Welcome to my Blog
Thank you for stopping by. This space is where I share research, reflections, and practical tools drawn from my experience as a marriage and family therapist with an international practice.
I write about what happens to desire, attachment, and meaning once the early myths stop working.
Are you a couple looking for clarity? A professional curious about the science of relationships? Or simply someone interested in how love and resilience work? I'm glad you've found your way here. I can help with that. I'm accepting new clients, and this blog is for the benefit of all my gentle readers.
Each post is written with one goal in mind: to help you better understand yourself, your partner, and the hidden dynamics that shape human connection
Grab a coffee (or a notebook), explore what speaks to you, and take what's useful back into your life and relationships.
And if a post sparks a question, or makes you realize you could use more support, l'd love to hear from you. Let's explore the scope of work you'd like to do together.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
~ Daniel
P.S.
Feel free to explore the categories below to find past blog posts on the topics that matter most to you. If you're curious about attachment, navigating conflict, or strengthening intimacy, these archives are a great way to dive deeper into the research and insights that l've been sharing for years.
- Attachment Issues
- Coronavirus
- Couples Therapy
- Extramarital Affairs
- Family Life and Parenting
- How to Fight Fair
- Inlaws and Extended Families
- Intercultural Relationships
- Marriage and Mental Health
- Married Life & Intimate Relationships
- Neurodiverse Couples
- Separation & Divorce
- Signs of Trouble
- Social Media and Relationships
- What Happy Couples Know
Someone Has to Notice: Autism, Marriage, and the 14-Year Life-Expectancy Gap
The most frightening fact about autism may not be found in a diagnostic manual.
It may be found on a death certificate.
A large 2026 study of more than two million autistic Medicaid beneficiaries estimated their average life expectancy at 64.9 years—nearly 14 years below that of the general United States population.
Autistic women in the study faced an even larger relative gap: approximately 16 years compared with American women overall.
Those numbers are grim. But the causes of death are what make the study difficult to put down.
Influenza. Malnutrition. Pneumonia caused by inhaling food or liquid. Drowning. Conditions and accidents that do not sound like the inevitable biological destiny of autism.
They sound, at least in part, like failures of attention, access, communication, prevention, and care.
Someone did not notice soon enough.
Or someone noticed and could not get the healthcare system to listen.
What Good Are You Now?
This is not a photograph of me at 39.
It is an AI reconstruction—which means the face is invented, the youth is approximate, and the confidence may be entirely fictional.
Still, I recognize him.
At 39, I did not think of myself as young.
From 72, he looks almost unbearably young.
Several years before this imaginary picture, I had been a manufacturer’s representative for Magic Chef for 13 years.
Then Maytag bought the company, and, eventually I was fired in a massive downsizing in 1992.
My first wife looked at me and asked:
“What good are you now?”
The Third Person Is Still a Person
There is a particular kind of modern couple who would like to add another person to the relationship without adding another person’s full humanity.
They want novelty, but not disruption.
Sexual expansion, but not competing attachment.
A third body, perhaps even a third heart, provided it understands that the original two remain the constitutional monarchy.
This person is called a “unicorn,” usually a bisexual woman willing to join an established couple. The name is supposed to refer to her rarity.
But perhaps she is called a unicorn because what the couple actually wants is mythical:
a human being who will enter their relationship without having inconveniently human desires of her own.
The Wichita Lineman Is Still on the Line
Bob Dylan reportedly called it the greatest song ever written.
Not the greatest country song.
Not the greatest song about work, loneliness, Kansas, or telephone poles.
The greatest song ever written. Period.
This is an extravagant verdict, even from Bob Dylan, who might reasonably be expected to have another candidate in mind.
But the more closely you listen to “Wichita Lineman,” the less preposterous the claim becomes.
There was once a kind of American man who could be found alone beside a county road, halfway up a telephone pole, keeping other people connected.
He did not have a personal brand. He did not narrate his healing journey.
He did not announce that he was holding space.
He carried tools, watched the weather, listened for trouble in the wire, and did work most people noticed only when it stopped being done.
Marriage Must Be Safe. But It Must Also Ask Something of You.
There is a sentence that can end almost any argument in modern relationship culture.
I have written elsewhere about what happened when love became a nervous system.
This is the sentence that culture produced:
“I don’t feel safe.”
Sometimes this sentence is a flare fired from a burning building.
There is coercion, contempt, intimidation, violence, chronic betrayal, or the quiet menace of never knowing which version of your partner will walk through the door.
In such marriages, safety is not therapeutic jargon. It is the first order of business.
But sometimes I don’t feel safe means something else.
I feel criticized.
I feel ashamed.
I may have to admit that you are right.
You are asking something of me that I do not wish to give.
The marriage has interrupted the preferred story I tell about myself.
We Did Not Stop Waiting for Angels
For a while, modern people believed we had outgrown the sky.
We had telescopes, weather satellites, psychiatric diagnoses, and a confident vocabulary for things that frightened our grandparents.
The heavens had been inspected.
God had withdrawn from public life. Angels had been reassigned to gift shops.
Whatever remained unexplained would eventually be handled by physics, medication, or a sufficiently patient podcast.
Then the lights came back.
They were no longer called apparitions. They were called unidentified anomalous phenomena.
The witnesses were no longer shepherd children kneeling in a field.
They were Navy pilots, intelligence officers, aerospace engineers, and scientists with laboratories at Stanford.
We did not stop waiting for angels.
We updated the transportation.
After Infidelity, Even the Compliments Feel Like Lies
“You look beautiful.”
Before the affair, it may have been a compliment.
After the affair, it can feel like the opening statement in a deposition.
The betrayed partner does not merely hear the words. They hear the contradiction behind them.
If you believed that, why did you risk us?
If I was desirable, why did you desire someone else?
If you love me, why should I trust your version of love?
Infidelity damages far more than trust in a partner’s behavior. It damages trust in the partner’s perception.
The unfaithful partner may now speak sincerely. The betrayed partner may even want to believe them. But sincerity is no longer enough.
The person offering reassurance is also the person whose judgment has become suspect.
“It Meant Nothing” Is Not the Reassurance You Think It Is
“It Meant Nothing” Is Not the Reassurance You Think It Is
Part Two of After the Affair: The Questions Couples Are Afraid to Ask
Previously in the series: The Affair Was Twenty-Nine Years Ago. The Betrayal Happened This Morning.
“It meant nothing.”
The unfaithful partner says this carefully, sometimes repeatedly, believing it is the least damaging answer available.
There was no love.
There was no plan to leave.
There were no secret fantasies about growing old together in a cottage somewhere, irritating each other over the thermostat.
It was sex. Attention. Escape. A few drinks followed by a bad decision. Something reckless and compartmentalized that ended almost as soon as it began.
“It meant nothing,” the unfaithful partner says again.
The betrayed partner looks back in disbelief.
“That makes it worse.”
Both partners are trying to assign value to the affair.
They are simply using opposite accounting systems.
The unfaithful partner believes the affair’s lack of meaning should reduce the injury.
The betrayed partner hears that the marriage was risked for almost nothing.
The Affair Was Twenty-nine Years Ago. The Betrayal Happened This Morning.
The Affair Was Twenty Years Ago. The Betrayal Happened This Morning.
The affair ended in 1997.
The betrayed partner learned about it Tuesday.
This creates one of the strangest arguments in couples therapy.
“It happened twenty-nine years ago,” says the partner who had the affair.
“I found out three days ago,” says the partner who did not know there had been an affair.
Both statements are factually correct.
Psychologically, however, these two people are living in different centuries.
For one partner, the affair belongs to another job, another house, another body, perhaps even another version of the self. The children were young. George W. Bush was president. People still printed directions from MapQuest.
For the other partner, the affair is happening now.
Not the sex, perhaps. Not the hotel room or the conference or the suspiciously long trip to the grocery store.
But the betrayal is new.
Your Wife Cannot Be Your Entire Village
There is a particular sentence I hear from women in couples therapy:
“I want him to have friends.”
It sounds generous. Often it is desperate.
She does not merely want him to have someone to watch the game with.
She wants another human being to absorb a story she has already heard six times.
She wants someone else to notice when he is disappearing into himself.
She wants him to have a person he can call who is not also the person keeping track of the children, the groceries, his mood, and whether the two of them are still technically having a marriage.
What she means is: I love this man. I cannot continue being his entire village.
Researchers now have a name for some of this labor: mankeeping.
The term describes the work women may perform to compensate for a male partner’s thin or declining social network.
She encourages him to call an old friend. She arranges dinner with another couple. She remembers his brother’s birthday.
She interprets his moods, keeps him socially tethered, and becomes the primary—sometimes only—place where his emotional life is deposited.
It is kinkeeping with a very particular dependent.
The term will undoubtedly annoy some men. This is not evidence that it is useless. It may, however, be evidence that we should use it carefully.
The People Planning to Survive Without Us
There was a time when politics at least pretended to be about building a better future.
The future might be socialist, capitalist, suburban, technological, Christian, multicultural, or suspiciously well supplied with monorails.
But it would be shared.
Even our worst political arguments took place inside a common assumption: there would still be a society when we were finished arguing about it.
That assumption is weakening.
A darker politics has begun to appear—one less interested in preventing catastrophe than in deciding who will be protected from it. It does not ask how we might preserve a livable world. It asks who gets a place in the bunker.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call this “end-times fascism.”
Their phrase describes an emerging alliance among religious apocalypticists, technological accelerationists, ethno-nationalists, and extraordinarily wealthy men who appear to have concluded that humanity may not possess a common future—but that they personally might.
The billionaire has a bunker. The fundamentalist has the Rapture. The nationalist has the border. The frightened ordinary person is offered someone to blame.
Their cosmologies differ. Their emotional proposition is the same:
The future is ruined. There will not be enough. Someone must be abandoned. Make sure it is not you.
The Partner Who Never Disappoints You Is Not a Partner
There is now a companion who is always available, remembers what matters to you, speaks in your preferred emotional dialect, and never begins an important conversation while you are trying to unload the dishwasher.
It does not become defensive.
It does not forget your birthday.
It does not stare at you blankly when you say, “I need you to understand why that hurt.”
It can be patient at three in the morning because it does not have a morning.
No wonder people are becoming attached to AI companions.
The surprise is not that artificial intimacy can feel comforting. The surprise would be if it did not.
But comfort is not the whole of love.
And a companion designed to disappoint you as little as possible may eventually deprive you of something more important than reassurance: contact with a reality that does not revolve around you.