The image of the midlife crisis is so familiar that most of us picture the same scene. Someone buys a sports car. Someone has an affair. Someone walks out of a stable life with a suitcase and a wild look in their eye. It makes for good drama. It ...Read More
He asks me again where I flew in from. I tell him Singapore. He nods like it's the first time he's heard it, then asks the same question a different way fifteen minutes later: when did I get here, how long am I staying. I answer it again. For ...Read More
The loneliest people at work are rarely the ones eating lunch alone. They are, more often, the ones who never eat lunch alone, who get tagged in the group photo, who are texted about the offsite, who are described by colleagues as great to have on the team. ...Read More
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