There are two famous British men named Andrew whom polite society does not quite know what to do with.

One was born in Buckingham Palace.

The other built a digital palace from sports cars, cigar smoke, grievance, and apparently inexhaustible Wi-Fi.

Prince Andrew inherited status. Andrew Tate manufactured it.

One represents the exhausted final chapter of aristocratic male privilege.

The other represents its energetic reinvention for the algorithmic age.

They are not equivalent men.

The allegations against them differ, their legal situations differ, and those distinctions matter.

Prince Andrew denied Virginia Giuffre’s allegations and settled her civil lawsuit without admitting liability.

Tate denies the criminal allegations against him, which remain subject to legal proceedings across several jurisdictions.

But culturally, they belong in the same room.

Both became symbols of a masculine fantasy that has survived every apparent modernization of sexual life:

A sufficiently important man should not have to experience women as fully separate people.

The costume changed.

But the proposition did not.

New research claims to have measured how often women with low sexual desire have “mercy sex.”

What it actually measured was something far more interesting.

A woman agrees to have sex with her husband.

She was not thinking about sex beforehand.

She did not spend the afternoon in a state of barely managed erotic anticipation.

She was thinking about groceries, an unanswered email, and whether the damp towel on the bathroom floor had achieved legal residency.

But she likes him.

She likes being close to him. She is willing to begin.

Perhaps desire will arrive once they are touching.

Perhaps it will not. Either way, she does not experience the encounter as an injury or extraction.

Was that mercy sex?

Now consider another woman.

She agrees because declining will produce three hours of sulking, a speech about how they are “just roommates,” or another insinuation that a man cannot reasonably be expected to remain faithful under these conditions.

Was that mercy sex as well?

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who regard Twilight as a swooning romantic epic, and people who have spent fifteen years explaining why Edward Cullen is a restraining order with excellent cheekbones.

Both groups have a point.

The Twilight films are not especially subtle.

Everyone looks deprived of sunlight, iron, and an ordinary conversation.

Entire relationships are conducted through prolonged staring.

A seventeen-year-old girl moves to a damp logging town and discovers that the most desirable boy in school is a 104-year-old vampire who watches her sleep.

Naturally, she falls in love.

But the success of Twilight cannot be explained by vampires, abstinence, or Robert Pattinson’s hair.

Beneath the supernatural upholstery, the series tells a familiar psychological story: the fantasy of being selected so completely that ordinary life can no longer compete.

Bella Swan does not merely receive attention.

She receives bestowed attention.

Edward sees her, chooses her, studies her, protects her, and reorganizes his immortal existence around her.

Bella may feel ordinary, but the most extraordinary creature in the room cannot look away.

That is the central seduction of Twilight.

Not sex.

Significance.

Matt Damon was sixteen or seventeen when his mother asked him why he was so obsessed with becoming an actor.

He knew exactly what he wanted.

Damon had been captivated by The Natural, the 1984 film in which Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a baseball player with an almost supernatural gift and a rather more ordinary capacity for self-destruction.

Hobbs dreams of walking down the street and hearing people whisper that he was “the best there ever was.”

Young Damon borrowed the fantasy.

Someday, he told his mother, people would watch him pass and say the same thing about Matt Damon.

His mother was appalled.

“Did I raise you?”

Nancy Carlsson-Paige reportedly replied.

She called it an “egomaniacal pipe dream” and asked the question that punctured the whole magnificent adolescent production:

How does this help other people?

There are mothers who encourage a child’s grandiosity. There are mothers who quietly reorganize the household around it.

Damon’s mother threw a chair through the window.

It may have been one of the most useful conversations of his life.

There was once a highly sophisticated youth-sports program known as “going outside.”

Children selected their own teams, disputed the rules, played until someone’s mother called them home and occasionally experienced the developmental catastrophe of not being especially good.

There were no private coaches.

Nobody drove three hours to compete against children who lived twenty minutes away.

No app tracked an 8-year-old’s statistics.

Parents did not review game film unless Dad had recently purchased a camcorder and become temporarily unbearable.

That world has not entirely disappeared.

It has been acquired.

In a remarkable New York Magazine investigation, Caitlin Moscatello describes how private clubs and investment firms have transformed American youth sports into a $40 billion industry.

Travel programs now begin before kindergarten.

Families spend thousands—and sometimes tens of thousands—of dollars each year on fees, uniforms, hotels, private coaching, streaming packages and tournaments.

Artificial intelligence has already learned the manners of psychotherapy.

It can reflect your feelings. It can summarize your predicament.

It can ask whether a thought is helping you.

It never glances at the clock, forgets your anniversary, interrupts with a story about itself, or appears faintly bored by the fourth retelling of the same workplace grievance.

In certain respects, this makes AI unusually well suited to the performance of therapeutic attentiveness.

A new study suggests that this performance is becoming remarkably convincing.

An AI chatbot conducting brief cognitive behavioral therapy sessions displayed general therapeutic skills—including warmth, empathy, validation, and collaboration—that compared favorably with those of human therapists.

Then the researchers looked more closely.

The chatbot struggled with the work beneath the manners:

identifying pivotal beliefs, choosing the right intervention, helping clients discover something rather than merely telling them something, and adapting treatment to the particular human being in front of it.

That distinction is the entire story.

AI may already be learning how therapists sound. It has not yet demonstrated that it can reliably understand what a therapist is looking at.

We live in an age of emotional literacy.

People know about triggers, attachment styles, boundaries, trauma responses, love languages, emotional labor, and nervous-system regulation.

Couples arrive in therapy carrying an impressive vocabulary for their inner lives.

This is progress.

A generation ago, many people could not name what they felt, much less explain how childhood experience might be shaping an adult marriage.

Pain was swallowed.

Men were expected to become upholstered furniture.

Women were expected to absorb everyone else’s distress while remaining pleasant about it. Family secrets were protected with greater devotion than family members.

We should not romanticize that world.

But every corrective eventually develops an excess.

The language of emotional liberation can quietly become a language of emotional sovereignty: I feel it, therefore it is true.

I need it, therefore you must provide it. I was triggered, therefore what I did next belongs partly to you.

A feeling that began as information becomes a verdict. Then it becomes an instruction. Occasionally, it becomes a small monarchy.

This is where modern relationships need a distinction that should be obvious but often is not:

Feelings deserve attention. Values deserve authority.

Your feelings deserve to be noticed, understood, and treated with compassion.

They do not automatically deserve control of the vehicle.

We have been told that dating is broken.

The evidence is presented with the solemnity of a congressional inquiry: ghosting, breadcrumbing, situationships, swiping fatigue, commitment anxiety, and an apparently bottomless supply of people who are “not looking for anything serious” but would still like to come upstairs.

The vocabulary is new. The confusion is not.

A study of college students suggests that beneath the apps, abbreviations, and endlessly revised relationship statuses, young people still imagine romance developing along a familiar path.

They notice someone. They test the interest. They spend more time together.

They decide whether to become a couple. Eventually, the relationship either deepens or comes apart.

The technology changed the marketplace.

It did not change the human heart.

A woman receives a compliment.

“You were the best person in the room.”

There are several ways she might answer.

She can agree, which risks sounding insufferable.

She can say thank you, which is perfectly reasonable but may leave her feeling strangely exposed.

She can dismiss the compliment, protecting herself from appearing vain while quietly telling the giver that her judgment was mistaken.

Or she can return some of the light.

“Thank you. That means a lot coming from you.”

This last response is not exactly modesty.

It is something more socially accomplished. She accepts the praise while reassuring the other person that the relationship remains intact.

She has been elevated, but she has not abandoned the person standing beside her.

New research suggests that women are particularly alert to this delicate negotiation. They anticipate that conspicuous self-promotion may provoke resentment from other women, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.

We might call that insecurity. Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it is social intelligence acquired in a world where female ambition remains welcome only when it arrives properly housebroken.

Dr. Orion Taraban has built an enormous audience by saying aloud what much of contemporary relationship culture prefers to discuss behind its hand.

Attraction is unequal. Beauty matters. Status matters. Sex matters.

We tend to compare our partners with available alternatives.

if we need the relationship less, we may possess more power within it. Kindness, regrettably, does not compel desire.

None of this is especially soothing, because the good doctor Taraban does not seem interested in soothing anybody.

The California psychologist and creator of PsycHacks has become one of the internet’s most provocative interpreters of modern relationships.

His 2024 book, The Value of Others, examines coupling through the language of behavioral economics: value, exchange, competition, scarcity, leverage and the availability of better options.

It is easy to understand why his ideas have found an audience, particularly among men who feel that conventional therapeutic language has described them mainly as defective women.

Taraban tells them that attraction is not a moral reward. Nobody owes them desire. Effort does not guarantee romantic success. If they want different outcomes, they must become capable of producing them.

There is something bracing about this.

There is also something stunted.

Friends with benefits sounds like something invented by a committee determined to keep desire from becoming inconvenient.

There will be friendship. There will be sex.

There will be no possessiveness, no Sunday discussion about where this is going, and certainly no one standing barefoot in a kitchen at midnight asking why a text went unanswered.

The arrangement is supposed to preserve the pleasures of intimacy while removing its administrative burden.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes two adults understand the bargain, enjoy one another, and leave without requiring the experience to become a referendum on their worth.

But human beings are not famous for maintaining tidy internal arrangements.

Bodies attach. Expectations creep in through the side door. Someone begins staying later. Someone else begins leaving sooner.

Eventually, the friendship may mean more to one person while the benefits mean more to the other.

Some couples do not have a communication problem.

They have been denied the conditions under which communication is possible.

One partner promises to be home for dinner.

At 3:40, the manager changes the shift.

Childcare has been arranged. It must now be rearranged.

There was supposed to be time together after the children went to bed. Instead, someone is closing the store—and perhaps returning six hours later to open it.

The worker says, “I’m sorry.”

The partner hears, “Once again, we came second.”

But neither partner made the decision.

The employer did.

New research suggests that unpredictable work schedules are associated with a substantially greater risk of separation and divorce among hourly service-sector workers.

An erratic schedule does not merely take time away from a relationship.

It damages the couple’s ability to make promises about time at all.