High-achieving couples don’t crumble from weakness.

They crumble from overdeveloped strength—the kind that masquerades as invincibility until the interior walls quietly give way.

No one sees the collapse coming, least of all the people inside it.

I watch this unfold in my office with unnerving regularity:

The surgeon who thrives under fluorescent lights at 2 a.m.
The founder who negotiates existential financial risk before breakfast.

The attorney who can out-argue grief.

The C-suite leader whose nervous system has been running a private economy of suppression for years.

They all assumed competence was protection.
Achievement was armor.
Success was marital insulation.

Then the affair arrives—quietly, rationally, almost politely—yet more devastating than any crisis they have weathered.

High achievers don’t have ordinary affairs.
They have structural failures disguised as transgressions.

High-achieving couples often assume competence protects against catastrophe.

You manage volatility professionally. You anticipate problems before they bloom. You maintain the outward appearance of control even as life accelerates beyond humane limits.

But relationships are not governed by competence.
They are governed by proximity, nervous system regulation, and unexpressed need.

Success doesn’t prevent an affair.
It merely upgrades the packaging.

And when betrayal lands, high achievers learn a lesson that research on stress physiology has documented for decades: the nervous system does not negotiate with your résumé as detailed in allostatic load literature (McEwen, 1998; McEwen & Wingfield, 2003).

Affair recovery is not only a moral crisis.
It is the moment your emotional system calls a debt long overdue.

There is a particular kind of story that walks into a therapist’s office looking like a sexual problem but is, in fact, a biography of survival told in the language of urgency.

Hypersexuality is often treated as a moral failing in the wild and as a “behavioral excess” in more polite clinical circles. But anyone who has spent significant time in trauma-informed therapy knows that hypersexuality is rarely about sex at all.

It is about the nervous system trying to outpace a memory.

A study out of Israel—published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior and conducted by Rotem Yaakov and Aviv Weinstein—has now confirmed what clinicians recognize intuitively: childhood trauma isn’t simply correlated with hypersexual behavior; it helps build the psychological scaffolding that makes that behavior feel necessary.

And sexual narcissism, that glossy defensive veneer of erotic grandiosity, may be the bridge that connects the two.

In other words: childhood trauma isn’t just in the background. It’s in the machinery.

Every faith tradition produces at least one woman whose reputation eventually eclipses her biography.

Christianity, industrious as ever, has several.

But none has traveled farther—through pulpits, women’s conferences, Pinterest boards, private doubts, and tense marital conversations—than the Proverbs 31 woman.

She appears only once in Scripture.

Not in a narrative, not in a theological treatise, but in a poem—a Hebrew acrostic, the ancient equivalent of dedicating the alphabet to one person. A portrait of wisdom in full bloom: economic, moral, emotional, embodied.

And yet, by the time she arrives in couples therapy, she often looks nothing like the woman in the poem.

She arrives as a brand.
A mandate.
A lifestyle aspiration with a side of guilt.
A doctrinal mascot for exhausted women.
A nostalgic fantasy for certain men.

Which is impressive, given that she didn’t ask for any of it.

Fictosexuality refers to enduring romantic or sexual attraction to fictional characters. Not a fleeting crush. Not a “well, he is pretty cute for a cartoon lion.”

Not a temporary fever brought on by binge-reading too many fantasy novels at 2 a.m.

Fictosexuality is:

• persistent.
• meaningful.
• experienced as a legitimate orientation.
• emotionally loaded.
• psychologically coherent.
• and—for many people—central to their sense of identity.

Researchers studying sexual identity formation have long noted that desire can occur toward persons, archetypes, symbols, and imagined others (Berlant & Edelman, 2014). Fictosexuality is simply the contemporary form of this ancient phenomenon.

It is not pathology.
It is not delusion.
It is not failure.
It’s just the human imaginative capacity doing its usual overachieving thing.

Every era invents new language for longing.

Victorians had swooning.
Millennials had situationships.

Gen Z has turned desire into a full-time classification project—half anthropology, half fandom studies, half committee meeting.

And now, from the unruly compost pile of digital culture, we meet the newest micro-label: berrisexual.

A word so charmingly absurd it feels pre-approved for a tote bag.

But as always, behind the joke is something earnest: a very old human ache dressed in new pixels.

To understand berrisexuality, we must understand its lineage: fictosexuality, nijikon, parasocial attachment, and the centuries-long tradition of falling in love with beings who do not strictly exist.

As scholars of sexual identity construction note, desire often expands faster than language, which is why new terms emerge at cultural flashpoints, as explored in Barker’s analysis of sexual identity labels (Barker, 2016) and in Fahs’s work on naming practices and desire (Fahs, 2019).

So let’s begin—with affectionate bemusement for the human heart and its unfettered enthusiasms.

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.