Every society has a word it weaponizes and later pretends to regret.

The f-slur is ours.

It has lived many lives—bludgeon, joke, code, seduction, provocation, elegy. We declared it dead several times. No one believed us.

The word has returned, not sheepishly but triumphantly.

It appears on theater marquees, in gallery titles, across queer gaming circles, inside performance art manifestos. It is a ghost with tenure.

And like all ghosts, it only appears when the living have unresolved business.

The f-slur survives because the culture that produced it never dismantled the conditions that made it necessary. A slur is not a word. It is a system reporting on itself.

And this system is very much still here.

In corporate America, persuasion is treated as a kind of moral arithmetic: if you collect enough strong evidence, arrange it neatly, and speak clearly, the audience should—by some unwritten code of professional decency—agree with you.

This belief persists despite decades of meetings proving the opposite.

If persuasion were determined by argument strength, quarterly planning sessions would be triumphs of logic rather than long-form testimonials to human impatience.

A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology—from Roman Linne, Jannis Hildebrandt, Gerd Bohner, and Hans-Peter Erb—offers an explanation so unflattering it feels like a diagnosis: people don’t respond to your argument; they respond to the sequence in which you slip it past their nervous system.

Professionals polish arguments with jeweler-like fussiness.
They should instead be rearranging them with jeweler-like cunning.

There are body parts we proudly display—jawlines, clavicles, legs—and then there’s the armpit: evolution’s quiet overachiever, hidden under cotton and deodorant and centuries of polite denial.

But biologically, psychologically, and erotically?
The armpit is loud.

It broadcasts information.
It shapes attraction.
It influences bonding.
And yes—it can be erotic in a deeply scientific way.

Let’s walk straight into the research most people pretend doesn’t exist, while keeping this appropriately trauma-informed, and grounded in peer-reviewed human behavior science.

If you want to understand any sexual behavior—why we do it, why we pretend we don’t do it, and why epidemiologists have been nervously clearing their throats about it for forty years—you have to begin with a basic anthropological truth:

Humans will try almost anything once, and twice if nobody panics.

Anal sex has spent decades sitting in the corner wearing a trench coat and sunglasses, treated primarily as a public-health hazard rather than a human behavior with motives, meaning, and (for many) genuinely rewarding sensation.

When researchers finally stopped hyperventilating long enough to ask why people actually do it, an interesting thing happened:

The data told a story far more ordinary—and far more revealing—than anyone expected.

Let’s begin at the beginning: prevalence.

If you want to understand the fragile beauty of human psychology, don’t look at brain scans or meditation retreats.

Look at the Milan, Italy subway, where a man dressed as Batman recently doubled the rate at which commuters offered their seat to a pregnant woman.

It is one of the most charming, rigorous, and quietly revolutionary demonstrations of the Batman Effect—a phenomenon where unexpected events disrupt commuter autopilot and trigger prosocial behavior.

Let’s go deeper, because the effect is not just funny or heartwarming.

I

t’s a rare, real-world glimpse into how the human brain manages attention, how novelty triggers present-moment awareness, and how social contagion spreads prosocial cues through a crowd without anyone realizing what’s happening.

This is not comic-book morality. This is neuroscience, urban psychology, and the exquisitely delicate machinery of human perception—disguised in a cape.

There comes a point in every long-term relationship when you discover you are no longer the sole proprietor of your emotional life.

You wake up fine—perhaps even optimistic, which is already suspicious.
The coffee is decent. Nothing hurts. You think: Maybe today will behave itself.

And then your partner walks in.

Not yelling.
Not upset.

Just… placing their keys on the counter in a way your nervous system interprets as a prelude to war.

Suddenly, you are stressed too.

This is not pathology.
This is not poor boundaries.
This is not “being too attuned.”

This is something far more democratic and far less voluntary: bio-behavioral synchrony—the process by which two nervous systems begin sharing emotional data like a couple on a family phone plan.

It’s the reason couples can have entire conversations without speaking.

It’s also why one person’s anxiety can detonate the whole household.

Before you ever get to the Utah mountains where Brian Wittke died, you have to understand a quieter geography: the map of his nervous system.

He was a commercial airline pilot, a father of three, and by all accounts a conscientious professional.

He also lived inside an industry where admitting to depression feels, for many pilots, like handing over your wings.

According to his mother, he worried that seeking treatment would cost him his license and his livelihood, a fear echoed by dozens of pilots interviewed in recent reporting on aviation and mental health.

On June 14, 2022, he disappeared. His mother texted and watched his location data vanish, then reappear—too late. By the time his phone told the truth about where he was, he had died by suicide in the Utah mountains.

A trauma-informed lens does not ask, “Why did he do this?” as if it were an isolated, inscrutable decision. It asks:

• What chronic pressures was he carrying?

• What did his body and brain have to absorb to keep flying?

• And what did the system do—or fail to do—with that load?

Because trauma isn’t just what happens to you. It’s also what happens inside you when you are trapped between competing threats: lose your career or lose your mind.

Pilots are not just stressed.

They occupy a textbook high-risk environment for cumulative trauma, moral injury, and chronic hyperarousal. But the way aviation handles mental health often adds trauma instead of relieving it.

Let’s unpack that.

There are quiet moments in modern life when you realize the technology has outrun the species.

Not by a little.
By miles.

It’s the moment you see someone talking lovingly to a phone screen.
Or when you realize your smartwatch understands your stress better than your spouse.
Or when you catch yourself feeling grateful for a notification.

But the real turning point arrived when people began forming attachments to folks they do not actually know — and their nervous systems failed to object.

The body, ever eager, simply said:
“Oh, attention! Oh, possibility! Oh, someone who might care!”
And from there, it was off to the races.

Welcome to the new sexual attachment system: parasocial intimacy — the kind that feels mutual, behaves reciprocal, and isn’t either.

This is not a glitch in human evolution.
It’s the predictable outcome of a world that monetizes attention and calls it connection.

There is a phrase that belongs in the Museum of Things Therapists No Longer Believe: Relax. It’s just porn.

That line worked when porn was a static product—when erotic content was one-directional, not designed to talk back, and incapable of forming a simulation of intimacy.

But OnlyFans is not porn.

OnlyFans is a relational technology—a system that simulates attachment, personal attention, erotic attunement, and emotional responsiveness. It is designed to feel like connection because connection is the product.

The research—still emerging, but powerful—confirms this.

Studies now argue that OnlyFans is not simply “NSFW content delivered via subscription” but a new ecosystem of digital intimacy, parasocial attachment, sexual learning, identity experimentation, and emotional labor (Hamilton et al., 2023; Lippmann et al., 2023; Tynan & Linehan, 2024).

And because it is relational, not merely sexual, its blast radius is relational as well: marriages, partners, children, and the emotional architecture of the household.

This is not moral panic.
This is a public health conversation, twenty minutes before the smoke alarm goes off.

Sunday, May 24, 2026. Gentle readers, there are dates that mean nothing and dates that behave more like thresholds. Pentecost falls into the second category.

You don’t need to believe anything theological to appreciate the symbolism: according to an old story, it was the day people who had been talking past each other somehow started making sense again.

Frankly, that’s as close to a marriage miracle as anything I’ve seen in clinical work.

So yes—The Monastic Marriage Series launches on May 24, 2026.

And no, you don’t need to light candles or mumble in ancient languages.

You just have to acknowledge that most of us are trying to maintain modern relationships with nervous systems that should’ve been retired three upgrades ago.

Everything is too loud, too fast, too insistent. You’ve already misinterpreted your partner three times by breakfast.

Most couples aren’t short on love.
They’re short on interior quiet—the kind that lets meaning arrive undistorted.

On Pentecost, Sunday, May 24, 2026. I’m opening a private, paywalled 10-part series that drags the most durable contemplative practices into the overstimulated American marriage.

There are two kinds of endings in love: the cinematic kind Hollywood keeps selling us, and the kind most people actually live through.

The cinematic version is full of betrayal, shouting, and a dramatic exit involving a slammed door.

The real version—what a recent StudyFinds article recently nodded to—is the quiet collapse that happens so gradually you barely notice it until the intimacy has dissolved like a neglected cup of tea.

Quiet divorcing isn’t a trend. It’s an emerging American archetype.

And its defining feature is absence—of conflict, of conversation, of warmth, of repair.

Most people don’t experience a marriage ending so much as a marriage drifting. By the time someone finally says, “I can’t keep doing this,” the relationship has been ending silently for years.

A man walks into his house at 9:47 p.m. looking like someone who has outrun the day.

His tie is off, but his posture hasn’t received the memo; his nervous system is still rooted in the last meeting.

His wife is standing near the dishwasher rehearsing the question she’s been saving for hours. He does not see her. He sees a plate left in the sink.

The plate, for him, is not domestic negligence. It is a problem to solve, a variable to control, a piece of the world that can be brought back into order.

He believes he is helping.

She feels, in that moment, completely unseen.

If you work with executive couples long enough, you learn this: the modern CEO is not a personality so much as a physiology, a system shaped by deadlines, decisions, and a kind of chronic vigilance that the body cannot simply hang in the foyer like a coat.

We like to imagine leadership as a psychological profile—charisma, confidence, perhaps a touch of ego—but the academic literature shows something far less romantic and much more consequential: CEOs carry structural strain home the way coal miners once carried dust in their lungs. The residue permeates everything.

What follows is not a critique of leaders; it is an explanation of the environmental mismatch between high-stakes work and intimate partnership—a mismatch quietly eroding marriages from the inside out.

This is the story of how power quietly complicates love.