Arthur Schopenhauer has become the unofficial philosopher of the romantically disillusioned.

Spend enough time in the more aggrieved corners of YouTube, Reddit, or the modern grievance economy and you will encounter the familiar verdict:

Schopenhauer understood women.

He saw through romance.

He predicted modern dating.

He knew what women were really like.

No.

He understood something more unsettling.

He understood what desire can do to judgment.

He understood how humiliation can harden into contempt.

And he demonstrated, perhaps unintentionally, how an intelligent person can turn personal disappointment into a theory about half the human race.

Schopenhauer was not right about women.

But he was disturbingly perceptive about the machinery beneath romantic love.

Every couple has one argument that returns with the reliability of Christmas.

The dishes.

Money.

Whose mother is coming for Thanksgiving.

Whether the thermostat is set for human beings or for storing beef.

You think you're arguing about the thermostat.

You are almost certainly not.

Therapists eventually discover something that couples spend years trying not to believe:

The topic is almost never the topic.

Arguments don't begin with words.

They begin with atmosphere.

A fascinating new study published in Communication Research suggests that the emotional tone of everyday conversations depends less on what couples are discussing than on the emotional climate they bring into the conversation before either person opens their mouth.

Think about that.

The vacation planning meeting may actually be about emotional security.

The grocery list may secretly be about commitment.

The argument over whether to stop at Costco may really be asking,

"Do you still choose me?"

Marriage is sneaky that way.

It never sends the invoice to the correct address.

There was a time when the greatest threat to a marriage was thought to be an affair.

Then it was workaholism.

Then television.

Then the internet.

Today, millions of couples are slowly bleeding intimacy one notification at a time.

The villain isn't the smartphone.

The phone is just glass, aluminum, and enough computing power to land Apollo 11 on the moon.

It has no agenda. It doesn't wake up plotting the demise of your sex life.

You do that all by yourself.

Or, more precisely, you do it every time your spouse begins a sentence and you reflexively glance down because your pocket buzzed.

Every time someone says, "Can I tell you something?" and you answer, "Hang on..." while scrolling through photos of a stranger's Labradoodle.

Every time your partner reaches for connection and loses a fair fight against an algorithm specifically engineered to hijack your attention.

Therapists have a wonderfully awkward word for this behavior: phubbing—snubbing someone you are physically with in favor of your smartphone.

It sounds silly.

It isn't.

The headlines always make it sound like a mystery.

An attractive thirty-something teacher.

A fifteen-year-old boy.

Thousands of text messages.

A devastated school district.

An arrest.

And then the same question appears beneath every news story.

"What was she thinking?"

It's the wrong question.

The better question is:

What kind of world makes this increasingly possible?

Because while we argue about individual women, something much larger has quietly happened.

We have accidentally engineered a society that makes emotional boundary violations astonishingly easy.

The female teacher is simply where we happen to notice it.

The same psychology is unfolding everywhere.

One of the great myths about infidelity is that it begins with attraction.

It usually does not. Attraction is ordinary.

Married people continue to possess functioning eyes.

They meet charming colleagues, notice beautiful strangers, and occasionally discover that an old flame has appeared on social media looking suspiciously serene.

Attraction knocks on the door.

Permission opens it.

A recent study published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy helps explain how that permission may develop.

Researchers examined the connections among relationship quality, attitudes toward casual sex, gender, and the acceptability of infidelity.

Their findings suggest that relationship dissatisfaction does not affect everyone in the same way.

An unhappy relationship may make cheating seem more acceptable, but that shift is partly shaped by a person’s preexisting comfort with sex outside emotional commitment.

In plain English: a deteriorating relationship does not manufacture an entirely new sexual personality. It interacts with the one already there.

That is considerably more interesting than saying unhappy men are more likely to approve of cheating.

It is also considerably less convenient.

There is a famous joke among statisticians that accidentally explains why perfectly good marriages sometimes drift into unnecessary misery.

The joke goes something like this:

Day 1: Scientists investigate whether red jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

Day 2: Scientists investigate whether orange jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

...

Day 19: Scientists investigate whether purple jelly beans cause acne.
Result: No relationship found.

Day 20: Scientists investigate whether black jelly beans cause acne.
Result: A statistically significant result!

Headline:
"Scientists Discover Black Jelly Beans Cause Acne."

The humor is that the researchers tested 20 different colors.

Even if none of the colors actually causes acne, statistical theory predicts that if you perform enough independent tests using the conventional 5% significance level (p < .05), eventually one of them will appear "statistically significant" just by random chance.

The black jelly bean wasn't necessarily special.

Every generation develops its own explanation for why relationships lose their vitality.

We blame stress.

Children.

Technology.

Work.

Pornography.

Social media.

Now, increasingly, we blame certainty.

In a thoughtful recent profile in The Atlantic, Faith Hill revisits Esther Perel's influential argument that modern couples often sacrifice desire in their pursuit of security.

We seek predictability, transparency, and emotional safety, even though eroticism has always depended on uncertainty, playfulness, and the recognition that another person can never be fully known.

Hill suggests that America's declining sexual interest may be part of something larger—an "eroticism shortage" rooted in a broader discomfort with ambiguity.

I think that's an intriguing observation.

I also think it points toward a deeper problem.

Not an eroticism shortage.

A curiosity shortage.

She says this while checking her engagement analytics, negotiating a sponsorship with a cookware company, editing her fifth video of the day, reviewing affiliate sales, answering emails from her manager, and scheduling tomorrow's content across four social media platforms.

If irony burned calories, Tradwife TikTok would disappear overnight.

A fascinating new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterlyexamines one of the internet's fastest-growing subcultures: the "tradwife" influencer.

The researchers weren't interested in judging women who choose to stay home, homeschool their children, or bake sourdough bread. Those are legitimate personal choices that millions of families make happily.

Instead, they asked a far more interesting question:

How do social media influencers package traditional gender roles into a profitable digital business?

Their answer tells us as much about Instagram and TikTok as it does about marriage.

David Crosby never called it Blue Space Therapy.

In fact, I doubt he would have.

Sailors rarely describe what the sea gives them in therapeutic language. They simply say they need to get back on the water.

They need to hear the wind. They need to sail.

Therapists, on the other hand, reach for words like emotional regulation, differentiation, secure attachment, attention restoration, and environmental psychology.

Often, we're describing the same experience.

For nearly forty-five years, David Crosby returned to the same wooden schooner whenever his life became too loud.

Through extraordinary musical success, devastating addiction, prison, recovery, illness, and redemption, one constant remained: Mayan.

The story isn't really about a famous musician who owned a beautiful boat.

It's about why one human being kept returning to the same place to become himself again.

Every generation has its villain.

Once upon a time it was the shiksa.

Today it's TikTok.

Or ChatGPT.

Or therapy.

Or California.

Or Jordan Peterson.

Or Harvard.

Or Fox News.

Or MSNBC.

Or "that woman."

Or "those friends."

Or the damned phone.

The names change.

The emotional process does not.

Edwin Friedman saw this almost forty years ago, although many readers missed what he was actually saying. His famous essay, The Myth of the Shiksa, was never really about Jewish men marrying non-Jewish women. It was about something infinitely more interesting.

It was about the remarkable human ability to mistake the carrier of anxiety for its cause.

That insight may be even more important today than when Friedman first wrote it.

There is an awkward moment that arrives in nearly every marriage.

One spouse says,

"You've changed."

The other replies,

"No. I'm finally being myself."

Sometimes that's a triumph of maturity.

Sometimes it's an announcement that someone has started listening to podcasts.

The difference matters.

Psychology has a wonderfully clumsy phrase for genuine maturity: Differentiation of Self.

It sounds like something assembled by a committee of professors who were paid by the syllable.

The phrase deserves a better publicist.

Because buried inside those three words may be the single most important idea ever developed about adult relationships.

Not communication.

Not attachment.

Not love languages.

Not boundaries.

Differentiation.

If you only read three thinkers on the subject, make them Murray Bowen, Edwin Friedman, and David Schnarch.

Bowen built the architecture. Friedman carried it into leadership and culture.

Dear Daniel,

I recently watched the Netflix film Office Romance, which made me think about the broader issue of romantic relationships in the workplace.

I've also noticed that several publications—including HR Magazine, People Management, RM Magazine, and LinkedIn—have been discussing workplace relationships, often in the context of real organizations dealing with the benefits and risks of employees dating each other.

In addition, Forbes published workplace romance statistics on July 1, 2026, suggesting that romantic relationships between coworkers remain surprisingly common.

Given all of this attention, I'm curious about your perspective.

Do you think workplace romances are generally a good idea, or do they create more problems than they're worth?

From your experience as a marriage and family therapist, are there psychological dynamics that people—and employers—often overlook?

I'm not seeking personal advice or counseling. I simply thought this would make for an interesting discussion.

Kind regards,

Monica