For centuries, swearing has been condemned as vulgar, lazy, or proof of a limited vocabulary. But new research suggests your grandmother was dead wrong.

Swearing doesn’t just make you sound more human—it may also make you stronger, more motivated, and more emotionally engaged.

Yes, really. That four-letter word might just be a performance enhancer.

Romantic comedies sell us the myth of instant compatibility: find “the one,” cue fireworks, cue happily ever after. But real couples will tell you something else.

They’ll say, “We weren’t perfect at first. We learned each other. We grew together.”

So what does research actually say about growing into your partner? That’s not just a sentimental notion. It’s one of the core ways long-term love works.

In the 1990s, psychologists Sandra Murray and John Holmes discovered that happy couples don’t view each other with cold-eyed objectivity.

They see each other better than reality. These “positive illusions” turn flaws into tolerable quirks:

• Stubborn becomes “persistent.”

• Quiet becomes “thoughtful.”

• Messy becomes “creative.”

This isn’t denial—it’s generosity.

And couples who practice it report greater satisfaction and commitment (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1997). Long-term love depends, in part, on the ability to soften your gaze.

We all think we have a “type.” Maybe it’s tall and outdoorsy. Maybe it’s the witty bookworm. Maybe it’s someone with an unnerving ability to fold fitted sheets.

Whatever the list looks like, we treat it as if it’s set in stone.

But what if your type isn’t destiny? What if it’s more like clay—malleable, rewritable, and shaped by experience?

That’s exactly what a new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found.

Researchers didn’t just ask people about their romantic preferences—they actually rewired them. And the results tell us a lot about how attraction, perception, and relationship satisfaction really work.

“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.

Hopelessness in marriage feels heavy, like winter that won’t end. You stop expecting warmth, stop checking the forecast.

Couples walk into therapy like that: sitting far apart on the couch, arms crossed, convinced the thaw will never come.

And yet — they showed up. That’s the tell.

If you were truly hopeless, you’d be in a lawyer’s office, not a therapist’s.

Even at the lowest point, some small ember of hope got you through the door.

Couples therapy’s job is to treat that ember like a pilot light: small, fragile, but capable of lighting the whole furnace again.

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.”

Esther Perel likes to remind us that infidelity offends the human sense of the sacred so much that it got not one, but two slots on the Ten Commandments.

One says don’t do it. The other says don’t even think about it. That’s how seriously the ancients took cheating — it wasn’t just bad behavior, it was considered cosmic vandalism.

Infidelity is less like a “mistake” and more like a meteor strike.

It doesn’t just wound; it redraws the map. Couples talk about life in two eras — the before and the after.

Some relationships don’t make it across that fault line. They end in slammed doors, divided houses, and the dull paperwork of divorce.

Others, bafflingly, survive.

They pick through the rubble, bandage their wounds, and, in time, rebuild. Not the same house, mind you — something different. Sometimes sturdier. Sometimes stranger.

So what separates the couples who collapse from the ones who crawl forward together?

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.

It starts with a glance. Not the quick, casual kind, but the one that lingers—measuring, scanning, assessing. For most women, it’s a familiar experience.

A new study in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology confirms that this gaze is more than harmless attention: it sparks measurable anxiety about personal safety.

Yet the findings also reveal a paradox.

That spike in safety anxiety doesn’t always dampen women’s choices to self-sexualize, especially when the man is described as attractive or high in status. In short: risk and reward collide in the space of a single look.

Itzhak Bentov thought the heart and brain were tuning forks for the cosmos. Nikola Tesla insisted everything could be explained through vibration. John C. Lilly floated in darkness until he was convinced the universe was being run by “cosmic programmers.”

Edgar Cayce shut his eyes, went into a trance, and spoke about health and Atlantis in the same sitting. Jacques Vallée looked at UFOs and decided they were less about aliens and more about the human imagination.

Put them all together and you don’t really get a coherent school of thought, do you?

You get a strange constellation of characters — brilliant, reckless, often wrong, but unwilling to accept the idea that consciousness was nothing more than neurons firing in the dark.

Most UFO researchers chase hardware: saucers, propulsion systems, and the occasional green alien with big eyes. Jacques Vallée went after something stranger — the way these sightings reflect the human mind.

Born in France in 1939, Vallée trained as an astronomer and computer scientist. He worked on the technology that would eventually become the internet, which should have earned him a safe life as a respectable scientist.

Instead, he took a sharp turn into the murky business of UFOs. But Vallée wasn’t interested in proving that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials.

His heresy was more subtle: UFOs might be real enough as experiences, but they were also psychological, symbolic events — mirrors more than machines.

While Tesla fried eggs on coils and John Lilly floated with dolphins, Edgar Cayce just took a nap. That was his whole method in a nutshell.

He lay down, went into a trance, and started talking. And for reasons that baffled his family and most of the scientific community, people listened.

Born in 1877 in rural Kentucky, Cayce became famous as the “Sleeping Prophet” — a man who could, while unconscious, diagnose illnesses, prescribe cures, and occasionally wander off into Atlantis.

He wasn’t a trained doctor, he wasn’t a laboratory scientist, and he wasn’t much of a showman either.

He was a soft-spoken, church-going man who looked more like your kindly uncle than a psychic celebrity.

Which made it all the stranger when thousands of people wrote him letters begging him to bestow attention upon them and heal them from afar.