A covenant marriage is a legally reinforced version of marriage available only in Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas—three states that, with great confidence, decided they could succeed where the rest of the country and half of Europe have failed: telling adults what to do with their relationships.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, couples who choose this model voluntarily give up the option of no-fault divorce in exchange for a contract with mandatory counseling and stricter exit criteria.

It’s marriage with the wheels chocked, the emergency brake pulled, and your pastor holding the spare key.

You sign not just a license but a “declaration of intent,” which is the marital equivalent of announcing to your dinner guests that yes, you really mean it this time—you’re going to stop eating sugar. In theory, it restores gravitas.

In practice, it’s America’s attempt to legislate what used to be enforced by tight-knit communities, extended families, and a general fear of public shame.

We’ve traded those for Bluetooth-enabled doorbells and algorithmic loneliness. Of course something like covenant marriage was going to pop up eventually.

Every generation resurrects the same myth: the gifted child who emerges like Athena from Zeus’s skull — brilliant, fully formed, and above all, untainted by the human mess of family dynamics.

It’s a comforting story. It flatters us.

If brilliance is innate, no one has to grapple with the awkward truth that giftedness isn’t an ethereal trait, but a relational product — the slow accumulation of cognitive patterns, parental habits, emotional climates, and, yes, the parent’s own gloriously imperfect wiring.

A recent study, The Role of Parental Education, Intelligence, and Personality on the Cognitive Abilities of Gifted Children, quietly smashes that myth.

It treats giftedness not as a monolith but as a set of discrete cognitive domains rooted in the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model (McGrew, 2005; Schneider & McGrew, 2018), showing that parents influence different cognitive abilities in different ways.

In other words, giftedness is not one thing — and neither is the parental contribution.

The result is a portrait of gifted children that is richer, more complex, and far more human than the tidy narratives we prefer. Let’s walk through it.

Once upon a time, teenage American boys read books.

And there was once a rite of passage in American male adolescence: reading Henry Miller at precisely the wrong time in life.

When you’re young, his sentences feel like license—wild, rapturous, profane, as if emotional chaos were a sacrament.

Only later, usually after age and regret have taken turns sanding you down, do you realize that Miller wasn’t modeling any sort of depth.

He was modeling the kind of emotional immaturity that flourishes when no one demands your presence.

In this post, I’m not undertaking a cultural cancellation. I hope, instead, that it reads more like a commentary on an American saint of defensive self-absorption.

A diagnosis that doesn’t rewrite your life—It only reveals what you’ve already lived through

At 60, you’re supposed to be gliding into the soft-focus years—gardens, grandkids, and grudges you’ve finally outgrown.

Instead, you’re staring at a late-life diagnosis that clarifies more than it disrupts.

A major meta-analysis in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews confirms that ADHD persists into older adulthood far more reliably than mid-century psychiatry ever allowed, and a national CDC report shows that nearly half of adults with ADHD weren’t diagnosed until adulthood.

The shock isn’t that you “have ADHD.”

The shock is that you lived six decades without anyone naming it.

Every generation invents new words for sex—not because desire is changing, but because we’re finally honest enough to name the patterns we used to pretend were accidents.

The old categories weren’t built for actual humans. They were built for forms, surveys, and the kind of public conversations that depend on polite fictions.

The 2020s have no patience for polite fictions. And that’s how almondsexuality entered the room.

Almondsexual didn’t crawl out of academia or a think tank.

It was born in the digital commons—the LGBTQ+ corners of the internet where people do the real labor of naming their inner lives.

These communities have always been ahead of the curve, inventing vocabulary long before institutions realize their glossary is 40 years out of date.

There are moments in a woman’s life when medicine suddenly remembers she exists.

Menopause isn’t usually one of them.

ADHD in women isn’t either. But put the two together and you enter a research vacuum so deep it makes the Grand Canyon look cramped.

Yet here we are—finally—staring at a study that tries to map what really happens when ADHD and menopause occupy the same hormonal real estate.

It’s messy. It’s counterintuitive. And it tells us more about how women interpret their bodies than anything we’ve learned in decades.

The newest work, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders, forces us to climb out of the cultural fog around “women’s issues” and look directly at what’s been hiding in plain sight.

Women with ADHD aren’t just navigating distractibility—they’re navigating an entire history of being overlooked, misdiagnosed, and expected to tough out biological experiences men receive sympathy medals for.

The fact that it took until 2025 for someone to study this intersection says more about medicine than it does about women.

If you want to understand what’s happening to American sexuality, don’t bother with marriage statistics or dating questionnaires.

Look at the “most viewed” section of Pornhub.

That’s where the erotic imagination of the country is being shaped, standardized, and exported in real time.

And according to a new long-range study in The Journal of Sex Research, what people are watching today looks markedly different from what they watched 25 years ago.

Visible physical aggression in mainstream pornography hasn’t crept upward; it has tripled.

Not because all of America suddenly became leather-friendly, but because online porn now runs on an economy of intensity rather than intimacy.

Every generation rediscovers the same truth: you can’t out-desire your own nervous system.

You can try—Americans are nothing if not ambitious—but biology keeps the receipts.

A new Austrian study in Psychoneuroendocrinology, the paper Too stressed for sex? Associations between stress and sex in daily life, confirms what therapists have quietly known for decades.

Stress, that relentless party-crasher, is exceptionally effective at smothering women’s sexual desire in the moment.

Men aren’t immune, either of course.

But women’s bodies tend to treat stress like a flashing red alarm: this is not the moment!

The sound of the dishwasher always struck her as strangely moralistic.

It whirred, clicked, and churned with the same nightly insistence, as if to remind her that predictability had become the head of household.

She held a single wineglass to the light, turning it slowly in her hand as though the angle might reveal something she’d missed.

Her husband wandered in behind her, scrolling his phone with the blank absorption of a man consuming nothing important.

And there in the soft kitchen light, between an appliance humming its mechanical sermon and a glow from a screen that felt more intimate than conversation, she sensed the truth: modern married life rarely collapses in spectacular fashion.

It thins. It dries at the edges. It becomes a room you’ve walked through so many times you no longer see it.

The coffee’s gone cold again. She’s halfway through a spreadsheet; he’s deep in an online rabbit hole about Japanese joinery.

Two people, one kitchen, parallel intensity.

From the outside it looks like disconnection. From the inside, it’s two nervous systems trying to find the same current — what psychologists call flow.

Flow isn’t new. Artists called it possession, athletes refer to “the zone.”

The modern term belongs to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, but the intuition is ancient: there are moments when effort becomes joy and consciousness organizes itself so completely that self-consciousness vanishes.

The casserole dish has already been washed twice.

Steam curls above the sink while three generations hover in the same square of light—the daughter bent over homework, her mother fussing with leftovers, and her grandmother whisper-sighing, “You should really encourage her eat more protein.”

No one means harm.

But under that fluorescent glow, “care” feels like static: constant, well-intentioned, impossible to tune out.

Across America, kitchens like this are the emotional laboratories of the modern family.

Pew Research Center reports that nearly 1 in 5 Americans now lives in a multigenerational household.

The reasons are practical—child-care costs, student debt, elder care—but the side effects are often conflictual.

When too many emotional economies operate under one roof, affection begins to take on the texture of management.

Her father texts during her Zoom meeting:
“Can you bring soup?”

She hits the thumbs-up emoji, mutes herself, and keeps nodding through a conversation about “quarterly outcomes.”

By the time the call ends, she’s got three browser tabs open—one for DoorDash, one for her daughter’s FAFSA, and one titled “How to talk to aging parents about independence.”

That’s what burnout looks like for America’s Sandwich Generation: love divided by logistics.

It’s the unpaid, unending role of caring for aging parents while still raising, funding, or worrying about your own kids. It’s devotion that’s begun to taste like debt.