your heart thudding, ears ringing, and brain shrinking to a single pixel mid-argument, congratulations: you were “flooded.”

When your nervous system flips into fight/flight, your ability to listen, reason, and empathize craters. In that state, continuing to talk isn’t communication—it’s demolition.

The Walk-Away Pause is a negotiated, time-limited break designed to de-escalate physiology and reset cognition so you can actually solve the thing you’re arguing about.

Think of it as strategic silence, but with rules.

If you’ve ever typed and retyped a message to a difficult ex, wondering if a single word might land you back in court, you’re exactly the audience the Yellow Rock Method was invented for.

Most of us don’t get into relationships thinking we’ll someday need a communication style named after a rock.

And yet, here we are. In high-conflict divorce, narcissistic abuse recovery, or workplace battles with a boss who confuses “feedback” with “character assassination,” the question is always the same: How do I respond without making things worse?

The answer isn’t silence (which can look cold) and it isn’t shouting (which makes everything worse).

The answer is Yellow Rock—a communication strategy that’s equal parts professional email, Sunday-school politeness, and emotional Kevlar.

When we talk about infidelity, we usually talk about heartbreak. But betrayal doesn’t just lodge itself in the soul—it also gets written into the body.

Affairs can raise blood pressure, disrupt sleep, and even increase the risk of chronic illness years down the road.

And the body doesn’t respond the same way for everyone: men often pay the price in their hearts, while women carry it in their nerves, hormones, and daily aches.

Infidelity, it turns out, is a love story with a medical sequel.

Infidelity is more than a story of heartbreak—it leaves physiological traces.

And while betrayal wounds everyone, the health fallout can look different depending on gender.

But the picture isn’t complete until we also ask: what happens in same-sex couples, where cultural scripts and relational expectations may differ?

Infidelity is one of those topics everyone thinks they understand.

But when researchers dig into the details, they find it’s not one single thing at all.

In fact, the meaning of betrayal shifts depending on culture, generation, and even technology.

A global review of infidelity research makes a striking point: how we define infidelity matters more than how often it happens.

Some couples say only sex counts. Others see emotional intimacy, flirting online, or even private messaging as a serious breach.

What looks like “cheating” in one culture may not even register as such in another (Levine, García, & Thomas, 2024).

Most people imagine menopause as hot flashes, hormone creams, and the nagging suspicion that you’ve suddenly become a one-woman sauna.

Fewer people talk about the other side effect that often appears around the same time: divorce papers.

Enter the meme-worthy phrase making its rounds online—meno divorce.

Like quiet quitting or doomscrolling, it’s a cultural shorthand that compresses an entire demographic trend into two sticky words.

And women are picking it up because it explains something both statistical and deeply personal: menopause is often the moment when patience for a lopsided marriage runs out.

What Is a “Meno Divorce”?