Modern relationships are not failing because people lack empathy.

They are failing because we have made explanation the price of care.

Somewhere along the way, emotional safety was redefined as verbal performance: the ability to narrate feelings clearly, justify reactions promptly, and explain oneself on demand.

What began as a reasonable desire for understanding hardened into a specific, near-normative moral expectation.

If you cannot explain what you feel, how you feel it, and why you feel it—preferably in real time—you are now suspect.

This shift has been disastrous for many couples. Not because explanation is bad, but because it has been mistaken for bestowed attention and presence itself.

This study is not interesting because autistic people tell worse stories.

It is interesting because they tell different ones—and their siblings do too.

The core finding is this: autistic folks and their first-degree relatives reliably produce narratives with lower narrative causality density—fewer explicit explanations of why events occur or how characters feel—despite intact sequencing, attention, and factual precision.

That is not a storytelling failure.

It is a different cognitive contract with the listener.

You don’t need to care about football to recognize this case.
You only need to have worked with power.

The collapse surrounding Michigan football—where a recently fired head coach now faces serious criminal charges—matters clinically not because it is shocking, but because it is diagnostically clean.

It is a familiar pattern, merely televised. If it feels dramatic, good. Pathology often only becomes legible once it’s broadcast in high definition.

For clinicians, this is not a morality play. It is a failure cascade produced by the convergence of three forces:

1. A role structured around supermasculine performance.

2. Narcissistic defenses continuously reinforced by institutional reward.

3. A family system quietly tasked with absorbing everything no one wants to name.

The useful question is not “What was wrong with this man?”
The useful question is:

What kind of psychological structure does this role reliably produce—and how does it fail under stress?

Modern couples are not failing at intimacy.
They are becoming too good at managing it.

This pattern is becoming visible now because economic independence, emotional literacy, and digital companionship have removed many of the pressures that once forced relational repair. When survival no longer requires emotional permeability, relationships can remain stable while quietly flattening.

What follows is a clinical framework for understanding that flattening.

What Is Relational Involution?

“Emotional safety” is one of those phrases that survives almost entirely on good intentions.

It sounds humane.
It reassures everyone in the room.
It suggests that the relationship is being handled correctly.

It is also almost never defined.

In popular relationship culture, emotional safety is treated like a mood: calm voices, careful phrasing, minimal friction. In therapy culture, it often collapses into tone management. In high-achieving marriages, it gets confused with efficiency.

None of that is emotional safety.

High-achieving couples are rarely chaotic.

They arrive on time.
They speak in paragraphs.
They manage feelings the way they manage calendars—competently and in advance.

They often believe this is emotional safety.

What they usually have is emotional professionalism: a relationship optimized for stability, predictability, and minimal disruption. It looks good. It works well. It feels oddly untouched.

And eventually, one partner says something inefficient, like:

“I feel lonely even when we’re together.”

That moment isn’t a communication failure.
It’s the system revealing its limits.

This post attemts to engage the gentle reader to explore emotional safety, explains why common frameworks often fail high-achieving couples, and introduces an alternative model of emotional safety that is predicated on influence, permeability, and repair.

A soft exit marriage is what happens when a relationship stays married on paper but stops asking much of either person emotionally.

Nothing dramatic occurs.
No announcement.
No moment friends later point to and say, that’s when it ended.

The marriage just keeps functioning. Calendars stay synced. Groceries get bought. The dog goes to the vet. It looks stable. Often enviably so.

Everyone behaves like an adult.

Which is usually the giveaway.

What disappears isn’t affection or politeness. It’s impact.

One partner’s inner life no longer really alters the other’s choices. Feelings are listened to respectfully, the way you listen to a colleague.

They don’t interrupt schedules. They don’t rearrange priorities. They don’t require anything afterward.

Neurodiversity has become one of those words that sounds like it’s doing work even when nothing else is. I use it way too much, myself.

It floats. It reassures. It allows everyone in the room to feel progressive without having to move a chair, dim a light, or rethink a deadline.

It is the verbal equivalent of applauding accessibility from a standing desk no one else can use.

Autism, by contrast, remains stubbornly physical. Loud. Exhausting. Inconvenient.

It still requires things—particularly when differences in sensory processing reliably affect pain thresholds, attention, and fatigue in everyday environments, as documented in adult autistic populations by Crane, Goddard, and Pring in Autism.

This difference matters.

As I said in my last post, Neurodiversity is a framework. Autism is a diagnosis. Treating them as interchangeable flatters institutions and strains bodies.

Autism is a diagnosis.
Neurodiversity is a framework.

They are often used interchangeably online, which is efficient for discourse and disastrous for clarity.

One term opens access to services, accommodations, and legal protections.

The other opens access to moral approval—and applause from institutions that prefer language to logistics.

Institutions tend to favor the second.
It’s cheaper.

I’ve learned that autism is not a personality aesthetic.

Autism exists as a diagnosis because certain neurological patterns cluster reliably enough to be studied, identified, and—most importantly—accommodated.

Differences in sensory processing, social cognition, executive functioning, and motor coordination are well documented, with measurable impacts on daily functioning, employment, and health outcomes, as summarized across decades of research in journals such as Autism Research and The Lancet Psychiatry.

I’ve been working with autistic children and their families for roughly twenty hours a week at a public mental health clinic for the past thirteen months.

That proximity has taught me something no amount of discourse ever could.

The couple arrived early. in the morning. I have to confess that I watched them somewhat carefully through the window.

They sat stiffly in their car, side-by-side but orbiting different suns.

She scrolled without reading; he scanned headlines without absorbing. Both looked full—full calendars, full professions, full lives—but something essential had emptied out between them.

When I invited them in, they walked into my office like two people who hadn’t realized their marriage was starving until they saw how thin it looked under clinical lighting.

This is the quiet crisis of our era:
a famine in the one resource modern couples cannot afford to lose—Bestowed Attention.

Not love.
Not desire.
Not compatibility.

Bestowed Attention.
The one form of nourishment no culture can mass-produce.

Let us begin with the simplest truth: casinos were not built to separate fools from their money.

They were built to separate confident men from their delusions—preferably while those men are wearing sunglasses indoors.

A new French study, published in Alcoologie et Addictologie, confirms what most of us learned watching someone lose a mortgage payment at blackjack: narcissists gravitate to “strategic gambling” as if it were a personality test they’re certain they’ll ace.

The tragedy, of course, is that they never do.

Before anyone sends me an email beginning with “Well, actually,” let me open with an apology—the academic kind, not the sincere kind.

Besides Marriage and Family Therapy, I also have a degree in Labor Studies, and I am a published researcher in the field.

Which means I have spent an absurd amount of time understanding workplaces, workers, and the elaborate mythologies they construct about their own competence.

So if this piece sounds judgmental, know that I say all of this with respect for working people and… let’s call it realistic expectations of their self-awareness.

With that out of the way:
A new study in Autism Research shows that autistic employees are far less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effectthan their non-autistic peers.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you already knew this.