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).

Some researchers claim that having sex has sorta been the engine of human history since forever.

Empires rose and fell, religions flourished, fortunes were made and lost — all circling around who’s having it, who isn’t, and who’s lying about it.

Psychologists politely call sex “central to wellbeing” (Laumann et al., 1994). Translation: without it, most people are restless, irritable, and not fun at parties.

But what about the people who never ever have sex?

A massive new study of nearly half a million adults in the UK and Australia suggests that lifelong sexual inactivity isn’t just about being unlucky on Tinder.

It’s tied to genes, geography, inequality, and — here comes the punchline — higher intelligence (Wesseldijk et al., 2025).

It’s the kind of headline that makes you choke on your lingonberry jam: Swedish teenage girls recruited as assassins, carrying napalm firebombs in gang wars.

Once upon a time, Sweden’s exports were Volvos and ABBA.

Now it’s teenage girls ferrying Molotov cocktails across Stockholm suburbs.

The question we can’t dodge — the one policymakers and parents alike should be asking — is: what’s happening in these girls’ families?

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.

Cummington, Massachusetts, is one of those towns people like to call “tucked away.”

Tucked away from what, exactly, is never clear. Presumably, civilization.

But being tucked away does not protect you from the things that really matter—namely, water, snow, and the sky itself deciding to crush you.

For a town of only 800 people, Cummington has three very promising ways to be destroyed: flood, blizzard, or microburst.

Each has already auditioned in nearby towns, which means it’s really only a matter of scheduling before Cummington gets its turn.

Defiance doesn’t always roar.

More often it whispers: a pause before you nod, a question when everyone else is silent, the simple act of not betraying yourself for someone else’s comfort.

I did not learn this lesson in a classroom.

I learned it in survival. Childhood sexual abuse fractures memory, dulls empathy, and teaches the brutal truth that hurt people hurt people. Those who never heal can often turn their pain outward.

But even in the darkest places, another truth flickers: you can resist.

You can hold one thread of yourself intact. Sometimes that thread is the only thing that keeps you alive long enough to grow into someone who can say “no” out loud.

Couples therapy is never just two people in conversation.

With Iranian couples, you quickly discover the chairs are already full: qeyrat (masculine honor), namus (family honor tied to women’s bodies), centuries of law, and the voice of a mother-in-law who somehow materializes even across time zones.

They don’t speak directly, but they dictate the script.

“They don’t speak, but they dictate the script.”

What Namus Really Means

For centuries, marriage has been cast as the cornerstone of happiness, the cultural apex of adulthood.

But new research tells us the real psychological boost comes much earlier—and with far less ceremony.

A longitudinal study across Germany and the U.K. shows that life satisfaction rises when people enter a relationship, peaks when they move in together, and stays elevated long after (El-Awad et al., 2025).

Marriage, by comparison, barely shifts the graph.

This isn’t to say marriage has lost its meaning.

Cohabitation may provide the measurable boost, but marriage is one of humanity’s oldest rituals. It is gravitas, continuity, and a public vow. If partnership is the daily bread of happiness, marriage is the ritual feast.

Marriage retreats aren’t cheap, but studies suggest they may deliver faster, longer-lasting results than months of weekly sessions — if you’re brave enough to show up.

So you’re wondering if intensive couples therapy is worth the money. Fair question.

Spending thousands of dollars on a marriage retreat can feel like betting your relationship on a long weekend with a stranger in a cardigan.

Yet the truth is, weekly therapy often feels like driving with the parking brake on — steady progress, sure, but painfully slow.

Intensives, by contrast, promise a fast track: a weekend or week where you and your partner are locked in a room long enough to either rediscover your love… or your lawyer’s number.

And yes, the research suggests that these compressed sessions can work — sometimes spectacularly so.

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.