Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have a knack for picking the wrong romantic partners?

The answer might not lie in bad luck or poor judgment but rather in something much deeper: an unclear sense of self.

A new study published in Self & Identity suggests that individuals with low self-concept clarity (SCC) tend to be less selective in romantic partner evaluations—particularly when assessing less compatible matches.

In other words, the less you understand yourself, the more likely you are to settle for a partner who doesn’t actually “fit.”

In an age where therapy has become as customizable as a Starbucks order—"I’ll take a half-caf attachment repair with a sprinkle of somatic reprocessing"—it was only a matter of time before someone came up with Cultural Family Therapy (CFT).

This, dear reader, is what happens when family therapy meets anthropology at a cocktail party and decides to birth an intellectual lovechild over too many glasses of decolonized wine.

CFT purports to integrate transcultural psychiatry, which is a dignified way of saying: "Your problems aren’t just yours; they belong to your ancestors, your nation, and possibly the entire geopolitical history of your ethnicity" (Kirmayer, 2012).

While acknowledging cultural influences in therapy is important, CFT externalizes problems to such a degree that it risks undermining personal agency (Bourdieu, 1977).

For decades, relationship researchers focused on how couples fight—their conflict patterns, escalation cycles, and the dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But recent research suggests that it’s not the fights themselves that predict divorce—it’s how each partner is wired to experience connection, safety, and emotional intimacy (Simpson & Rholes, 2017).

In other words, it’s not just the fire of conflict that burns relationships down—it’s whether the couple knows how to put the fire out before it consumes everything.

So, Your Partner is Your Greatest Psychological Test? Fun.

If you thought marriage was about love, trust, and Sunday morning coffee runs, think again. In reality, it’s a front-row seat to your deepest, most repressed wounds—all conveniently triggered by the person you promised to cherish forever.

According to Carl Jung, we spend much of our lives rejecting and projecting this shadow onto others, and in relationships, our partners often bear the brunt of this unconscious baggage.

The good news? If approached consciously, shadow work can transform your marriage into a tool for deep healing rather than a battlefield of past traumas.

In this post, we’ll explore how shadow work fits into leading couples therapy models, including Gottman’s research, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Developmental Model, and Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy (RLT)—because your relationship isn’t just about love; it’s about growth.

Imagine this: You’re in the middle of brushing your teeth, minding your own business, when suddenly—BAM—you vividly recall that time in third grade when you called your teacher “Mom” and then spent the next six months contemplating faking your own death to avoid further humiliation.

Congratulations, you’ve just experienced a memory pop—your brain’s equivalent of an unwanted jump scare.

Memory pops are those random, often unbidden recollections that surface for no apparent reason, completely hijacking your train of thought.

They arrive without warning, like an eccentric uncle showing up to Thanksgiving uninvited, and often with about the same level of emotional subtlety.

But why do they happen?

And more importantly, can you make them stop? Science has some answers, but like most things involving the brain, they range from “It’s complicated” to “We’re honestly just guessing.”

T

rigger warnings—once the domain of online forums and academic syllabi—have seeped into the world of art, serving as a kind of emotional hazard sign before viewers encounter potentially distressing content.

But what if, instead of protecting us, these warnings actually diminish our experience of art?

A new study in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts suggests that content warnings might do just that, lowering aesthetic appreciation while increasing negative emotional responses.

Irony abounds in this study. Not a single participant in the study avoided looking at the supposedly distressing artwork. Not one.

A fresh study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has added another wrinkle to our understanding of conspiracy beliefs: they don’t just make people paranoid about shadowy elites controlling the world—they also shift how they interpret social inequalities.

It turns out that when folks buy into conspiracy thinking, they are less likely to blame disadvantaged groups for their struggles and more inclined to see the wealthy and powerful as, well, up to something.

This research complicates the usual hand-wringing over conspiracy theories.

While conspiracy beliefs have been linked to irrational thinking, political extremism, and even public health skepticism (Douglas et al., 2017), this study suggests they might also serve a peculiar function: challenging the American idea that success and failure are purely based on individual merit.

In other words, conspiracy theorists may not just be tinfoil-hat-wearing contrarians—they might also be (accidentally?) questioning the myth of meritocracy.

Limbic Capitalism—a phrase so neatly academic it could almost hide its sinister undertones. It sounds like a term conjured up by a committee of bored psychologists sipping overpriced coffee.

But in reality, it neatly captures how today's market forces are tapping directly into our emotional and intimate lives, especially through dating apps, pornography, romantic consumerism, and a broader cultural narcissism that further commodifies human connection.

Let's peek behind the curtain and see how this works, shall we?

What Exactly is Limbic Capitalism?

Humans, that peculiar species known equally for inventing calculus, jazz music, and reality television, can’t agree on how to handle something as straightforward as love.

You’ve got monogamy, which society props up like the perfect IKEA shelf—promising sturdiness and elegance but prone to wobbling dangerously if not assembled just right.

Then there’s polyamory, monogamy’s free-spirited cousin who promises everyone at the party an emotional goodie bag filled with love, honesty, and occasionally uncomfortable truths.

Like all ambitious philosophies, both come with fine print, hidden fees, and potential meltdowns.

Human beings, in their infinite wisdom, have long insisted that romantic love is the holy grail of human happiness.

Entire industries—wedding planners, dating apps, even an entire wing of pop music—exist solely to reinforce this collective delusion.

But what if the real secret to well-being isn't candlelit dinners and whispered sweet nothings, but rather eating cold pizza on a friend’s couch while discussing if aliens have a secret base under Greenland?

Welcome to the relationship Twilight Zone. There was a time when relationships made sense.

You were either single or taken—there was no in-between, no Schrödinger’s relationship, no quantum entanglement where one person thinks they’re dating and the other thinks they’re just “seeing where things go.”

And then, dating apps happened.

Now we have situationships—a delightful term for a romantic arrangement with all the emotional labor of a relationship and none of the commitment.

If you’ve ever found yourself invested in someone who won’t call you their partner, congratulations. You’ve won a free ticket to the emotional equivalent of an escape room with no clues.

So, the question is: How do you get them to commit—or at least be honest enough to admit they won’t?

For years, Attachment Theory has treated as the holy gospel of relationship science.

It promised to explain everything—why you text back too fast, why your ex had the emotional availability of a houseplant, and why your best friend is engaged to a guy who never calls her “babe.”

But here’s the problem: it might be wrong. Or at least, wrong enough to be dangerous.

Not in the “flat earth” kind of way, but in the Freudian, still-lingering-long-past-its-expiration-date kind of way.

Researchers are starting to push back, and not just in the “I have some questions” way. More in the “we need to rethink this whole thing before we ruin more relationships” way.

So, is attachment theory scientific truth or relationship astrology with a PhD? Let’s break it down.