
BLOG
- 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 Personality of the Perpetually Single: What the Big Five Reveal About Lifelong Solo Acts
By 2023, half of America was flying solo. And not just metaphorically.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.4% of American adults were single.
A record-breaking number—32% of women and 37% of men—had never married. That’s not just a blip. It’s a demographic moonwalk away from the altar.
So who are these long-term solo dwellers?
Are they independent spirits with excellent taste in throw pillows? Or is there something—psychologically speaking—that separates the coupled from the contentedly (or not-so-contentedly) uncoupled?
Turns out, personality may be part of the story.
Loving an Avoidant: How to Show Up Without Smothering
Loving someone with avoidant attachment can feel like trying to hug a lighthouse.
You reach out, they dim the beam.
You get closer, they disappear into the fog.
And yet, when you give up and start walking away—there’s a light, blinking on the horizon again.
This is not because your avoidant partner is cruel.
It’s because they’re scared.
Not of you. Of needing you.
If you’re in love with someone who flinches at closeness, prefers texting to talking, and treats vulnerability like a foreign language—don’t take it personally. But don’t take it as permanent either.
Avoidantly attached people can love deeply.
But they often need a different kind of emotional space to feel safe enough to stay.
This post isn’t about chasing or fixing. It’s about showing up—without losing yourself in the process.
Come Closer, Stay Back: The Intimacy Struggles of the Avoidantly Attached
Once upon a push–pull, a handsome someone didn’t text you back.
Or they did—but not for 17 hours.
Then they sent a link to a frog video with no context, no follow-up, and no emotional closure. TikTok labeled them “avoidantly attached,” and now we all feel better.
Or do we?
In the online relationship zoo, avoidant partners have become the sexy villains of the decade—stoic, mysterious, and emotionally distant until, inevitably, they disappear mid-bond.
But if we scrape away the memes, moralizing, and Instagram therapy bait, we’re left with something much more complicated:
Avoidant people often desperately want connection.
They just don’t trust it.
Or themselves.
Or you.
Or time.
Or hope.
Let’s talk about that.
What Is Avoidant Attachment, Really?
I Got Compersion Wrong: A Monogamist's Apology and a Closer Look at the Science
I used to think compersion was a niche affectation of the polyamorous intellectual elite—a smug little parlor trick for those who insisted on moral superiority while casually dismantling monogamy.
In earlier posts, I dismissed it as a shiny buzzword that functioned more as ideological branding than emotional reality.
I may have even implied it was emotionally fraudulent. That was not generous of me. Worse, it was wrong.
In the spirit of intellectual repentance, let me try again. This time, with humility, and actual science.
What Compersion Is—No Spin, No Smugness
How Humans Break Up: Three Exit Strategies and a Thousand Emotional Loops
Picture this: your ancestors are huddled in a Paleolithic cave.
One wants to leave the relationship, but breaking up means exile, starvation, or being eaten by a saber tooth tiger named Chunga.
Fast-forward 50,000 years and breakups still suck—but now, instead of tigers, we have TikTok therapists and group chats.
In a recent Greek study that’s as poignant as it is uncomfortably relatable, Apostolou and Kagialis (2024) decided to investigate how people break up—not just why.
And what they discovered is depressingly logical and oddly familiar: most of us try to be decent about it, some of us hedge our bets with ambiguity, and a few of us just quietly vanish like interns after lunch.
But wait. Before you tattoo “Soften the Blow” on your wrist, let’s explore what this research really says—and how it syncs or clashes with what couples therapy titans like Gottman, Perel, Tatkin, and Johnson have been saying all along.
Kafka and the Lost Doll
In the final year of his life, Franz Kafka—forty years old, frail from tuberculosis—was living in Berlin with Dora Diamant, the woman who had brought light into his darkest years.
He had at last found love, and some measure of peace, if not health.
Each day, he walked slowly through the gardens of Steglitz Park, a place of green quiet where the world seemed gentle enough to bear.
One afternoon, as he and Dora walked, they came upon a little girl sitting alone, her face hidden in her hands, sobbing.
Kafka knelt beside her and asked softly, “Why are you crying?”
“My doll is lost,” she whispered. “I can’t find her anywhere.”
Moved by her sorrow, Kafka offered to help her search. The three of them looked together, combing the bushes and paths, but the doll was nowhere to be found.
At last, Kafka said, “Let’s try again tomorrow.”
When the girl returned the next day, Kafka met her with a letter.
“It’s from your doll,” he said.
Emotional Safety vs. Emotional Control: Can You Be Too Nice for Real Intimacy?
There’s a kind of marriage that looks amazing from the outside.
No raised voices.
No door slamming.
No one sobbing into their quinoa.
Just two grown-ups, calmly solving problems like polite IKEA employees.
They listen. They nod. They de-escalate.
They are, by all appearances, emotionally safe.
So why does it sometimes feel like nobody’s home?
Why Millennials Are Leaving Religion—But Not Spirituality: A Decade-Long Study Offers Clarity
A generation is quietly rewriting the rules of faith.
Millennials, long portrayed as apathetic or irreverent when it comes to religion, are not so much turning their backs on the sacred as they are walking out the side door of the church.
According to a sweeping longitudinal study published in Socius, this cohort—tracked from adolescence into adulthood over a ten-year period—has been steadily disengaging from organized religion.
But they aren’t becoming wholly secular. They’re reimagining what it means to be spiritual in a world where institutions often feel more judgmental than just, more performative than prophetic.
“Who’s Allowed to Be the Messy One in This Family?”
The Silent Script We All Seem to Know
Somewhere between the second tantrum and the last apology, every family writes an invisible contract:
Who gets to fall apart? Who’s expected to hold it together? Who keeps the peace, who causes the trouble, and who disappears when things get loud?
You won’t find it on paper.
There’s no formal ceremony. But most families have a gut-level understanding of who’s allowed to be the "messy one."
And when someone violates this implicit agreement—by getting better, getting worse, or simply asking questions—the entire emotional ecosystem ripples, if not revolts.
As a family therapist, I see it all the time.
And the internet, full of memes about “golden children” and “designated patients,” has started to catch up. But there’s something deeper here—something quietly devastating and wildly hopeful.
Let’s talk about it.
Culture Wars of the Soul: Why the Light Triad Struggles to Go Viral in America
There’s something embarrassingly earnest about the Light Triad, which is exactly why it gets quietly ignored in a culture that rewards the opposite.
American culture—at least in its loudest, most exportable forms—is built on a cocktail of competitive individualism, performance-based worth, and the myth of redemptive dominance.
We believe in reinvention and bootstraps and the kind of redemption that requires a visible, crowd-pleasing arc. There’s no Netflix drama about someone who stayed kind when no one was looking.
And so, Light Triad traits—Kantianism, Humanism, and Faith in Humanity—don’t just go uncelebrated.
They’re quietly mocked.
the social-media-muddied waters of modern courtship, being too earnest gets you ghosted. Being too forgiving makes you “low value.”
And expressing Faith in Humanity in public is like showing up to a gunfight with a tote bag that says “Feelings Are Valid.”
This cultural backdrop matters, especially in couples therapy, where partners come in steeped in narratives shaped by their environment.
Let’s take a look at these traits one at a time, and examine what they’re up against.
Bridging East and West: Adapting Morita and Naikan Therapies for Western Clients
In an era where mindfulness has migrated from Zen monasteries to Silicon Valley boardrooms, it’s worth asking: what else from Eastern psychology might be valuable in a Western clinical setting—if only we could translate it without losing the soul of the practice?
Morita and Naikan therapy, two Japanese psychological traditions rooted in Buddhist philosophy, offer profoundly countercultural approaches to suffering and self-examination.
But can they work with a Western client steeped in self-esteem culture, therapeutic disclosure, and the pursuit of happiness?
Absolutely—but adaptation requires care, cultural sensitivity, and a deep understanding of the philosophical chasm between East and West.
What Are Morita and Naikan Therapies?
Post Modern Secure-Speak Lovebombing and the Aesthetic of Almost: How Modern Romance Makes Us Feel Seen But Not Chosen
Breaking down the curated confusion of emotionally literate non-commitment.
When It Feels Like Love—But Isn’t
They said all the right things.
They looked you in the eye.
They shared a photo of your hand, tagged “Grateful ✨.”
They told you you were “safe.”
You thought that meant staying.
But now they’re gone—or fading—or energetically detaching with a 300-word explanation and no follow-through.
You’re not imagining it. You’re inside one of the most confusing relationship trends of our time:
Secure-Speak Lovebombing
The Commitment Aesthetic
The Intimacy Mirage
Each of these is a carefully branded cousin of the same emotional bait-and-switch:
You’re made to feel chosen, but never actually claimed.