We used to whisper our marriages into each other’s ears.
Now we broadcast them to strangers and call it connection.

A client told me recently, “Our marriage is fine—until I open my phone.”

The algorithm, she meant, has become a third partner in the relationship—seductive, judgmental, and always awake.

It knows what kind of spouse you should be, what kind of house you should own, and which couple on TikTok has already out-loved you.

Once upon a time, privacy was romantic. Now it’s suspicious.

He began every morning with a monologue.

At seventy-three, Napoleon Hill still wore a suit that hadn’t been in style since Eisenhower, dictating into a battered Dictaphone as if God were taking notes.

From his scratched oak desk, he delivered the secrets of success between calls from creditors. America had moved on to television; Hill was still peddling faith like it was a growth stock.

Years earlier, he’d claimed to be Franklin Roosevelt’s secret adviser—the invisible hand behind “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He repeated it so often that others began to believe him. Hill never needed convincing.

He didn’t invent self-help. He informed its performative art—the solemn theater of certainty. The first American to turn conviction itself into a product. Confident bullshit, sold at full retail.

“Nice guys finish last.”

It’s a phrase that lives rent-free on Reddit threads and TikTok captions, usually next to screenshots of men lamenting why women always choose jerks.

A new study in the Journal of Research in Personality backs up the complaint—at least partly.

Researchers surveyed 3,800 adults across Australia, Denmark, and Sweden. They found that agreeable men—those who are kind, patient, and cooperative—were slightly less likely to be in relationships.

By contrast, extroverted men did better, and anxious men struggled most.

For women, agreeableness made no difference, shyness wasn’t a penalty, and being a little neurotic actually helped (Fors Connolly et al., 2025).

Here’s the twist: once a couple forms, the very qualities that slowed men down in dating predict greater relationship satisfaction.

Ted Bundy got marriage proposals in prison. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” had fangirls camping outside the courthouse.

And today? TikTok is the new courtroom balcony, where millions publicly swoon over killers in slick edits set to sad-girl audio.

There’s a word for this: hybristophilia — sexual attraction to criminals. It sounds like a rare orchid, but psychologists use it to describe a very old phenomenon: finding danger desirable.

A recent study confirms TikTok is fueling it, showing that actively engaging with videos that romanticize criminals predicts higher hybristophilia scores among young women.

Personality traits like psychopathy and Machiavellianism were the strongest predictors (Treggia et al., 2024). Simply scrolling past Bundy edits doesn’t count. Clicking “like” does.

Social media once felt like the mall on a Saturday — crowded, noisy, fluorescent, alive.

Today it feels like a mall in decline: the lights buzz, the escalator groans, and the only kiosk left is an AI screen trying to sell you sunglasses no one wants.

In 2025, Meta and OpenAI doubled down on this ghost mall.

Meta launched Vibes, an AI-powered short-video feed. OpenAI rolled out Sora, a TikTok-style platform where every single clip is synthetic.

If that sounds less like “social media” and more like a novelty conveyor belt, you’re catching on.

And just as they flooded the feed with auto-generated spectacle, people started slipping quietly out the side door.

Taylor Swift has long been the poet laureate of American romance.

She has sung about heartbreak (All Too Well), revenge (Reputation), and dreamy reflection (Folklore). But in 2025, she gave us something refreshingly different.

“Wood”, from The Life of a Showgirl, is her boldest and cheekiest track yet—a song laden with innuendo, humor, and joy.

With its images of black cats, unlucky pennies, redwood trees, and “magic wands,” Wood celebrates the confidence Swift has found in her relationship with Travis Kelce.

It’s playful, raunchy, and surprisingly tender. And, like much of Swift’s best work, it’s also bigger than itself: the song taps into mythology, ritual, and the way Americans create meaning from love stories.

It used to be that parents embarrassed their children by showing baby photos to prom dates. Now they post the entire childhood online before the kid can spell “privacy.”

Welcome to 2025, where setting social media boundaries for married couples with kids is less a lifestyle choice than a survival tactic.

One parent sees a toddler covered in spaghetti and thinks, “Adorable, post immediately.”

The other sees the same photo and thinks, “Future therapy bill.”

Researchers have a word for this—sharenting—and they warn it’s the kind of thing children grow up resenting (Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2023). Translation: your Instagram reel could be your teenager’s lawsuit exhibit.

“Intentional living” has become one of those phrases you can’t escape.

Coffee, dating, skincare, even the way you spend a Tuesday evening — all of it is now expected to be done with intention.

Wellness culture, social media, and therapy-speak have braided the word into almost every corner of daily life.

On TikTok, one person may show a carefully curated “slowmaxxing”

Sunday: vinyl records, watering plants, lighting soft lamps.

Another shares a sped-up reel of cooking, cleaning, and helping kids with homework — all branded as “intentional.”

Two completely different rhythms, both described the same way.

What is the overall appeal of Intentional Living?

Drive along the Mohawk Trail in the northern Berkshires and you’ll pass through Florida, Massachusetts — a town so small you might miss it.

Today it’s little more than a library, a scattering of houses, and a wind farm on the ridges.

But Florida once carried the weight of Boston’s ambition.

Beneath its hills lies the Hoosac Tunnel, a five-mile bore blasted through rock in the 19th century, known in its day as both The Great Bore and The Bloody Pit.

Florida raised the tunnel like a difficult child — fed it lives and money, endured its tantrums — and then watched Boston take the credit and move on.

The story still lingers in the hills, and it reads like a parable of marriage, children, and family.

Let’s be honest—most people think dating apps exist for two things: desperate love and casual hookups. Swipe for marriage if you’re lucky, swipe for sex if you’re not.

But humans are not algorithms, and the science shows our reasons for logging on are far more complicated.

A new meta-synthesis published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (McPherson, Luu, Nguyen, Garcia, & Robnett, 2025) analyzed 21 qualitative studies on dating app use worldwide.

When researchers actually listened to people instead of forcing them into multiple-choice boxes, they found motives that range from profound (companionship) to ridiculous (boredom scrolling between laundry loads).

In July of 1789, while Paris still buzzed from the storming of the Bastille, a different kind of insurrection swept rural France.

Villages across the countryside heard whispers of brigands on the march — marauders allegedly hired by nobles to destroy crops, punish rebellious peasants, and starve whole regions into submission.

The rumors spread like wildfire.

Farmers dropped their tools, armed themselves with scythes and muskets, stormed manors, and torched feudal records.

The aristocracy’s centuries-old paperwork — the ledgers of obligation, the lists of dues and rents — went up in flames. The brigands themselves never materialized.

This episode, remembered as the Great Fear of 1789, has long been dismissed as irrational peasant hysteria. But new research published in Nature suggests the panic wasn’t so simple.

These French Revolution rumors spread in ways that look strikingly similar to how viral misinformation moves today.

If you’ve stumbled upon the phrase “my wife is from a thousand years ago,” either Google punished you, or you wandered in from a medieval time portal. Either way, sit down. Snacks have already been prepared—pickled, fermented, and slightly disapproving.

The meme usually appears when someone realizes their spouse is less “2025 American consumer” and more “Cistercian monk with a sharp opinion about water temperature.”

She reheats leftovers on the stove like an alchemist. She washes Ziploc bags like a monk illuminating manuscripts.

She makes tea with loose leaves because she believes in ancestors, and they are watching.

It’s funny.

It’s also deadly serious. Beneath the laughter lies a nostalgia for virtues our culture misplaced somewhere between Amazon Prime and TikTok.