Breakups hurt, but what happens next may be just as important. Explore the rising trend of the “relationship autopsy”—a post-breakup ritual that blends therapy, storytelling, and modern meaning-making.

What Is a Relationship Autopsy?

A relationship autopsy is the postmortem ritual where we analyze what went wrong in a romantic relationship—often with friends, a therapist, or even in a solo spiral through text messages and memory.

Think:

• Re-reading old conversations

• Playing voicemails like court evidence

• Sharing screenshots in group chats

• Asking, “Was I crazy, or…?”

• Trying to name the precise moment the spark died

This isn’t always healthy. But it is very human.

You don’t have to be married long to know that forgiveness isn’t a fuzzy feeling—it’s a mental workout.

And thanks to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we’re getting a clearer picture of what actually happens inside your head when you forgive your partner—not just in theory, but in terms of real, trackable cognitive change.

Here’s the gist. Forgiving your spouse doesn’t delete the memory of what happened. It doesn’t blur it, soften it, or whitewash it.

What it does—remarkably and reliably—is soften the way you feel when you remember it. The pain recedes, even as the facts remain sharp.

That’s right. “Forgive and forget” is a lie. But “forgive and feel differently”? That’s the truth, and science is finally catching up.

If MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) is the guy who left the party muttering about divorce laws, the Sigma Male is the guy who never came to the party—yet somehow left with everyone’s girlfriend, a minimalist wardrobe, and an NFT side hustle.

He is calm.
He is stoic.

He is emotionally unavailable, and that is somehow... aspirational.

Welcome to the curious case of the Sigma Male—a meme that started as a parody of macho hierarchies and evolved into a brandable identity for a generation of men stuck between Alpha burnout and Beta shame.

Once upon an algorithm, somewhere between the fall of Napster and the rise of Jordan Peterson, a cohort of mostly online men quietly muttered: What if we just... didn’t?

Didn’t marry.
Didn’t move in.
Didn’t date.
Didn’t even try.

That whisper became a meme. That meme became a philosophy. And that philosophy became a slow, bitter exodus—one disillusioned Reddit thread, YouTube video, and YouTube ban at a time.

They called themselves MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way). And whether you consider them lonely prophets or digital reactionaries, the movement offers a cultural Rorschach test for what’s been happening to men in the 21st century.

How relational manipulation erodes trust, identity, and even the soul—according to therapists, philosophers, and The New Yorker

In a quietly blistering essay published in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv traces the intimate horror of gaslighting—not just as emotional abuse or interpersonal drama, but as a profound moral violation. Not just a matter of “he said, she said.”

Not even a problem of lying, strictly speaking.

Gaslighting, when examined closely, is the sabotage of a person’s ability to trust themselves. It’s not about deception alone; it’s about unmaking someone’s inner compass—their sense of perception, memory, and reality.

And in my office, I see the aftermath all the time.

The client sitting in front of me is usually not enraged. More often, they’re sheepish, shame-faced, unsure. “Maybe I’m being dramatic,” they say. “I know I can be sensitive.”

They’ve been trained to doubt their own pain.

Let’s begin with a hard truth: you can have an advanced degree, impeccable logic, and a meditation app subscription—and still lose your mind when your partner says, "Can we talk?"

This is not a failure of character. It’s a feature of your nervous system.

In conflict, your biology kicks in long before your narrative self catches up.

That eloquent inner monologue?

It sometimes gets hijacked by a system built to scan for tigers, not tone of voice. The question, then, is not whether your nervous system will react. It will.

The question is: what do you do next?

There are some experiments you don’t get to reverse.

Like bleaching your hair platinum at 52.
Or selling the house for a food truck.
Or opening your marriage because a podcast made it sound sexy and spiritually evolved.

This is the quiet underbelly of the midlife open marriage trend—a story not of sexual liberation, but of existential whiplash.

Couples in their 40s and 50s are stepping into consensual non-monogamy (CNM) not out of lust, but out of a cultural moment that dares them to chase aliveness—even if it burns their life down.

What they’re discovering, sometimes too late, is that the fantasy of “ethical expansion” collides hard with the emotional physics of human attachment.

This post is for the ones sifting through the ashes.

For all its widespread use, methylphenidate—sold under names like Ritalin, Concerta, and Medikinet—still carries a few surprises.

One of them? It might only curb impulsive decision-making in men.

A recent neuroimaging study out of the University of Haifa, published in NeuroImage, offers a startlingly specific twist: a single 20 mg dose of methylphenidate reduced “choice impulsivity” in men, but had no such effect in women. The reason, researchers suspect, lies deep in the brain’s white matter highways—particularly in a region called the forceps major of the corpus callosum.

Let’s unpack that.

What Exactly Is Choice Impulsivity?

Picture this: You're in your 40s or 50s, carrying a bit more belly than you’d like, feeling persistently low, and not having much sex—maybe less than once a month.

That’s another pretty common American snapshot.

Now imagine this trifecta—low sexual frequency, depression, and abdominal obesity—as a subtle but powerful predictor of early death.

According to a 2025 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, this exact combo may quietly and cumulatively shorten your life, especially if you're a man (Teng et al., 2025).

This isn't moral panic or pop psych clickbait. It’s epidemiology. And the numbers are quietly devastating.

Let’s get this out of the way early: FWB stands for Friends with Benefits, not Free With Burrito, though both can lead to regret and gastrointestinal confusion.

But what exactly is a friends-with-benefits relationship?

A quick gloss might say: “Two people having sex without the commitment of dating.”

But that’s like saying jazz is just music without words—it misses the improvisation, the ambiguity, and the occasional heartbreak hidden behind the snare drum.

In America, the “FWB” arrangement has become a full-blown cultural meme—a relationship archetype circulated in media, music, TikTok therapy, and private texts at 11:48 p.m. on a Wednesday. But what does it mean, socially and psychologically?

Is it a healthy middle ground between celibacy and codependence—or a slow-motion emotional trainwreck?

Let’s take a walk through the recent research, the cultural history, and the messy inner logic of FWB, in all its contradictory American glory. Don’t worry—I’ll be gentle.

If porn-induced dissociation had a mascot, it would be the glassy-eyed man in front of six screens, edging into oblivion.

His jaw slack. His dopamine hijacked. His browser history a Dantean archive of algorithmic seduction.

This is not just porn addiction.

This is gooning.

And it’s quietly becoming the most extreme expression of compulsive masturbation in the digital era.

Once upon a time, puberty blockers were used to delay puberty in eight-year-olds with a pituitary problem. Testosterone was for men in midlife crisis.

Surgeons would not remove healthy breasts unless they were asked very nicely by an oncologist.

Then, for reasons both noble and tragically naïve, we rewrote those rules.

We called it progress.

And for some, it was. For others, it was a detour into a medical maze with no exit and no map.

This isn’t about whether transgender people deserve care. They do.

The question is whether we’re giving them good care—or just fast care with bad evidence and even worse incentives.