I first became aware of Living Apart Together relationships when a was one of the owners and blog editor over at Couples Therapy Inc.

Frankly, I’m impressed with what they’ve done to the place since I moved on to do more couple and family work.

I wrote this article about 5 years ago for the CTI blog, and I continue to follow this trend more recently in my relatives new private practice.

Not long ago, the idea of a married couple choosing to live in separate homes might’ve triggered a wellness check—or at least a concerned conversation with your priest, rabbi, or HOA president.

But today, Living Apart Together (LAT) relationships are quietly reshaping the definition of modern love.

These aren’t failed marriages in disguise.

They’re a conscious choice—an evolving model for committed partnerships that value emotional intimacy and personal autonomy. If that sounds like a contradiction, welcome to the 21st century.

Let’s start here: Identity is changing. Rapidly.

And if you’re a parent, especially one who still refers to “The Facebook,” you may feel like you’re parenting through an ontological thunderstorm—with your kid updating their gender, neurotype, and aesthetic faster than you can refill your antidepressant prescription.

They aren’t “coming out” so much as broadcasting a constant, shifting signal, wrapped in irony and rejection of fixed meaning.

This isn’t just generational weirdness. It’s a philosophical earthquake. And if you're feeling confused, you're not alone. You're paying attention.

Your sister was your first enemy and your last text. Your brother knows where the emotional bodies are buried—and still shows up with snacks. Welcome to the age of sibling loyalty, where shared trauma turns into shared strength.

In a world where vertical family ties—parent to child, elder to youth—are fraying under pressure, horizontal bonds are stepping in. Siblings, once relegated to punchlines and rivalries, are becoming emotional anchors in adult life.

This post explores the quiet rise of the sibling pact: mutual loyalty, emotional caretaking, and secret memes forged in childhood chaos and carried into adult resilience.

As extended families scatter and parental support erodes, American siblinghood may be evolving into the final frontier of family solidarity.

The image of fatherhood has evolved, and thank God.

We’ve moved—albeit unevenly—from the emotionally distant provider to the dad who sings lullabies, schedules therapy, and says “I’m sorry” without flinching.

Still, for many men, expressing deep emotion in parenting feels like both a calling and a transgression.

This post explores the slow, powerful transformation of fatherhood from stoic to soft, from provider to co-regulator—and why this shift isn’t just nice. It’s necessary.

“Use your words,” we say to the toddler mid-meltdown. But what if no one ever taught you the words? Or worse—what if you learned that using them made things worse?

Emotional literacy used to be optional, like cursive or Latin. Now, it’s a matter of survival. In a world where stress is ambient, attention is fractured, and feelings are both pathologized and monetized, emotional literacy isn’t just nice—it’s necessary.

This post explores how emotional literacy became a top-tier parenting goal, how we’re doing (spoiler: mixed), and why helping kids feel their feelings is one of the most subversive things you can do.

In the popular imagination, burnout is for corporate climbers and frontline workers.

But parenting is both of those—without the pay or lunch breaks. When one parent begins to smolder under the strain of endless demands, it doesn’t just affect them. It ripples through the emotional climate of the entire household.

This post isn’t just about self-care (which, let’s be honest, has been repackaged as scented guilt).

It’s about identifying, naming, and healing family-system burnout—especially when the one breaking down is the one everyone else depends on.

Your child knows how to say "thank you" in three languages, eats both matzo ball soup and pho, and once asked why Santa doesn’t light a menorah. Congratulations. You’re raising a bicultural, multifaith masterpiece—with frequent identity crises baked in.

Blending cultural and religious traditions in one household is like hosting a potluck where no one agrees on what counts as food.

It’s messy, beautiful, and, if done well, creates children who are multilingual in the language of love, even if they mix up the order of their ancestors’ holidays.

This post is for the parents navigating sacred calendars, clashing rituals, and the ever-present fear that your kid will feel half-everything and whole-nothing.

Let’s go deep into the joy and chaos of raising bicultural, multifaith children—and what the research, the memes, and your in-laws are all trying to say about it.

Once upon a time, “family” was a word you inherited, whether it fit or not. Now, more people are building their own families—not through blood, but through belonging. And not just as a lifestyle choice, but as a survival strategy.

If you’ve ever felt more seen by your group chat than by your parents, you already know: found family isn’t a quirky subplot anymore. It’s the main story.

This post explores the rise of chosen families, the decline of the nuclear unit as default, and how memes, policy gaps, and hard-earned emotional intelligence have turned friendship into family—and family into something you sometimes choose to opt out of.

Once we had Sunday dinners, bedtime stories, and snow days. Then came the pandemic, which turned routines into risk assessments and left rituals abandoned like shopping carts in an empty parking lot. Now, families are trying to remember how to gather again—without flinching.

Welcome to the quiet, sacred work of rebuilding. After years of chaos, families are crawling out of survival mode, blinking in the sunlight, and asking: What do we still believe in?

This post isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about something far more ambitious: spiritual reconstruction through crockpots, game nights, and Saturday pancakes.

What Exactly Is a Family Ritual?

If your child is flapping their hands while explaining the plot of a cartoon in microscopic detail—and you’re Googling “Is this normal?”—you’re not alone. Welcome to the new normal, where the family operating system is being rewritten in real time.

Once upon a time, parenting was about conformity.

Children were expected to sit still, speak when spoken to, and color inside the lines—preferably with the correct grip. But now, more families are discovering that the “rules” don’t apply.

Or rather, they never did.

Neurodivergence is no longer an outlier; it’s a reality shaping how families communicate, regulate, and grow. And the culture is finally catching up—if only just.

Let’s trace how we got here, how the memes reflect the movement, and why this shift may be the single most optimistic development in modern parenting.

Once upon a time, children fell in love with frogs, dirt, and imaginary friends named Pickle. Today? They fall in love with screens that blink, ding, and know more about them than their grandparents do.

Welcome to parenting in the algorithmic era, where kids learn to swipe before they speak and toddlers can spell “YouTube” before their own last names.

This isn’t just a technological issue—it’s a developmental reckoning.

Let’s explore how digital childhood evolved, why it’s changing the emotional architecture of families, and what the memes and psychologists are saying about it—all while you scroll through this on a glowing rectangle of your own.

Lucía once told Ravi, “Sometimes I feel like we’re two ghosts haunting the same device.”

And Ravi, smiling through a headset in Toronto, whispered back: “Maybe we’re not ghosts. Maybe we’re the first generation of lovers who understand that presence can exist without physical form.”

That may sound poetic—but it’s also philosophical. As the nature of intimacy evolves, we’re being asked questions our ancestors never had to answer.

• Can love exist without touch?

• Is intimacy still “real” when mediated by screens?

• What does it mean to feel close to someone you’ve never physically smelled?

Welcome to the strange, shimmering realm of virtual intimacy—where affection is coded, conflict is buffered, and love lives in the cloud.

Are We Still Embodied Without Bodies?