If you were monkey branched, you may still be asking the wrong questions.

You may be asking:

• Why did they do this?

• Was it something I missed?

• Was the other person already there the whole time?

Those questions are understandable.
They are also downstream.

The more important question—the one your nervous system has been asking long before your mind caught up—is this:

Why did this hurt in a way that feels disorganizing, destabilizing, and hard to explain?

The answer is simpler—and more sobering—than most advice columns will tell you.

Let’s start by stripping away the cute metaphor.

Monkey branching sounds playful. Gym class. Momentum.

A harmless swing from one bar to the next.

That language is doing a lot of moral laundering.

What we’re actually talking about is relationship replacement while maintaining emotional cover—cultivating a new attachment before ending the current one in order to avoid the psychological and ethical free fall of being alone.

This is not modern.
This is not new.
This is avoidance with better branding.

Here is the Sexual Timing Paradox:

When intimacy arrives before structure, attachment forms without infrastructure.
When experience arrives before stability, embodiment outruns containment.

If containment comes too late, attachment overwhelms discernment.
If information comes too early, embodiment overwhelms structure.

Timing matters—but capacity decides.

Here is the Sexual Timing Paradox:

When intimacy arrives before structure, attachment forms without infrastructure.
When experience arrives before stability, embodiment outruns containment.

If containment comes too late, attachment overwhelms discernment.
If information comes too early, embodiment overwhelms structure.

Timing matters—but capacity decides.

This essay is not about whether sex is good.

It is about when sex begins doing relational work you may not yet be ready to carry.

In my clinical work, I rarely meet people who regret wanting intimacy. I often meet people who regret how quickly intimacy accelerated before character, temperament, and long-term intention had time to reveal themselves.

What follows is not a purity argument. It is a timing argument—grounded in attachment science, relational dynamics, and what couples quietly discover years later.

If you already disagree, you may stop here.

If you are curious why so many modern couples feel emotionally bonded, sexually entangled, and yet oddly disposable—read on.

For a long time, dating rewarded illegibility.

You were supposed to imply without stating.
Care without committing.
Desire without consequence.

Opacity was framed as sophistication. Ambiguity passed for depth.

Clear-coding ends that arrangement.

Clear-coding is the refusal to participate in relational guesswork. It is the emerging norm that says:

if someone has to decode your behavior to understand your intentions, the system is already broken.

What’s changing is not how people feel.
It’s what they are willing to tolerate.

Decentering men is not a meme, even if memes are how many people first encounter it.

At its core, decentering men refers to removing male romantic attention as the primary organizing force of a woman’s emotional, temporal, and psychological life—without rejecting intimacy itself.

What looks like humor online is often the public language for a private reckoning.

Many women are no longer structuring their choices, schedules, nervous systems, or sense of self around being chosen.

Romance becomes optional rather than foundational. Partnership becomes a choice rather than a proof of adulthood.

This is not a rejection of love.
It is a reordering of meaning.

This is not a technology blog. It is a relationship blog that keeps encountering the same disturbance under different names.

Couples come in describing a thinning of friction. Less arguing. Less rupture. Less repair. Less need.

What sounds like maturity at first eventually reveals itself as something else: relational offloading.

At first, this offloading hides inside work schedules. Or parenting logistics. Or endless scrolling framed as rest.

More recently, it has begun to appear as companionship without consequence.

Which is why artificial intelligence—specifically affectionate, emotionally responsive AI—keeps surfacing here, even though this site has no interest in software qua software.

What matters is not the machine.

What matters is what we are asking it to carry for us.

There is a comforting fantasy many couples hold: that infidelity arrives suddenly, summoned by temptation or opportunity or moral weakness.

A lapse. A rupture. A single bad decision on an otherwise clean ledger.

New research suggests something far less dramatic—and far more unsettling.

Infidelity, it turns out, often begins long before adulthood. Long before the partner.

Long before the opportunity. It begins in the family of origin, in what was modeled, concealed, normalized, or quietly endured—before anyone had the language to object.

A recent study published in The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families examines how parental infidelity, attachment style, and relational intimacy shape infidelity intentions among emerging adults.

Not behavior. Not outcomes.

But whether cheating even registers as a conceivable response under relational strain.

That distinction matters.

There are many theories about what makes sex good.

Chemistry. Safety. Timing. Trauma. Attachment.
Lighting purchased during a brief but meaningful phase of adulthood.

But according to a new study, we may have been overlooking the most basic variable of all:

Knowing what things are called.

Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.

Literally.

Words. Nouns. Anatomy.

Researchers asked young adults to do something radical:
Look at a diagram and name the parts.

No Google.
No euphemisms.
No vague gesturing toward the lower hemisphere of the body like a Victorian relative has just entered the room.

Just: What is this?

What followed was not erotic.
But it was revealing.

There is a certain kind of person who feels injured everywhere they go.

Not harmed, exactly.
Not necessarily traumatized.

But persistently wronged—across friendships, partnerships, workplaces, families.

They do not simply suffer.
They organize themselves around suffering.

A recent study published in Personality and Individual Differences offers a precise psychological name for this pattern: the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood.

What the research shows—quietly but unmistakably—is that this tendency is strongly associated with vulnerable narcissism, not with objective trauma exposure itself.

This is not a moral claim.
It is a structural one.

Every two years, I present a synthesis of cross-cultural infidelity research for the LingYu Psychology Institute on Zoom.

Established in Toronto in 2009, LingYu is the largest Chinese professional psychology center in North America.

For fifteen years, its global network of psychologists, psychotherapists, and social workers has delivered clinical services, professional training, supervision, corporate consultation, public mental-health education, and research at North American standards.

Which is to say: this is not a room inclined toward moral shortcuts.

And yet, every cycle, the same question surfaces—quietly, almost reluctantly:

Why do partners who value fidelity still do such reckless things?