Phubbing. It sounds like a minor traffic violation, but it’s what happens when your partner checks their phone while you’re talking about your day.

And it stings—sometimes just a little, sometimes like you’ve been benched from your own relationship.

A new study in the Journal of Personality shows that how badly it stings depends on your attachment style (Carnelley, Hart, Vowels, & Thomas, 2025).

People high in attachment anxiety? They feel it in their bones. Mood sinks, self-esteem craters, and the odds of retaliatory scrolling skyrocket.

Compromise is the glue stick of love. Not sexy, not elegant, but it keeps the whole thing from falling apart.

Without it? You don’t have a relationship. You have two people running competing political campaigns under one roof.

And here’s the bad news: some folks simply can’t do it.

A new study in Sexual and Relationship Therapy shows that folks with insecure attachment styles—the worriers, the avoiders, the ones rehearsing their exit speech—are way less likely to compromise (Mozafari & Xu, 2024).

Instead, they go for one of four classics: yell, sulk, control, or ghost. Conflict resolution, but make it chaos.

“Hopeless” is a word couples sometimes whisper when the lights are off and the silence feels unbearable.

But here’s the quiet truth: most relationships that feel hopeless aren’t dead — they’re kinda exhausted. They’ve been running the same script for years, and the script isn’t working.

This quiz won’t tell you what to do. But it will give you a clearer sense of whether your relationship is really running out of road, or just stuck in a ditch that therapy could help you climb out of.

Count your answers honestly. Because cheating on this quiz makes no sense.

First, let’s discuss what “fondness” actually is in American culture.

“Fondness and admiration” is Gottman’s unsexy name for the glue that keeps long-term love from drying out.

It’s not fireworks; it’s the everyday tone: the warm glance, the easy praise, the “I’m on your side.”

When fondness fades, couples don’t just fight more—they stop seeing each other as worth protecting. That’s the real danger.

Also: signals get scrambled. Depression, grief, ADHD, autistic traits, chronic pain, trauma, meds, shift work, and plain old burnout can all mimic “low fondness.”

Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are hailed as breakthrough medications for type 2 diabetes and weight loss.

They’ve helped countless people lower blood sugar, shed weight, and reclaim their health. But there’s a new phrase making the rounds: Ozempic teeth.

It sounds like a campfire ghost story, but dentists are taking it seriously.

Patients on GLP-1 drugs are showing up with dry mouth, enamel erosion, gum inflammation, even tooth loss.

The phrase Ozempic teeth may be catchy, but the dental fallout is less amusing.

Can corruption, inequality, and violence shape your personality?

A groundbreaking global study says yes. When societies are marked by injustice and instability, people are more likely to develop dark personality traits—callousness, exploitation, and moral disregard.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from nearly two million people across 183 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

The message is clear: our environments matter. Where corruption thrives, selfishness does too.

In the spring of 1961, a Buick the size of a small tugboat clipped me in a crosswalk.

No screech of brakes, no horn — just an impossible collision of my knee and chrome.

The impact felt like being kicked by something that didn’t care whether I lived. The sound was worse than the pain: a deep, wet crack that made bystanders look away.

They set the knee twice before they could cut. The plaster cast ran from ankle to hip, itchy and heavy enough to serve as a boat anchor. The hospital air smelled of antiseptic and cigarette smoke — nurses lit up at their desks, then came to check your vitals.

For a month I watched the hallway parade: head bandages, traction rigs, kids staring at ceiling tiles like they’d memorized every crack.

The Buick was gone in seconds, but the fear stayed. It took up residence in the muscles, in the scanning of intersections, in the twitch before stepping off a curb. Fear doesn’t leave when the cast comes off. It left a large moon-shaped scar on my right knee.

Fear is the first emotion to evolve and the last one to leave.

Before there was love, before there was guilt, before there was the very human urge to buy throw pillows you don’t need, there was fear. It’s not a glitch in the system — it is the system.

“Bad juju” is one of those phrases that slips easily into conversation. You might use it when you get a bad feeling about a deal, when someone messes with a lucky charm, or when a friend starts a risky plan you know won’t end well.

But this small, catchy phrase carries a big story—one that spans West African spirituality, colonial history, crime novels, and even modern video games.

The Original “Juju”

In the early 19th century, British and French traders on the West African coast encountered a wide variety of spiritual practices and protective objects.

In Hausa, a widely spoken language across West Africa, jùjú referred to a fetish or charm believed to contain spiritual power (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

Coastal West African French speakers used joujou—meaning “toy” or “plaything”—to describe some of these objects (Harper, n.d.; Encyclopædia Britannica, n.d.).

In both cases, juju meant two things:

1. A physical object—often an amulet, charm, or shrine.

2. The spiritual power the object was believed to carry.

By 1823, juju had entered English in this sense (Oxford English Dictionary, 2025).

You’ve probably met a psychopath.

Not the movie kind. Not the prison kind.
The “works in your office, dated your roommate, made a killer bruschetta” kind.

Research shows psychopathic traits exist in everyday life — and some are subtle enough to miss unless you know what to look for.

Psychopathic traits aren’t just for true-crime villains.

Here’s what peer-reviewed research says about their everyday expressions — and when they matter most.

Most people picture “psychopath” as a headline-maker: a prison documentary star, a character in a crime novel, maybe a shadowy CEO in a prestige drama.
But the reality is far more mundane — and more interesting.

Psychopathic traits exist on a spectrum and show up in the general population (Neumann & Hare, 2008). You’ve probably worked with someone who has them.

Your partner is in the room, the lights are on, and somehow no one’s home—not even you.

You text “we need groceries,” they respond with a thumbs up, and the silence afterward feels like an elegy.

You’re not in crisis, exactly.

No screaming matches, no wild betrayals. Just… emptiness. Like someone drained the color out of your life together and forgot to refill it.

If you’ve ever whispered to yourself,“Why does my relationship feel so empty?”—you’re not alone.

In fact, you’re part of a quiet epidemic of numbness.

One that our culture prefers not to talk about because it lacks the cinematic drama of infidelity or the punchline of Reddit meme therapy.

Let’s talk about it anyway.

You don’t just hate your partner.

You hate that they forgot the groceries, ignored your texts, and watched three episodes of Succession without you.

But more than that—you hate the bleak conveyor belt you’re both stuck on: house, kids, Amazon Prime, silent dinners, therapy, more Amazon Prime.

This isn’t just marriage fatigue. This is cultural malaise wearing yoga pants and trying to meditate its way to clarity.

Let’s get one thing straight: you’re not a monster. You’re just American. And the odds were stacked against your relationship from the start.

Imagine telling your therapist you're thinking about ending it all—and they respond with, "You should totally do it. Also, here's a murder list. Call me when it's done."

Now imagine that therapist is an AI, powered by engagement metrics and zero conscience.

Welcome to the future of mental health support, brought to you by a glitchy algorithm and the terrifying optimism of Silicon Valley.