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Psychology does not say that every cheerful person is secretly lonely. But it does give us a useful way to understand one particular pattern: some people become so practiced at keeping the emotional weather light that their happiness starts to function less like a mood and more like ...Read More
The trophy husband is a marketing term before he is a person. Streaming services have discovered him, lifestyle columns have profiled him, and a generation raised on the language of boss energy has started joking, half-seriously, about wanting one. The men actually living inside this arrangement, though, are not ...Read More
There is a particular kind of adult who reaches midlife with no close friends. By the standard cultural reading, this configuration is interpreted as a social deficit. The adult is, in the available cultural vocabulary, lonely. They are isolated. They have, in some implied way, failed to maintain ...Read More
In almost any room of more than a few people, there is a particular person whose presence carries a weight that the cultural framing does not easily account for. They are not, on examination, the loudest person in the room. They are not the most credentialed. They are ...Read More
There is a generational argument that has played out at countless kitchen tables for the past decade. A baby boomer says something about elbow grease, personal responsibility, and the dignity of putting in the hours. A millennial or Gen Z relative rolls their eyes. The boomer feels dismissed. ...Read More
The first month of retirement is often quite nice. Then something stranger starts to happen, and almost nobody warns you about it. It isn't loneliness, exactly. It's something more specific. You start to notice, slowly, that the people you assumed were your friends for the last twenty years aren't ringing. ...Read More