“She never met a stranger.” Four words in a small-town obituary that said more than any résumé. Multiply that by 38 million, and you begin to see how Americans really define a life.

A sweeping linguistic analysis of 38 million American obituaries, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when pressed to define a life, Americans consistently emphasize tradition and benevolence.

Less power and thrills, more casseroles and caretaking.

In other words: no one cares that you were regional manager of the Northeast office—what they remember is that you loved your grandchildren and showed up to every Sunday service.

What Do 38 Million American Obituaries Teach Us About Legacy?

“Unconditional love” has a nice ring at the altar.

It sounds romantic, eternal, and vaguely saintly — as if the mere act of saying I do dissolves all conditions.

But here’s the truth: marital love is not unconditional.

Nor should it be.

The idea of loving a spouse “no matter what” is seductive.

It promises safety, permanence, and a Hollywood ending.

Yet research — and countless divorce filings — tell a different story.

Adult love thrives on reciprocity, trust, and boundaries.

Without those conditions, marriage collapses under the weight of unmet needs and unchecked harm.

“Conditional love” has always been cast as the villain in the love story.

It sounds transactional, cold, and about as sexy as a spreadsheet. People assume it means: I’ll love you only if you vacuum, stay thin, and don’t embarrass me at dinner parties.

But here’s the unromantic truth: conditional love is the only kind of love adults actually manage.

Without conditions, marriages don’t become poetic — they become chaotic.

If unconditional love were real, people would be marrying Labradors.

Loyal, forgiving, never asking questions.

But you can’t argue about the mortgage with a Labrador, and that’s where the fantasy collapses.

This is my unapologetic defense of conditional love.

If you still crave the fairy tale of “love no matter what,” I’ve already written its obituary here: The Myth of Unconditional Love in Marriage.

When you become the invisible spouse, it isn’t about vanity.

It isn’t about wanting roses every Friday or dramatic love notes slipped into lunchboxes. It’s about something far quieter and lonelier: the sense that the person who once saw you best no longer sees you at all.

Marriage, at least in its glossy brochure form, is supposed to be two people building a life together — a duet, a partnership, a home.

But when neurodiversity is part of the family landscape, marriage can start to look less like a duet and more like a never-ending group project: therapy schedules, insurance fights, endless paperwork.

And if you’re not careful, one person becomes the project manager while the other fades, quite literally, into the background.

If you scroll through Reddit threads or late-night parenting groups on Facebook, you’ll see the refrain over and over: “I feel invisible in my own house.”

Not unloved. Not abandoned. Just unseen, like the ghost of a partner who still does the dishes but whose inner life has been erased.

Families raising a neurodivergent child — whether autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or otherwise — quickly learn that the whole household shifts around that child’s needs.

Parents juggle therapy appointments, meltdowns, calls from teachers, and endless forms.

Meanwhile, the sibling without a diagnosis is often standing just offstage, quietly adapting. Sometimes they become protectors, advocates, even the comic relief.

Sometimes they carry resentment or that peculiar sense that childhood was cut short. Many carry both.

One adult sibling put it plainly: “I love my brother, but I was raised as his third parent, not as myself.”

When someone comes out after decades of marriage, it can feel like the ground gives way under both partners’ feet.

The spouse who discloses often experiences relief at finally living authentically. The other may feel blindsided, betrayed, or as though the marriage’s history has been rewritten overnight.

This is not as rare as people think.

Research on mixed-orientation marriages (where one partner identifies as straight and the other as LGBTQ+) suggests late-life coming out is a significant, if under-discussed, phenomenon (Buxton, 2001; Pew Research Center, 2013).

Many older adults delayed disclosure due to stigma, cultural pressures, or religious expectations. Others experienced what psychologist Lisa Diamond (2008) calls sexual fluidity — the natural evolution of identity across the lifespan.

Here are ten signs, drawn from research and lived experience, that may point to a spouse wrestling with identity. These are not smoking guns — there is no neat checklist for human complexity — but they can offer insight into patterns couples often recognize only in hindsight.

It’s 10 p.m. Your spouse has just posted what looks — to you — like a press release on your family’s private business.

Or maybe they’re scrolling TikTok while you’re baring your soul. You feel dismissed.

They feel confused. Suddenly, the marital argument isn’t about the dishwasher, the finances, or the in-laws. It’s about Facebook.

If one of you is autistic, the fight isn’t really about the post. It’s about two brains running on different Wi-Fi networks.

Ted Bundy got marriage proposals in prison. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” had fangirls camping outside the courthouse.

And today? TikTok is the new courtroom balcony, where millions publicly swoon over killers in slick edits set to sad-girl audio.

There’s a word for this: hybristophilia — sexual attraction to criminals. It sounds like a rare orchid, but psychologists use it to describe a very old phenomenon: finding danger desirable.

A recent study confirms TikTok is fueling it, showing that actively engaging with videos that romanticize criminals predicts higher hybristophilia scores among young women.

Personality traits like psychopathy and Machiavellianism were the strongest predictors (Treggia et al., 2024). Simply scrolling past Bundy edits doesn’t count. Clicking “like” does.

What if ten seconds of your heartbeat could predict not just who becomes a commando, but who stays married, gets promoted, or survives IKEA?

That’s the claim hovering over new research from the University of Haifa, published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback.

A quick measure of heart rate variability (HRV)—the subtle rhythm in the milliseconds between beats—may reveal who thrives under stress and who crumbles.

David Benatar, the South African philosopher behind Better Never to Have Been (Wikipedia), argues that bringing new people into existence is always wrong.

His case is stark: life inevitably contains suffering, nonexistence contains none, therefore the kindest act is not to procreate.

It’s philosophy as prophylaxis: the only foolproof way to prevent human suffering is to prevent humans. In other words, it has all the nuanced thinking of a Trojan condom.

For centuries we’ve been told that coupling is the ticket to happiness.

Fairy tales, romantic comedies, your aunt at Thanksgiving—everyone promises that life improves dramatically the moment you find “the one.”

But science, ever the party guest who insists on facts, has a more measured story: yes, relationships help, but mostly in a few predictable areas.

A new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science (Qin, Hoan, Joel, & MacDonald, 2025) suggests that entering a relationship does indeed boost well-being, though not in the miraculous way culture has long promised.

Infertility is rarely kind, but for LGBTQ+ couples, it’s a double bind.

You face not only the grief of cycles that don’t work but also the absurdity of some clinics that don’t recognize your family.

Queer infertility therapy isn’t a luxury—it’s how couples keep from drowning in both the science and the silence.

Infertility never arrives as a polite guest. It doesn’t knock, it doesn’t call ahead.

It barges in, drops its bags in the middle of your living room, and declares it’s staying for an indefinite period of time.

For most couples, infertility brings grief, financial strain, and awkward silences at dinner parties.

For LGBTQ+ couples, infertility drags along a second, less visible shadow: decades of systemic exclusion, medical erasure, and cultural suspicion of queer families.