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Welcome to my Blog

Thank you for stopping by. This space is where I share research, reflections, and practical tools drawn from my experience as a marriage and family therapist.

Are you a couple looking for clarity? A professional curious about the science of relationships? Or simply someone interested in how love and resilience work? I’m glad you’ve found your way here. I can help with that.

Each post is written with one goal in mind: to help you better understand yourself, your partner, and the hidden dynamics that shape human connection.

Grab a coffee (or a notebook), explore what speaks to you, and take what’s useful back into your life and relationships. And if a post sparks a question, or makes you realize you could use more support, I’d love to hear from you.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
~Daniel

P.S.

Feel free to explore the categories below to find past blog posts on the topics that matter most to you. If you’re curious about attachment, navigating conflict, or strengthening intimacy, these archives are a great way to dive deeper into the research and insights that I’ve been sharing for years.

 

Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw

The Naked Return: Why Family Nudism Is Making a Comeback

Most revivals ask you to buy something—vinyl, vintage denim, another “sustainable” hoodie.

Naturism’s pitch is simpler and far more subversive: you already own the outfit. You were born in it, and it still fits.

For decades, clothing has been treated like emotional duct tape: armor against judgment, a billboard for your status, a filter for your insecurities.

The naturist revival suggests something different. The body doesn’t need a disguise. The body is the disguise.

is family nudism becoming a thing?

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Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw

Signs Your Partner Is Emotionally Distant (But Still Loves You)

Not every love story ends with an explosive blowout.

More often it fades the way air leaks from a tire—slowly, quietly, until you’re startled by how flat things feel.

You wake up one morning and realize you haven’t really laughed together in weeks.

Conversations have been whittled down to weather updates and grocery lists. You’re still under the same roof, still sharing a bed, still splitting the bills—but intimacy has thinned until you feel less like partners and more like polite roommates.

This is emotional distance. It isn’t always the death of love, though it often masquerades as such. More often, it’s the nervous system’s survival strategy: a partner shutting down to cope with stress, exhaustion, or the unspoken backlog of resentments.

Love can still be present, flickering in small gestures, even when connection feels faint. Here are a few hopeful signs.

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Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw Family Life and Parenting Daniel Dashnaw

Parents, Memories, and the Strange Lottery of Attachment

You think you’re remembering a golden moment: your toddler, grinning with applesauce on their cheeks, running toward you like a drunken Olympian.

But you’re not just remembering. You’re filtering.

And the filter was bolted into place decades ago, when you were small and depending on parents who either showed up or didn’t.

A study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Perzolli, Arcos, Kerr, Smiley, & Borelli, 2024) confirms what most therapists already suspect:

Your ability to savor joy depends on whether your caregivers were emotional first responders or checked-out landlords.

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Separation & Divorce Daniel Dashnaw Separation & Divorce Daniel Dashnaw

The Quiet Language of Leaving: What Couples Say Before They Walk Away

Love doesn’t usually end with fireworks.

It ends in sentences — short ones, muttered in kitchens or texted at midnight — long before anyone says the word goodbye.

Most relationships don’t explode. They erode.

Not with a dramatic breakup scene, but with a trail of small sentences, tossed off like casual remarks but carrying the weight of exit strategies.

Men and women speak different dialects of dissatisfaction. Women often voice their discontent earlier, in coded phrases that sound ordinary but mean I’m lonely here.

Men, by contrast, tend to bury their unhappiness under silence, cliché, or withdrawal until the words slip out almost by accident.

Neither side is lying. Both are saying, in their own way: I don’t know how to reach you anymore.

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Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw Attachment Issues Daniel Dashnaw

Does Swearing Make You Stronger? The Strange Psychology of Cursing

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.

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What Happy Couples Know Daniel Dashnaw What Happy Couples Know Daniel Dashnaw

Growing Into Your Partner: The Psychology of Long-Term Love

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.

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Can Your “Type” Be Rewired? What Relationship Science Says About Attraction

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.

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Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw

Is My Relationship Really Hopeless? Take the Quiz

“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.

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Couples Therapy Daniel Dashnaw Couples Therapy Daniel Dashnaw

Why Therapy Sometimes Can Save Relationships That Seem Hopeless

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.

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Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw

10 Signs Your Partner Isn’t Terribly Fond of You

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.”

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Extramarital Affairs Daniel Dashnaw Extramarital Affairs Daniel Dashnaw

Why Some Couples Survive Infidelity — and Others Don’t

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?

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Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw Signs of Trouble Daniel Dashnaw

Ozempic Teeth: The Hidden Side Effect You Can’t Ignore

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.

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