A great many couples arrive in therapy with a reasonable-sounding complaint:

“We aren’t happy anymore.”

It feels like a diagnosis. Usually, it is closer to a receipt.

Happiness tells us something about what has already been happening inside a relationship.

It reflects whether two people feel safe, connected, respected, purposeful, and sufficiently free to remain themselves.

Couples often respond by trying to produce happiness directly.

They schedule date nights. They book a vacation.

They buy concert tickets and sit beside each other privately wondering whether the parking was worth it.

None of this is foolish. Pleasure matters. Fun matters.

Novelty can interrupt the administrative trance into which long marriages sometimes drift.

But happiness cannot be ordered as a separate marital service.

It tends to appear after certain conditions have been created.

A new consensus study on positive mental health offers a useful distinction—and may help explain why some couples remain unhappy despite trying so hard to become happier.

Robert Heinlein spent much of his career designing improved arrangements for the human race.

Improved governments. Improved armies. Improved sexual customs. Improved marriages. Improved methods for occupying other planets, where presumably nobody would insist upon bringing the same tedious rules from Connecticut.

His novels considered communal families, plural marriages, nudism, sexual freedom, and the possibility that jealousy might be one more primitive habit intelligent people could learn to outgrow.

He was fascinated by relationships constructed deliberately rather than inherited wholesale from parents, priests, and county clerks.

Then, in 1948, he married Virginia Gerstenfeld.

They remained together for forty years.

It was not quite the domestic conclusion one might expect from the great speculative engineer of unconventional love. Heinlein imagined households populated by several unusually attractive adults sharing affection with astonishing administrative efficiency. What he created for himself was more concentrated: an intensely bonded marriage to one brilliant, disciplined, indispensable woman.

The man who kept redesigning marriage in his fiction appears to have found his greatest freedom inside a partnership of two.

Hermann Hesse became a patron saint of the 1960s without having the good manners to remain alive for most of them.

Young Americans like me discovered Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian and recognized a fellow traveler: suspicious of authority, hostile to bourgeois conformity, interested in Eastern spirituality, and convinced that the authentic self was hiding somewhere beyond the reach of parents, pastors, employers, and anyone wearing a necktie.

At the time, I was less interested in his marital history.

This was understandable.

The counterculture preferred its prophets wandering beside rivers, not negotiating childcare with an exhausted wife.

The same young readers like me who struggled with the notion that love should be free also tended to believe it should be easy—an arrangement history has not often managed to provide.

Hesse married three times. Some might suggest that Hesse displayed a degree of Avoidant Attachment.

The marriages were very different, but together they revealed something central about him.

He longed for intimacy, depended upon it, and repeatedly experienced its ordinary demands as an encroachment upon the sovereignty of the self.

He wanted love.

He was less enthusiastic about somebody being there.

There is a particular sort who can enter a room, notice what everyone else has missed, announce that the future is arriving early, and persuade three people to finance it before lunch.

We often call this soul an entrepreneur.

At home, the terminology may be less admiring. Let me explain.

A recent study published in Acta Psychologica found that narcissism and psychopathy were associated with stronger entrepreneurial tendencies.

This does not mean entrepreneurs are psychopaths, despite what several former business partners may be muttering into their coffee.

It does suggest that qualities rewarded in entrepreneurial life can become complicated once the founder comes home.

Confidence becomes certainty. Risk tolerance becomes unilateral decision-making.

Vision becomes a household government in which one adult receives divine transmissions and the other is asked to “get on board.”

The business calls this leadership.

The marriage calls it “whatever.”

At an estate in New York’s Hudson Valley, seven successful professionals gathered to discuss what success had done to them.

They came from banking, marketing, healthcare, consulting, and technology.

They had titles.

They had money.

They had arrived.

The difficulty was that arrival felt surprisingly similar to being trapped.

The retreat, described by Lauren Weber in The Wall Street Journal, cost $4,000.

It was organized by Punks & Pinstripes for leaders seeking change.

The participants ranged from their mid-30s to their late 50s. They talked, meditated, and lay on the floor for a sound bath.

Corporate America had apparently become so exhausting that accomplished people were now paying four figures to lie down together and consider hardware stores.

A bank vice president said that a person can acquire the title and the money only to discover that the achievement feels hollow.

A marketing director said she was tired of waiting every day for the day to end.

A hospital executive whose position had been eliminated imagined opening a hardware store or becoming a science teacher.

When he pictured that life, he said, his nervous system relaxed.

This was not a gathering of people who had failed.

Failure might have made the problem easier to name.

These were people who had succeeded long enough to wonder whether success had been the problem.

The American job market is improving.

The economy added jobs for four consecutive months.

The unemployment rate declined to 4.2%.

The large numbers were behaving themselves.

Nearly two million Americans remained outside the celebration.

According to a recent report by Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, these workers had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks.

In June 2026, the long-term unemployed represented 27.3% of all unemployed Americans—four percentage points higher than a year earlier and near the highest level since the labor market was recovering from the pandemic in 2021.

The labor market can improve without improving for you.

This is one of the cruelties of economic statistics.

The chart rises.

The applicant remains seated at the kitchen table, adjusting a résumé for a position that will receive hundreds of applications.

A construction-company manager in Alaska recently fired a 24-year-old employee.

The young man had arrived late—or not arrived at all—four times during his first week.

The conversation was brief.

A few hours later, the manager had to fire him again.

This time, he spoke with the employee’s mother.

She called to request another chance for her son. When the manager declined, the conversation became heated.

The employee had been dismissed.

His mother had filed the appeal.

This incident appears in a recent report by Ray A. Smith in The Wall Street Journal about parents entering the professional lives of their adult children.

They are contacting hiring managers. They are submitting applications. They are attending interviews and lingering just outside the camera’s view during Zoom calls.

They are asking why their children were not hired.

Some are calling employers about benefits, negative feedback, and disappointing performance reviews.

A few are calling in sick for their adult children.

Apparently, adulthood now comes with authorized representation.

On a rainy morning in Austin, twelve young people sat on couches in an Airbnb and considered why their parents wanted them to work.

Their families were worth, collectively, $7 billion.

The question was not whether they would survive without employment. That question had been settled before they entered the room.

The question was what work might provide once money had removed the requirement for it.

The young people offered several answers.

The money belonged to their parents. Work taught the value of a dollar. Work gave a person purpose.

Purpose was the preferred answer.

It was also the only thing their parents could not place in trust.

The gathering was described by Juliet Chung in The Wall Street Journal.

It was organized by R360, a membership group for families worth at least $100 million.

These young folks were in college or in their twenties. They ate eggs in the morning.

They listened to presentations about entrepreneurship and real estate.

They prepared for a startup-pitch competition. They played pickleball. A private chef cooked rib-eyes.

They had come to learn how not to be ruined by money.

This is a problem that sounds indecent when stated plainly.

Most parents worry about tuition, rent, medical bills, and whether a child will find work that pays enough to make adulthood possible.

These parents had already solved those problems.

They were left with another.

What happens to a child when necessity itself disappears?

Therapy is supposed to help folks understand difficult relationships.

But what happens when the therapist begins helping the client end one?

A provocative new Wall Street Journal reportexamines whether some therapists are too readily encouraging adult children to cut off parents and other relatives in the name of self-care.

The question is combustible because estrangement is sometimes necessary. Families can be violent, abusive, coercive, addicted, or chronically destructive.

Nobody should be required to remain available for further harm simply because the person causing it has the same last name.

But the Journal is asking a more difficult question.

Has the threshold for permanent estrangement changed? And are some therapists helping to lower it?

Somewhere in America, a perfectly contented couple is worrying that they are not having enough sex.

They do not know who established the quota. No physician handed it to them.

It was not included with the marriage license.

Nevertheless, they have absorbed the idea that happy couples have sex frequently, unhappy couples have it rarely, and everybody else should be monitoring the situation like an underperforming retirement account.

The result is a peculiar form of intimate anxiety: two people may be reasonably satisfied until they begin wondering whether they are satisfied often enough.

The Wall Street Journal recently examined several popular beliefs about sex that do not sit comfortably with the available research.

One of the most persistent is the assumption that more sex necessarily produces a happier relationship.

It does not appear to be that simple.

There are many ways to watch a society become quieter.

The cashier becomes a screen. The menu becomes a QR code.

Directions come from a pleasant disembodied woman who never becomes irritated when we miss the turn.

Coffee is ordered before we enter the shop. Groceries arrive on the porch without requiring anybody to put on proper trousers.

Each innovation saves a little time. It also removes a small human exchange.

Now researchers have attempted to measure what may be disappearing.

A 2026 paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Sciencereported that we appear to be speaking substantially fewer words than we did at the beginning of this century.

Not writing fewer words. Not texting fewer words.

Speaking fewer words aloud.

We have become highly communicative and increasingly silent.

Online dating has traditionally been compared to finding a needle in a haystack.

The usual advice is to search patiently.

Keep an open mind. Give people a chance.

Perhaps the man holding a dead fish has hidden depths.

Perhaps “fluent in sarcasm” is merely covering a tender heart.

Perhaps the profile consisting entirely of gym photographs and complaints about women will reveal itself, over coffee, to be an early draft of Middlemarch.

The Burned Haystack Dating Method proposes a more efficient solution.

Burn the haystack.

The method was created by Jennie Young, a professor of rhetoric and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

Instead of endlessly swiping past unsuitable profiles, users learn to identify troubling language patterns and block decisively.

Metal does not burn.

When the hay is gone, theoretically, the needle remains.