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.

Technology keeps changing the surface, but the story stays the same: human beings are remarkably inventive when it comes to finding new ways to betray each other.

Once it was secret letters, then it was workplace affairs, and now?

It’s a glowing screen in your pocket that talks back like a lover.

If Tolstoy were alive today, Anna Karenina wouldn’t throw herself under a train for Count Vronsky—she’d rage-quit her marriage after catching him sexting with “AI Girlfriend 4.0.”

The question isn’t academic.

Couples are already splitting up over “AI affairs.”

The argument boils down to this: does cheating require a body, or is it enough that you’ve siphoned intimacy away from your partner and handed it to a piece of code?

A lavender marriage wasn’t about love. It was about appearances.

It was about giving society what it demanded—a man and a woman posed like salt and pepper shakers on the dining table—while privately carrying on a completely different menu.

So, what is a lavender marriage?

At its simplest: a marriage between a man and a woman where at least one partner was gay, lesbian, or bisexual, entered into for appearances rather than romance.

Think of it as a “marriage of convenience,” but with lavender trim—delicate, coded, and entirely performative.

Once upon a time, people fell in love at neighborhood barbecues, in classrooms, or while both reaching for the last avocado at the market.

Now? We swipe right, left, and occasionally into oblivion. Online dating has become the dominant way people connect.

But a recent international study suggests something surprising: couples who met offline are, on average, a little happier and more committed.

Not wildly happier. Just a little.

Enough to make researchers raise an eyebrow, but not enough to justify panic-deleting your dating apps.

Somewhere in America, a man in rural Missouri is mailing heirloom tomato seeds to a woman in Brooklyn. On paper, they should hate each other.

His yard has a flagpole; hers has a climate march poster. Their political bumper stickers, if parked side by side, could ignite a small brush fire.

And yet, they’ve been swapping seeds for three years.

Every spring, she sends him a sourdough starter; he sends her rare zinnia seeds in return. Neither has mentioned politics once. That’s probably why they still like each other.

This is a quiet revolution — the growth of rural conservatives and urban progressives finding each other in unlikely online spaces, building small, durable friendships around passions that have nothing to do with ballots, yard signs, or cable news.

Heterofatalism — the belief that heterosexual relationships are structurally doomed to disappoint — is no longer just an obscure academic term.

For many Gen Z women, it’s a working theory of modern romance. And it’s reshaping the way they approach dating, sex, and consent.

Coined by scholar Asa Seresin, heterofatalism isn’t a tantrum or a manifesto.

It’s a quiet conclusion reached after too many underwhelming dates, too many safety calculations, and too much unpaid emotional labor dressed up as fun.

In this worldview, even the best straight relationships carry a familiar imbalance of risk and reward.

And now, it’s influencing everything from dating app use to the quiet rise of the Gen Z celibacy trend.

Family therapy used to be about the people who lived in your house—or at least showed up for Thanksgiving.

You’d draw a genogram, map the alliances, name the conflicts, and maybe figure out why your brother still isn’t speaking to you about that thing from 2011.

But in 2025, that map is missing someone.

The algorithm.

It’s not blood-related, but it’s in the room. Every day. Every night. And it knows exactly what your teen searched for at 2 a.m. It’s shaping conversations before they happen, influencing loyalties before you’ve even had your coffee.