The word untenable is often used casually in relationship conversations. It shouldn’t be.

Here is the clinical definition I use:

Untenable relationship:
A relationship that cannot be sustained without ongoing self-betrayal, distortion of reality, or erosion of dignity.

In practical terms, a relationship becomes untenable when continuing it reliably causes psychological harm, regardless of intent, effort, or love.

This is not about how unhappy you feel.
It is about what continuation costs you.

An untenable relationship is not difficult.
It is structurally unsustainable.

Most therapists are trained—explicitly or implicitly—to treat gratitude as an unalloyed good.

Say thank you. Mean it. Feel it. Express it. Build the bond.

Regulate the nervous system. Everyone leaves warmer.

This study suggests something far more uncomfortable.

Gratitude does not just lubricate relationships.
It rearranges the hierarchy inside them.

And once you see that, you just can’t unsee it.

Kind lying refers to the selective softening or withholding of truthful feedback in order to protect a recipient whose emotional capacity would otherwise be overwhelmed.

There’s a certain personality type that treats honesty like a virtue sport.

They announce it. They endure it. They insist everyone else should, too. Feelings are optional. Truth is the brand.

The problem is that moral judgment doesn’t work that way.

Recent research in the British Journal of Social Psychology shows that people routinely judge kind liars as more moral than rigid truth-tellers—especially when the person receiving feedback is emotionally vulnerable.

Honesty, it turns out, does not automatically confer virtue.

Fit does.

When neurodiverse couples arrive in therapy, they are often already exhausted.

Not simply from conflict—but from managing conflict without a shared operating system.

They have insight.
They have vocabulary.
They understand that their brains work differently.

And still, the same arguments keep repeating.

That is because insight explains why something hurts.
It does not automatically change how the relationship is built.

At some point in adult life, a certain kind of explanation becomes humiliating.

Not because it’s wrong.
Because it keeps being necessary.

Neurodivergent adults are not suddenly less patient, less empathic, or less invested in connection.

What they are is finished—finished clarifying tone, finished explaining intent, finished smoothing conversations that never required smoothing in the first place.

What’s ending is not intimacy.

What’s ending is the assumption that one person should keep narrating themselves so everyone else can remain comfortably vague.

Upskirting is not a prank enabled by technology.
It is a sexual violation facilitated by it.

What this research clarifies—without moral inflation or rhetorical excess—is not merely who commits this act, but why it continues to function. Not technologically. Socially.

Upskirting persists not because it is misunderstood, but because it reliably attracts folks low in empathy and reliably encounters a culture prepared to minimize its meaning.

That pairing is not incidental. It is efficient.

They came in because something felt off.

Not broken.
Not dramatic.
Just harder than it used to be.

She said, “I feel alone even when we’re together.”
He said, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Neither raised their voice. Neither blamed. They spoke like people who had already tried to understand and were tired of guessing.

I

n the evenings, he came home and grew quiet. Not distant exactly—just still. He sat near her, sometimes with a screen, sometimes with a book, sometimes simply resting.

To him, this was closeness.
To her, it felt like absence.

Your nervous system is not designed for meaningful life-partner change.

It is designed to keep you intact, liked enough, and unthreatened.

That’s it.

Everything else—truth, erotic honesty, sustained intimacy, choosing the same person after illusion dies—is optional labor as far as your brain is concerned.

Which is why so many people confuse stability with love and call it maturity.

There is a belief that sounds responsible, enlightened, and trauma-informed:

Once I feel safe, I’ll be able to change.

It sounds careful.
It sounds wise.
It sounds like maturity.

It is also one of the most reliable ways adult change quietly disappears.

Because safety is not a prerequisite for change.

It is an after-effect.

A recent population survey finds that exhaustion is the most commonly reported reason couples have infrequent sex, outweighing conflict, dissatisfaction, or loss of attraction.

Recent survey research examining sexual frequency among couples finds that exhaustion is the most commonly cited reason for infrequent sex, surpassing explanations related to relationship dissatisfaction, conflict, or loss of attraction.

Approximately one quarter of couples report having sex once a month or less, yet many of these couples still describe their relationships as satisfying.

The findings suggest that low sexual frequency is more strongly associated with physical and mental fatigue than with relational breakdown.

Courage is not a feeling.

In adult relationships, courage is a behavioral decision made before emotional certainty arrives.

Most people wait for courage to arrive as an internal state.

They expect:

• certainty.

• readiness.

• emotional alignment.

• nervous-system calm.

• a sense that “this is the right time.”

That version of courage almost never comes.

In real relationships, courage does not precede action.

It follows it.

You move first.
Your body updates later.

Most people believe something like this:

Once I feel safe, I’ll be able to change.

It sounds healthy.

It sounds trauma-informed.

It sounds responsible.

It is also the exact belief that keeps people stuck.

Because safety is not a prerequisite for change.

It is an after-effect.