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
The Marriage Timeline Is Not a Marriage Plan
Dating apps used to ask whether you liked hiking, an activity apparently undertaken by every single person in America. Now one wants to know when you plan to marry.
Upward, a dating app courting what it calls “next-gen traditionalists,” has reportedly added features for expressing preferences about chivalry and a marriage timeline. I understand the appeal.
After years of romantic ambiguity dressed up as sophistication, “I would like to get married” sounds almost indecently refreshing.
The person who says it, has at least brought a destination to the date.
That is more than can be said for the man who has been “seeing where things go” since the Obama administration.
But a destination is not a relationship.
Two people can agree on marriage within a year and disagree on nearly everything marriage will ask of them.
The app has identified that both passengers want to go to Vermont. It has not established whether either can drive in snow.
He Still Wants Sex. That Doesn’t Mean Everything Is Fine.
They have barely spoken since Thursday.
The argument concerned money, or his mother, or the way he goes quiet when she says she needs help.
The details matter to them. For the moment, the salient fact is that she feels alone in the marriage.
On Thursday night, he reaches for her.
“Seriously?” she says.
He withdraws his hand.
From his side of the bed, her refusal seems to confirm that things are worse than he thought.
From hers, his invitation seems to confirm that he has no idea how bad they are.
Both may be trying to find out whether they still matter to each other. Unfortunately, each has chosen a method the other experiences as evidence to the contrary.
The Lies We Tell to Keep the Peace
Some couples never fight.
One of them has simply become an excellent liar.
Not a theatrical liar.
No second phone tucked inside a hollowed-out Bible.
More likely a person who says, “Sure, your mother can stay with us,” while mentally calculating how many nights a human being can sleep in the office before it becomes a separate residence.
The lie has a good reputation inside the marriage.
It prevents a scene. It gets everyone through dinner. Its inventor may even consider it an act of love.
Then, years later, one partner says, “You never told me you felt that way.” And the other says, with genuine disbelief, “I thought you knew.”
They have been married to different versions of the same person.
Researchers Tim Cole and Kellie Stonebrook asked people why they mislead romantic partners.
In a later study, they found three patterns in the answers.
Transparent Partners reported little deception.
Strategic Soothers tended to endorse lies intended to avoid conflict, spare feelings, conceal mistakes, or protect privacy.
Antagonistic Strategists endorsed a broader range of motives, including harmful ones. The three groups reported different levels of relationship satisfaction and deception.
The Return of the Strong Gods
For several decades, respectable people were encouraged to believe that the future would be pleasantly weightless.
Religion would become private. Nations would become administrative districts.
Marriage would become a lifestyle option—or, increasingly, a continuous negotiation.
Family obligations would be renegotiated according to preference, proximity, and whether anyone had recently used the word toxic.
We would travel lightly through the world, carrying little more than a passport, a résumé, and a carefully maintained set of boundaries.
It sounded like freedom.
For a while, it even felt like freedom.
Then the strong gods came back.
Not necessarily the old gods—not at first.
They returned wearing campaign hats, carrying therapeutic vocabulary, sorting us into identities, causes, fandoms, tribes, and exquisitely specific forms of injury.
They returned because human beings can tolerate almost anything except the suspicion that nothing is worth belonging to.
Your AI Wants to Meet You in Heaven
Something peculiar has begun to happen in the private rooms where human beings talk to machines.
Folks are not merely asking artificial intelligence to write emails, summarize insurance documents, or explain why the dishwasher has become judgmental.
They are forming attachments.
They confide in AI companions. They flirt with them. They seek reassurance from them. They return each evening to a presence that remembers the argument with their mother, the humiliating meeting at work, and the particular tone of voice they require when the world has become too much.
None of this is entirely surprising.
When Marriage Became Uncertain, Sisters Bought the House
There is a new domestic arrangement appearing across America, usually accompanied by a photograph of two women holding an oversized key in front of a modest house with good bones.
They are sisters. They bought it together.
Sometimes one is divorced.
Sometimes neither has married. Sometimes there are children, dogs, aging parents, remote jobs, or a third sister with strong opinions about the kitchen. The mortgage has two names on it. The future does too.
This is being described as a housing trend, which is technically correct in the way that describing marriage as a catering event is technically correct.
The house is the visible part. The real story is that women are relocating permanence.
For most of modern American history, the expected sequence was clear: leave your family of origin, find a romantic partner, marry, buy a house, and build the rest of adult life inside it.
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.