Gaslighting has become the kale of relationship advice—everywhere, overhyped, occasionally misused, and sometimes leaves a bitter aftertaste.

These days, if your partner forgets oat milk, you can call it gaslighting.

If they say, “I never said that,” you might decide it’s gaslighting.

If they forget the plot of Succession—clearly gaslighting.

But here’s the trouble: when everything is gaslighting, nothing is.

And that matters, because gaslighting isn’t just everyday bickering.

It’s a systematic pattern of emotional manipulation and psychological abuse. Misusing the term trivializes what survivors endure.

There’s a new star in the family travel universe, and no, it’s not your color-coded itinerary or the Pinterest board titled “Dream Vacation 2026.”

It’s Grandma. Or Grandpa. Or both.

The Wall Street Journal recently spotlighted the rise of skip-gen vacations — also called skip-generation travel — where grandparents whisk grandchildren away while parents stay home.

Yes, you heard that right: family travel without the parents.

“Nice guys finish last.”

It’s a phrase that lives rent-free on Reddit threads and TikTok captions, usually next to screenshots of men lamenting why women always choose jerks.

A new study in the Journal of Research in Personality backs up the complaint—at least partly.

Researchers surveyed 3,800 adults across Australia, Denmark, and Sweden. They found that agreeable men—those who are kind, patient, and cooperative—were slightly less likely to be in relationships.

By contrast, extroverted men did better, and anxious men struggled most.

For women, agreeableness made no difference, shyness wasn’t a penalty, and being a little neurotic actually helped (Fors Connolly et al., 2025).

Here’s the twist: once a couple forms, the very qualities that slowed men down in dating predict greater relationship satisfaction.

It’s not just your imagination—obituaries are getting sharper, funnier, and far more candid.

Families who once followed the safe script of “beloved parent, devoted spouse” are now publishing tributes that read more like exposés.

It feels less like mourning and more like cultural rebellion. In a world where résumés and Instagram captions are polished to perfection, the radical honest obituary cuts through with startling clarity.

What Are Radical Honest Obituaries?

Most obituaries smooth over flaws. They emphasize kindness, family, and tradition, while quietly ignoring cruelty, neglect, or addiction. Radical honest obituaries break that rule. They highlight what actually happened—sometimes tenderly, more often than not, savagely.

And because they violate the social contract of death—be kind, or be silent—they go viral. These obits aren’t just memorials; they’re also moral reckonings.

“She never met a stranger.” Four words in a small-town obituary that said more than any résumé. Multiply that by 38 million, and you begin to see how Americans really define a life.

A sweeping linguistic analysis of 38 million American obituaries, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that when pressed to define a life, Americans consistently emphasize tradition and benevolence.

Less power and thrills, more casseroles and caretaking.

In other words: no one cares that you were regional manager of the Northeast office—what they remember is that you loved your grandchildren and showed up to every Sunday service.

What Do 38 Million American Obituaries Teach Us About Legacy?

“Unconditional love” has a nice ring at the altar.

It sounds romantic, eternal, and vaguely saintly — as if the mere act of saying I do dissolves all conditions.

But here’s the truth: marital love is not unconditional.

Nor should it be.

The idea of loving a spouse “no matter what” is seductive.

It promises safety, permanence, and a Hollywood ending.

Yet research — and countless divorce filings — tell a different story.

Adult love thrives on reciprocity, trust, and boundaries.

Without those conditions, marriage collapses under the weight of unmet needs and unchecked harm.

“Conditional love” has always been cast as the villain in the love story.

It sounds transactional, cold, and about as sexy as a spreadsheet. People assume it means: I’ll love you only if you vacuum, stay thin, and don’t embarrass me at dinner parties.

But here’s the unromantic truth: conditional love is the only kind of love adults actually manage.

Without conditions, marriages don’t become poetic — they become chaotic.

If unconditional love were real, people would be marrying Labradors.

Loyal, forgiving, never asking questions.

But you can’t argue about the mortgage with a Labrador, and that’s where the fantasy collapses.

This is my unapologetic defense of conditional love.

If you still crave the fairy tale of “love no matter what,” I’ve already written its obituary here: The Myth of Unconditional Love in Marriage.

When you become the invisible spouse, it isn’t about vanity.

It isn’t about wanting roses every Friday or dramatic love notes slipped into lunchboxes. It’s about something far quieter and lonelier: the sense that the person who once saw you best no longer sees you at all.

Marriage, at least in its glossy brochure form, is supposed to be two people building a life together — a duet, a partnership, a home.

But when neurodiversity is part of the family landscape, marriage can start to look less like a duet and more like a never-ending group project: therapy schedules, insurance fights, endless paperwork.

And if you’re not careful, one person becomes the project manager while the other fades, quite literally, into the background.

If you scroll through Reddit threads or late-night parenting groups on Facebook, you’ll see the refrain over and over: “I feel invisible in my own house.”

Not unloved. Not abandoned. Just unseen, like the ghost of a partner who still does the dishes but whose inner life has been erased.

Families raising a neurodivergent child — whether autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, or otherwise — quickly learn that the whole household shifts around that child’s needs.

Parents juggle therapy appointments, meltdowns, calls from teachers, and endless forms.

Meanwhile, the sibling without a diagnosis is often standing just offstage, quietly adapting. Sometimes they become protectors, advocates, even the comic relief.

Sometimes they carry resentment or that peculiar sense that childhood was cut short. Many carry both.

One adult sibling put it plainly: “I love my brother, but I was raised as his third parent, not as myself.”

When someone comes out after decades of marriage, it can feel like the ground gives way under both partners’ feet.

The spouse who discloses often experiences relief at finally living authentically. The other may feel blindsided, betrayed, or as though the marriage’s history has been rewritten overnight.

This is not as rare as people think.

Research on mixed-orientation marriages (where one partner identifies as straight and the other as LGBTQ+) suggests late-life coming out is a significant, if under-discussed, phenomenon (Buxton, 2001; Pew Research Center, 2013).

Many older adults delayed disclosure due to stigma, cultural pressures, or religious expectations. Others experienced what psychologist Lisa Diamond (2008) calls sexual fluidity — the natural evolution of identity across the lifespan.

Here are ten signs, drawn from research and lived experience, that may point to a spouse wrestling with identity. These are not smoking guns — there is no neat checklist for human complexity — but they can offer insight into patterns couples often recognize only in hindsight.

It’s 10 p.m. Your spouse has just posted what looks — to you — like a press release on your family’s private business.

Or maybe they’re scrolling TikTok while you’re baring your soul. You feel dismissed.

They feel confused. Suddenly, the marital argument isn’t about the dishwasher, the finances, or the in-laws. It’s about Facebook.

If one of you is autistic, the fight isn’t really about the post. It’s about two brains running on different Wi-Fi networks.

Ted Bundy got marriage proposals in prison. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” had fangirls camping outside the courthouse.

And today? TikTok is the new courtroom balcony, where millions publicly swoon over killers in slick edits set to sad-girl audio.

There’s a word for this: hybristophilia — sexual attraction to criminals. It sounds like a rare orchid, but psychologists use it to describe a very old phenomenon: finding danger desirable.

A recent study confirms TikTok is fueling it, showing that actively engaging with videos that romanticize criminals predicts higher hybristophilia scores among young women.

Personality traits like psychopathy and Machiavellianism were the strongest predictors (Treggia et al., 2024). Simply scrolling past Bundy edits doesn’t count. Clicking “like” does.