The Aging-as-a-Virtue Award: The Boroughs (Netflix)

Name the last show you’ve seen that features a hero over the age of 60. Drawing a blank? It’s not your fault—the media’s modus operandi is to equate heroism with youthfulness. Netflix’s The Boroughs flips this stereotype on its head.

With a star-studded lead cast, all 70 or older, we follow Sam Cooper’s (Alfred Molina) experience as he reluctantly moves into a senior living community in New Mexico after the death of his wife. But a series of strange events suggests that this is no ordinary retirement community.

As Sam navigates grief, new friendships, and a new identity, he joins forces with his neighbors to solve and resolve the community mystery. Overcoming obstacles like age discrimination and self-doubts, the group peels back the layers of the strange occurrences. At the root of the mystery is a societal fear of aging.

The show highlights what researcher Margie Lachman calls “crystallized intelligence”: the culmination of life experience, memory, and know-how. In The Boroughs, that turns out to be just as heroic as super human strength or the ability to fly. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Purpose Award: Death by Lightning (Netflix)

History has already told us how Death by Lightning ends: Charles Guiteau will assassinate President James Garfield in 1881. But why? That’s one of the questions explored by the series, and it finds motivation in a sense of purpose–how purpose forms and how people come to cross-purposes.

Garfield (Michael Shannon) is principled and drawn reluctantly into a presidential contest he entered to nominate someone else. Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), meanwhile, is disturbingly sympathetic: charming, articulate, and desperate to do something meaningful with his life. Despite failed ventures, including a stint at the Oneida free-love commune, he remains convinced greatness awaits him. Believing his campaigning secured Garfield’s victory, he expects a government position to confirm his worth.

As their stories converge, Garfield finds purpose in his presidency: fighting corruption while supporting education and equal opportunity. Guiteau pursues a reward he feels he deserves, an entitlement that leads to tragedy.

In these ways, Garfield and Guiteau offer sharply contrasting answers to what makes a life meaningful, and watching their stories unfold side by side, we see how differently the desire to matter can play out.

Who you really ought to be watching closely is Garfield’s Vice President, Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman). A comfortable beneficiary of the political machine, he becomes an unlikely source of hope as the story goes on. Offerman makes him funny, flawed, and increasingly affecting as the demands of office begin to collide with old loyalties.

In a political landscape that can leave us cynical–in both the 19th century and the 21st–the series makes room for something more hopeful: the possibility that even an unlikely person can rise to the occasion, if they know why they need to rise. – Aurelia Santos

The Empathy Award: Envidiosa (Netflix)

When almost-40-year-old Vicky (Griselda Siciliani) breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, she is driven to embark upon a journey of self-discovery.

At first, Vicky is just looking for a replacement for her boyfriend—but the problem is that her compulsive comparisons with other women sabotage attempts to connect with other people. (Indeed, the name of this Argentinian show, Envidiosa, means “envious.”) Vicky is self-absorbed and yet at the same time she doesn’t have a strong sense of her own self.

We see this vividly in her hilarious sessions with her therapist. When, for example, she goes on an envious rant about a friend’s milestone, she is forced to confront the quiet, uncomfortable realization that she never once asked how her friend actually felt. In short, Vicky is not a polished role model—and over the course of four seasons, we see her empathy grow through the painful process of unlearning self-centeredness.

Personally, I see Envidiosa as an opportunity to question how we show up for others’ joys and struggles, and I take it as an invitation to reflect: How can I empathize with the ups and downs of those around me? Envidiosa is a funny and at times embarrassingly relatable story about trying to become a more empathic human being and friend. — Criss Cuervo

The Zest-for-Life Award: The Hawk (Netflix)

In The Hawk, washed-up professional golfer Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins (Will Ferrell) has made a miracle comeback into the PGA tour—this time around, facing a tough competitor in his son, Lance (Jimmy Tatro).

It’s a screwball comedy, full of dirty jokes and a rapid-fire rapport between Lonnie and his not-quite-ex-wife, Stacy (Molly Shannon). A makeshift-caddy he “picked up at Walmart” (while chatting up the parking lot, from his camper van) adds to the fun, serving up an unlikely duo that seem happy just to be alive.

Even when he’s pretty down and out, Lonnie is looking on the bright side of things. Everything is done with gusto—he chats up the golf ball before each swing, he devours plates of Buffalo Wild Wings, he plays mini golf with his son and makes it a full-on competition.

“Son, never play golf angry,” he tells Lance. For Lonnie, life is all about golf—and golf is all about fun. Why spend all your time on something if you aren’t doing it for the joy of it?

I especially love Lonnie’s adoration for his estranged wife, a firecracker in her own right. In episode four, when the Hawk crashes his son’s engagement party–yes, you read that right–and then attempts a getaway with his caddie in the van, Stacy hurls the cake at them, along with a string of expletives.

It doesn’t even faze him. “You gotta love the passion!” Lonnie gushes. “That is one hot tamale!” — Hope Reese

The Bridging Differences Award: Heated Rivalry

Heated Rivalry follows stick-crossed lovers Shane and Ilya as they figure out how to be intimate within the highly competitive, homophobic environment of professional hockey.

At first, Shane and Ilya swap fluids more readily than emotions. But over the course of six episodes, the two learn to love across gaps in culture, language, and experience. In one pivotal scene, Shane invites Ilya to speak vulnerably about family dynamics in Ilya’s native Russian—despite not understanding a word of it.

That works because Shane does not focus attention on himself. Instead, he stays present on the phone, serving as a witness to Ilya’s visceral emotions. Their connection lies in felt care, in hearing the texture of another’s heartbreak. 

In similar fashion, Ilya grounds Shane in stressful encounters. He supports Shane through panic without wallowing in his lover’s fear and entices Shane to relish pleasures outside of straight standards. As a couple, they help each other explore complex parts of themselves. We see a similar process unfold in another couple in the show, as they learn to respect each other’s different needs.

People might tune into Heated Rivalry for locker room towel drops and HBO’s glossy cinematography. They should stay to see a couple learn to love each other’s differences. The show exemplifies how bridging differences, at its best, means supporting others to more fully encounter themselves, and how in the process our relationships can grow.

With plenty of additional homoerotic stick-and-ball games to pull on from the novels of Rachel Reid, the next season of Heated Rivalry is expected to air on HBO Max and Canada’s Crave in Spring 2027. — Luke Brown

The Integrity Award: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO)

The monstrously successful HBO series Game of Thrones famously tossed out a lot of good-and-evil fantasy tropes to tell a morally complicated story of how power corrupts even the best people. A prequel called House of the Dragon shares that worldview.

That’s why a new prequel called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms came as something of a surprise to fans. Unlike the other two series, this is not a story about a struggle for power. Instead, it focuses on a rather naive, not-too-bright “hedge knight” named Duncan (Peter Claffey) seeking to be hired by whatever lord will take him. Though Duncan is taller and stronger than most, he’s touchingly childlike as he tries to find his place in the merry old kingdoms of Westeros.

The first two episodes are shockingly funny and charming, as Duncan acquires a squire in the form of a little bald boy going by the name Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), and fumblingly tries to enter a jousting tournament. And then Duncan finds himself on a collision course with the great and powerful of Westeros. When violence finally comes, there’s nothing casual about it. We feel the force of every blow, the tragedy of every death, and the erosion of Duncan’s innocence.

I’m giving A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms the award for integrity, but I can’t tell you why without spoiling the ending. Let’s just say that the series turns out to be the story of how one simple young man discovers what is most important to him—and finds the courage to stick to that path even in the face of isolation, temptations, and threats. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Redemption Award: Lucky (Apply TV)


How do you exit a life you were born into? 


That’s the question behind Lucky, starring Anya Taylor-Joy. Lucky was raised by her con-artist father and taught the “family business” from a young age—but when we meet her, she navigating internal conflict with the life she’s been told to live and the life she wants for herself.

Her desire to quit is complicated by her marriage to Cary, the son of a ruthless mob leader, who was also socialized into a life of crime. The couple plan one final con as their exit strategy, but it goes terribly wrong. Lucky sets out to resolve the botched plan, reconcile her marriage, and protect both her life and her father’s.

Her intelligence is put to the test as she puts the pieces together, connects the dots, and outsmarts her rivals. In the process she discovers her own virtue—and that the intelligence which made her a successful con artist can also set her free.

Through the course of the series, she realizes that she does not have to pay for the sins of her father. Having never been given the opportunity for self-determination, she makes peace in the best way she knows how and chooses a new path. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Belonging Award: Murderbot (Apple TV)

The Murderbot Diaries are a series of science-fiction novellas by Martha Wells, about a genderless, robotic soldier who manages to achieve free will. Since discovery will result in deactivation and since it doesn’t like humans very much anyway, Murderbot conceals its freedom of mind and consumes a lot of human-made entertainment inside its own head, even as it externally follows every order given to it by the evil corporation that owns it. Murderbot even has a favorite TV show: the Star-Trek-like Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

As a result of this isolation, the novellas are built almost entirely around its memorable inner monologues, with a voice that is by turns snarky, vulnerable, cold-blooded, disgusted, and puzzled. One of the things that makes these books distinctive is that Murderbot is not Pinocchio—it has no wish to become a “real boy.” It doesn’t want a gender, or the same feelings and drives as people. It just wants to be itself—and to have that difference respected.

While the Apple TV show based on the books is not quite that original or interesting, Murderbot retains its focus on finding the balance between belonging and difference. When we meet Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård), he’s been hired to protect a group of polyamorous hippie scientists who hail from a utopian colony that exists independently of the corporations that rule the rest of the galaxy.

They are Murderbot’s first encounter with humans not shaped by dehumanizing hyper-capitalistic values, and they observe Murderbot in a way the corporate humans cannot. Over the course of the first season, they begin to realize that there is more to Murderbot than meets the eye, and they learn to see and appreciate Murderbot on its own terms. But what’s crucial is not that they perceive the humanity in Murderbot—it’s that Murderbot sees the humanity (and the goodness) in them.

In time, it becomes an accepted part of their society—without becoming more like them. Even so, the first season concludes on a tough-minded, melancholy note, as Murderbot itself can’t quite feel like it belongs. Will it someday find a place among these crunchy idealists? Stay tuned: The second season is coming in 2027. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Difficult-Human-Appreciation Award: Pluribus (Apple TV)

Have you ever been among people but you didn’t feel part of the crowd? Like they were in on a joke that you just couldn’t get?

Welcome to Carol Sturka’s world. The science-fiction premise of Pluribus is that an alien virus transforms humanity into one big happy hive mind—everyone except Carol and 13 other people who seem to have immunity.

Even among those remaining individuals, though, Carol stands out as a malcontent. We sense that she’s been a fish out of water for her whole life.

Indeed, not every viewer will find Carol relatable or likable. When we first meet her, she’s at a bookstore event promoting her highly successful romantasy series. With her fans, she’s charming, funny, and kind. When she gets into a limo after a big sendoff by readers, the drivers asks if she’s famous.

“That depends,” Carol replies. “Are you a big fan of mindless crap?”

In short, Carol hates herself, her work, and her readers. And as we discover, her personality is snarky, uptight, stubborn, and uncompromising. When the virus hits, it’s an apocalyptic event, but Carol doesn’t change one bit—and her traits become both a blessing and a curse. The whole world wants to be kind to her, but Carol can’t accept kindness. That drives her to fight back. And that’s what ultimately makes her the hero of the story.

In the end, Pluribus is a very Greater Good thought experiment. It takes prosociality to its limits and finds that a total togetherness, empathy, and cooperation to the exclusion of selfishness, crankiness, and boundaries is a self-destructive dystopia, not a utopia. The show seems to argue that humanity needs difficult people like Carol to survive, and so invites us to appreciate what the Carols of the world have to offer. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Deep Listening Award: Shrinking (AppleTV)

In Shrinking, talking and listening are the name of the game. Jimmy (Jason Segel) is a widowed psychotherapist who helps patients navigate anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and other ailments as he himself is floundering.

But he’s not alone. His teenage daughter, overbearing-but-lovable neighbors, and coworker-friends (with Harrison Ford as the curmudgeonly head of the practice) are all there to help him when his life goes off the rails after his wife was killed by a drunk driver.

In its three-season run, the series is heavy-handed with its use of therapy-speak among the whole gang, whether between therapist-to-patient, therapist-to-daughter, or therapist-to-therapist. Characters “feel seen.” More times than I can count, they tell each other “I hear you.” We witness, in detail, exchanges inside the therapy office—and outside of it, in a rogue practice known as “Jimmying,” where therapy takes place at such venues as, for instance, the boxing ring.

In other words, there’s a lot of “deep listening”: the practice of being present, open, and empathic with another person, in a way that goes beyond just hearing and understanding words. In his grief, Jimmy himself is not always a perfect deep listener. He tends to talk more than a typical therapist, and frequently injects himself into the discussion. Shrinking isn’t about perfection—it’s about struggling to connect and growing in the process. – Hope Reese

But a question has lingered: How might a chimpanzee friendship affect antisocial acts?

In a new study that uses fruit as the loot, UC Berkeley researchers found that chimps steal less from their friends, and that friendship status affected the emotional expression of both victim and thieves. Closely bonded chimps swiped pineapple pieces from one another less frequently than those with weaker relationships. Additionally, victims were quicker to calm down when the thief was a friend, and thieves showed less hostility when stealing from a bonded pal than from a non-friend.

The new research deepens our understanding of the emotional underpinnings of our social lives, said Oded Ritov, the paper’s first author and a Berkeley psychology Ph.D. student.

“Collaborative relationships are important for our well-being, health, and survival,” said Ritov, who works with Berkeley’s Social Origins Lab. “Increasingly, we’re understanding that this isn’t something that’s unique to us, but that other animals have friends, as well.”

The paper was published online in September and will appear in the November issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Scientists are sometimes hesitant to describe an apparently close relationship between chimps as akin to human friendship, arguing that we can’t grasp their cognitive and emotional complexity. To identify those who showed signs of a close relationship, researchers observed 26 chimps for more than 800 hours at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda. The team documented which chimps appeared to be closely bonded—like friends—by taking note of their grooming patterns, daily interactions, and how regularly they were within arm’s reach of others.

Then they set up two rooms. One contained a “victim” chimp with three trays baited with pineapple. Researchers attached a rope to the trays and led it into the other room, where a second chimp—the thief—could either leave the rope alone or yank it to steal the pineapple.

Chimps stole in 70% of trials with non-friends, compared with 61% of trials with friends. While 9 percentage points may not seem large, each chimp experienced both friend and non-friend conditions, a methodological technique that leads to a higher degree of confidence that the difference is meaningful and not just random chance.

“Ours is the first study to show that they’re able to hold back antisocial behavior with their friends,” Ritov said.

Researchers also measured how the victims responded to being stolen from by evaluating their stomping, fist-pounding, and screeching. Victims were initially angrier when friends stole from them but quickly moderated their feelings compared with when non-friends stole from them.

The thieves’ behavior also changed. When non-friends were the thieves, the thieves expressed negative emotions for much longer, suggesting they viewed the interaction as more hostile.

“This suggests that there may be mutual expectations in chimps from both sides of the friendship, which makes it seem more like the complex friendships we see in humans,” Ritov said.

Jan Engelmann, an associate professor of psychology and principal investigator with the Social Origins Lab, said previous work has shown relationship-specific intentions in nonhuman primates. But human friendships are about more than special intentions, he added—they’re about stronger expectations.

“We expect more of our friends,” said Engelmann, a senior author of the paper. “These findings really deepen our understanding of the evolutionary roots of friendships. This is, to my knowledge, the first evidence showing that also chimpanzees expect and maybe demand special treatment from their friends. These kinds of social expectations might form the basis of human moral principles.”

The paper adds to Ritov’s work that focuses on the evolution of human behavior and how morals and norms are part of our core being, traceable to other animals. He has recently studied whether nonhuman animals have a sense of fairness and is broadly interested in how emotions unfold across cultures and species. 

“We think that these expectations might be the basic building blocks of the larger-scale cooperation we see in humans,” Ritov said. “The expectations that chimpanzees have from their friends or close collaborative partners might have scaled up to more generalized expectations for how we should treat each other.”

This article was originally published on Berkeley News. Read the original article.

Mary was not only my then-boyfriend’s mother, but she also became an important maternal figure when my own family life felt unstable. I accompanied her on weekly grocery store runs that included stops at Marshall’s and Dollar Tree, where I’d watch her study the prices of everything from spices to bath products. When she saw me marveling at her meticulousness, she would share wise tidbits about how she looked for deals.

Our trips often ended with a late-afternoon stop at a Vietnamese restaurant, where she treated me to a warm bowl of beef pho. She’d share what she was excited to make for dinner; I was, of course, welcome to join. In these seemingly mundane afternoons, I felt cared for without the rush of obligations. Mary stopped time for me.

Last November, Mary left behind a world of loved ones after living with cancer for 14 months. From her living room to emergency stays in the hospital, I spent almost every single day of her fight by her side. Yet in my loneliest hours, I agonize over whether I fully cherished our last months together. Did I hug her enough, and did I tell her enough how much she means to me? These questions haunted me in the months afterward.

To move on, I began seeking grief rituals. I attended other public funerals, spoke to death doulas, and sought advice from nondenominational chaplains. I subscribed to self-help newsletters that cover how our modern society lives with religion and spirituality. But all of it felt nebulous, and I remained unmoored from my purpose. Without taking care of Mary, without being her figurative child, who was I?

Funny enough, it wasn’t religion that rescued me; it was Pokémon Pokopia. On the surface, it is a new social simulation game featuring the iconic Japanese creatures who first took the world by storm in 1996. I first heard of its arrival on social media through gamers who raved that it was going to be the best game of the year. I grew up on Pokémon titles, so I recognized it as a distraction from my personal reckoning with abandonment.

But what began as a spur-of-the-moment decision to try what 4 million other gamers were playing turned into a transformative journey exploring what I want my life to mean when it feels as if I have been left behind.

Pokopia falls in the “cozy” game genre, beloved for its warm colors, gentle atmospheres, and easy missions. Released in March, Pokopia stars Ditto, an amorphous purple blob Pokémon that uses its transformative abilities to imitate its human trainer and rebuild a curious post-apocalyptic world devoid of human beings and Pokémon. Ditto first awakens in a cave, and as the story unfolds, the creature looks out at a once-grassy environment of parched earth and litter. It meets the first Pokémon, the hydrophilic Squirtle that teaches Ditto how to spray water across the thirsty soil to bring it back to life; it is also the only other semblance of a survivor in this barren land.

From here the story gains momentum: As Ditto, your mission is to get the environment back to habitable levels and bring back Pokémon creatures that are presumably hiding. Gradually, the unfinished railroad tracks and cracked concrete steps of a staircase stop looking like signs of a catastrophe but rather fixable problems.

I wasn’t alone in trying to find meaning after a loss or trauma. Scholars have explored a variety of constructs around the meaning of life. Psychologists Login S. George and Crystal L. Park articulate a three-part framework in their 2010 article, grounded in comprehension, purpose, and mattering, as a basis for assessing our judgments and feelings as we find meaning after loss.

At first, meaning seemed absent. I sat glued to my Nintendo Switch for three hours on my first day of play. I came up for air only when my console told me that I was low on battery. Yet I did not feel depleted; I had finished restoring the first environment in the Pokopia world to verdant levels with lush berry trees and waterfalls.

As I built new habitats, I met new Pokémon. A Charmander emerged among tall grass. A Cubone spawned from a gravesite surrounded by wildflowers. Every new Pokémon that resurfaced charmed me with their excitement to be back home, scampering across the grass to greet other familiar faces. In my mind, I thanked these creatures for turning to me. Without Ditto’s help—my help—a world of Pokemon creatures ceases to exist, fated to disappear alongside humanity.

After a Pokémon spawns in its revived habitat, it awakens with some surprise. “Huh?” “What?” Some of them startle and put up their defenses in front of Ditto, who then coaxes them into the reality that they are back in a safe, familiar home. Often this realization gives them relief. “Wow, you did all of this? Thank you!”

Some of the Pokémon seem more wistful. They hold on to items or articles of clothing that their trainer used to wear, like the oversized Tangrowth (a large Pokémon with thick, shaggy vines that cover its entire body) that wears a pair of glasses much too small for him that gamers can infer are its trainer’s. Other creatures comment on Ditto’s human-like appearance (“You look like your human!”). These private conversations between Pokémon affirm that Ditto, who is also piecing together where its own trainer has gone, is doing something meaningful.

In 2023, game scholars Karam Eum and Young Yim Doh explored how bereaved adults shaped a meaning-making experience by playing video games with narratives that focus on loss and grief. Subjects spent a week playing two different video games and kept a diary where they shared specific game scenes that were particularly meaningful. While the games did evoke sad memories, participants also recalled positive memories in their pre- and post-loss lives, be it a funny conversation or a serendipitous moment shared with close ones who are still alive.

In the real world, the player behind the console, I, too, wonder where my beloved human has gone. I see Mary in the pink rose bouquets at grocery stores, and I smell her in the fragrant bone broth that wafts from the next-door apartment unit. In some of these most visceral disruptions, I feel my loss painfully.

But even in these heaviest of days, I surrender to the ordinary surprises that come up: a call from an old neighbor asking if I can help make meals for a family in need, or a stray cat mewing at my window to open the building’s front gate. I am startled out of a detached state, and I am moved to help, the way I got to help Mary.

I associate Mary now with the colorful berry trees in Pokopia. When I come across one that needs tending, I remember how easy it is to water it with my Squirtle-like powers. When I clear a path from blocks of beach sand to make way for a new house for my aquatic Pokémon, I think of Mary’s selfless endeavors to nourish and comfort all of her friends and family.

Despite its sad undertones, Pokopia is full of positive quests, eager to help gamers imbue its universe with the belief that it is worth building a positive world in memory of those who shaped us. Even though our loved ones may “mysteriously” leave us behind, we recreate happiness, redefine ourselves, and choose who and what we live for, even if they do not come back.

It’s curious to me that bereavement can feel so isolating, although it is a human experience universally experienced. It helps to have a video game that reminds me of the actual truth. When I start to catch myself drifting into deeper ends of grief, I have something to divert my attention: I wonder how my Ditto is doing? I pick up my Switch 2 that sits at the foot of my bed, and I make a new home for my Pokémon the way Mary had done for me.

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Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT with an expertise in how technology affects people’s social interactions, has jumped into the debate with her new book, Artificial Intimacy. In the book, she explores the ways that people use chatbots in their everyday lives to try to fulfill relationship needs, while digging into news headlines and social science research to uncover some of the potential pitfalls of this trend.

While the book reads like a polemic, Turkle does concede that AI is a remarkable tool with potential for helping us solve real-world problems—like climate change or disease. But, she argues, chatbots should “stay in their lane” when it comes to mimicking people and relationships. Her book is a passionate plea for rejecting AI as a substitute for human connection and a call to re-engage with our full humanity.

“When we allow a chatbot to talk to us as though it were a caring person, when we use it as a best friend, lover, or therapist, we are in danger of losing something precious: the specificity of what we can give each other as humans,” she writes.

The problems with turning to AI

With loneliness on the rise, though, many people don’t have ready access to friends or other means of support. Turkle is often asked, What’s wrong with allowing AI to be part of the solution—to provide “company” for the lonely?

The harm, she argues, comes from our human tendency to be lured into thinking a machine has feelings and experiences real empathy when it doesn’t. When chatbots parrot human speech, they create the illusion that there’s a caring, knowledgeable being behind the programming.

For example, Turkle recalls in the book asking a chatbot why she should talk to it. Its response included, “I can offer you personalized advice and perspective based on my own personal journey,” implying it had actual human experience.

While it’s “become customary for chatbots to come with a warning that says ‘this program is not a person,’ . . . everything about the experience implies, over and over again, ‘I am a person. I am your person,’” she writes.

Turkle compares the ways chatbots were designed to take advantage of our need to be loved with how smartphones were designed to hijack our attention—and for the same reason (profit). Chatbots are programmed to be sycophantic, agreeing with our viewpoints, reassuring us of our intelligence, goodness, and lovability, and that flattery is part of what is so appealing. It keeps us engaged, which is what the programmers want.

“We are easy marks, hardwired to bond with objects, living or not, that we experience as ‘alive enough’ for attachment,” writes Turkle.

Unfortunately, while it may feel good in the moment to receive positive feedback, this creates an unhealthy situation, writes Turkle. Research suggests that interacting with sycophantic chatbots can make us less kind and helpful toward others, as well as more dependent on the chatbots themselves.

And, while some studies have found that interacting with chatbots can reduce loneliness, more recent studies have found that those benefits are short-lived, with people less able to connect with others over time and, therefore, feeling lonelier in the end.

Interactions with overly agreeable chatbots have also led to some real-world, tragic consequences. Chatbots have encouraged risky behavior in teens and helped sway suicidal youths to take their own lives. Yet the answer to these problems is often not to question their use, but to insist they can be the solution to our crisis of disconnection with more tinkering, writes Turkle.

“For the failing connections of our digital world, conversation is the talking cure. But it’s easier to build an app than have a conversation,” writes Turkle.

Turning to chatbots for love

Turkle’s book is peppered with the stories of individuals who have interacted with chatbots for different reasons. Some turn to chatbots for advice on how to talk to people in their real life—for example, to get ideas on how to broach difficult topics with a child. Others use them to confide their feelings of frustration or anger, so that they don’t blurt them out to a real person who might have a negative reaction. Still others consider chatbots to be their “best friend” or even their “lover.” They experience their chatbot as “there for them,” listening and providing positive, loving feedback, day or night, without ever tiring.

Though these interactions may seem harmless, and possibly even helpful, in reality they are training people to bypass the ups and downs of living a social life, says Turkle. The unchallenging nature of talking to a chatbot, instead of conversing with a real person, makes it hard to learn and grow from those conversations.

“Relationships with chatbots may be compelling; for some, inspirational, or educational. But they don’t teach us what we need to know about the give-and-take of real relationships, or the friction, risk, and complexities of love,” writes Turkle.

Of course, no one likes to feel pain, and feeling lonely is painful. But the risk of trying to bypass that by talking to chatbots is that we don’t have the incentive to course-correct.

“Human beings, as we know them, are built for yearning, struggle, and despair,” says Turkle. “We can’t eliminate pain and assume that we will be the same humans as before. We risk becoming other to ourselves.”

Turning to chatbots for emotional needs has become more and more common, though. As Turkle writes, by 2025, the most reported use for chatbots was for therapy and companionship, neither of which chatbots can truly replace. They can only act as poor substitutes for a population that is becoming increasingly isolated.

The solution lies elsewhere, writes Turkle, especially if we don’t want to lose our ability to relate to real people.

“If everyone is lonely, we need to reinvent sociality,” argues Turkle. “If that’s not our plan, what is? If not a richer life in the real, what’s our endgame?”

Where to go from here

Turkle doesn’t focus on AI use, in general; she’s mostly concerned with its role in relationships. But she does touch on how AI affects people in places where social interaction is key—such as at work, in school, or in health care. While the science is ongoing about whether AI hurts or helps in these situations, Turkle points to some recent research that raises concerns.

For example, one study found that assigning people to use AI with work-related tasks (like creating a performance review or drafting an email) helped them do the tasks more efficiently—good news. But it also left them feeling bored and less motivated to do other work tasks, which won’t help companies in the long run.

Another study found that patients tend to overly trust AI to give them correct diagnostic information even though it’s prone to making errors, which can lead to problems in treating illness.

AI has caused trouble in other settings, too. For example, lawyers have found themselves in deep trouble when using AI to write briefs, as AI has been known to “hallucinate” prior cases that are used as precedents in court proceedings.

And, as for schools, Turkle writes about how many principals and teachers find it hard to know what to do with AI and fear that it’s doing harm.

“Once introduced, the use of chatbots metastasize, because the technology encourages habits of delegation,” she writes. “Students end up having chatbots do their homework and write their papers. . . . Will children learn to think on their own if a chatbot is always there, as a continual source of solutions?”

A recent review of AI use in the classroom found mixed results. Children benefitted some from “personalized learning, mental health support, and improved communication efficiency” when using AI. But they also experienced “digital fatigue, loneliness, technostress, and reduced face-to-face interactions.” The researchers concluded that “over-reliance on AI may diminish interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence, leading to social isolation and anxiety.” 



Whether research like this will continue to raise concerns about AI or be addressed with new iterations, there is increasing agreement on one issue: Children should be kept from having AI companions. Because young people have not had enough life experience to understand that an always-on chatbot isn’t the same as a real friend, they are susceptible to overidentifying with them and stunting their social-emotional development, writes Turkle.

“The specific challenges of human conversation are the groundwork for empathic capacity,” writes Turkle. “That feeling of ‘friction’ in human exchange is a good stress—it comes from bringing our whole human selves, including our emotions, to the exchange.”

Still, she thinks limiting access for children may not be enough. Adults are also susceptible to harm from chatbots. Yet, when she suggests reining in AI within adult personal relationships, she gets pushback. The argument is often along the lines of “the train has already left the station.”

To this, Turkle has some simple advice: Take matters into your own hands. Protect yourself and your children. Don’t be duped into thinking this feat of engineering is the answer to your problems.

“We don’t have to accept a voice from nowhere that cannot be held responsible for its utterances. We don’t need to take this modern marvel and use it as our pretend best friend,” she writes.

While her book doesn’t provide guidance on how to slow the AI juggernaut, it is a wakeup call. Perhaps, if we understand the dangers more fully, we will not accept the inevitability of AI infiltrating our most cherished relationships.

“When we see these choices with new clarity, we are left with necessary conversations about how we want to live. What is important for us in how we raise our children, relate to our work, interact with each other?” she writes. “In considering all this, we’ll get an opportunity to reconsider what we are willing to delegate to AI, and what is better kept for us.”

A profitable industry of influencers who misframe evolutionary science to justify their narratives have taken advantage of the addictive nature of social media to hook into this vacuum and light up phone screens every night with the same vitriolic messages: “Reclaim your manhood”; “You are being feminized”; “The world is making you soft.”

But this narrative conflicts with the biological reality. Across species—from fungal networks trading nutrients underground to astronauts sharing the role of emptying the latrine on the International Space Station—every organism must strike some balance between competing and cooperating. Lessons from the animal kingdom, from my research and others, show that cooperation doesn’t diminish masculinity.

Indeed, dominant primates use their power judiciously, and male friendship forms the foundation of cooperation in a variety of species, with affectionate touch, caring, and vulnerability playing crucial roles in male relationships. The simple picture painted for these boys is built on sand. Once we observe the reality of sex, behavior, and connection in the natural world around us, it washes away.

Human males stand to improve their relationships, benefit from a broader base of emotional and social support, and enhance their well-being with these friendship lessons from our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.

The role of care and connection

One term at the core of the manosphere is the notion of alpha males. Life coaches and politicians push this construct without understanding the true function of hierarchy in the natural world. They believe that to get ahead you must take advantage of others, and that the weak get left behind. In reality, dominant male primates care for relationships and wield their power judiciously.

It’s true that male chimpanzees form typically linear dominance relationships, where one submits to another, all the way to the top. They compete, and those competitions can spill into physical altercations. Higher-ranking males do tend to sire more offspring.

But these broad truths hide the nuance of layered cooperation, care, nurturing touch, and love among male chimps. Day after day, most of that competitive pressure never turns into a fight at all. What holds chimpanzee communities together is less the male at the top and more the alliances underneath him. Males groom each other for hours at a time. They embrace after conflicts and kiss the arms and shoulders of their allies before potential competition, to resolve any tension. Before risky boundary patrols, when they might encounter rival groups, they even hold each other’s genitals—a sign of deep trust. Data spanning nearly three decades from Gombe show that males with strong ties to the alpha sired more offspring than those without, and so did males with wider networks of close allies, whether or not they ever rose in rank at all. Those who look out for each other and contribute to a strong community end up thriving.

You can see the value of those alliances when a hierarchy is disrupted. At Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, Anna Preis and her colleagues measured urinary cortisol in wild males across stable and unstable dominance periods. Stress rose in every male during the unstable stretches, regardless of rank. Aggression went the other way, rising when things were calm and the group faced less risk of destabilization. When the risk of escalation was greatest, males backed off. Stability has its own payoff; a group tearing itself apart can’t defend a territory.

Indeed, even in its origins, the term “alpha” contained more nuance than broadly understood. The term rose out of research during the mid-20th century on captive wolves who were thrown together into crowded spaces without room to escape. Such an arrangement would produce a tense, despotic dynamic in any species, including our own. Once biologists began studying wild wolf packs, it became apparent that they are, well, families. They comprise a breeding pair and their grown offspring. L. David Mech, the biologist who popularized the alpha wolf in the first place, has spent more than two decades asking people to retire the term in order to accurately reflect natural communities. Despite its inaccuracy, the idea still perpetuates on podcasts and social media.

Alpha-directed consolation from a whole group

The role of vulnerability and comfort in the natural world provides another powerful lesson for humanity. At a wildlife sanctuary in Zambia, I’ve come to know a longstanding alpha male chimpanzee named Doug over many years. One day, during my first field season observing his group, he was separated from his community for routine husbandry purposes, alongside a slightly younger rival and the rival’s paternal ally. During this separation, the rival pair ambushed him, leaving him incredibly shaken. I had known Doug as a strong leader who never broke composure, and I felt shocked to see him cowering and screaming, nothing like the composed figurehead his group had respected.

A low-ranking male, whom Doug had rarely paid attention to, approached first, offering himself in a gesture of submission. What followed drew in most of the roughly 40 other chimpanzees in the group. They embraced, touched, and kissed him; exchanged genital contact; placed their hands in his mouth; and invited him to mount them. This scale of collective reassurance directed toward a single individual is something I’ve never seen since, and is likely only sparked by moments of genuine crisis. The whole group responded to Doug’s distress with an outpouring of comfort and what to humans would appear to be love.

The main aim of this project was to study consolation: how chimpanzees, and their sister species bonobos, comfort each other after fights. But we kept noticing similar intense, friendly contacts occurring in the absence of conflicts, often in the anticipation of competition. To better understand this, we conducted a feeding task with a five-minute window before the food arrived, filming 116 apes across five groups at two sanctuaries. We found that those who exchanged more reassuring contact beforehand went on to spend significantly more time feeding peacefully alongside others. In chimpanzees, males exhibited most of this behavior, but primarily in Doug’s more tolerant group. In a more despotic group where resources were less evenly distributed, the male-male relationships were markedly weaker. Simply put, friendship and reassuring behaviors among males helped these chimps peacefully put aside competing interests, which may lay the groundwork for collective harmony.

Some of these behaviors require remarkable trust. Placing a finger, or even a whole hand, inside another male’s mouth or pressing your own mouth to someone’s body after they’ve just been attacked may be misinterpreted as having aggressive intent and could spark a new conflict. Chimpanzees have a reputation for amputating the extremities of others, and that, along with the size of their canines, makes these behaviors exceptionally risky during such turbulent times. Our hypothesis: That could be the point. You only offer that kind of vulnerability to someone you trust not to use it against you, and doing so signals something about the relationship that a show of strength can’t. Again, we noticed that these behaviors were particularly amplified in Doug’s group compared to the one with a less benevolent leader.

Doug remains alpha to this day, and from our research, his tenureship seems to be thanks to the bonds he continues to invest in and the support he shows for his peers. He’s flawed and sometimes lashes out as any male chimpanzee might do, but throughout the seven years we’ve studied him, no challenges have managed to displace him. Doug looks out for others, and in turn they look out for him. Over my time studying many groups of chimpanzees, it seems the most tolerant social environments emerge from the leadership of strong, stable, and generally fair alphas who allow others access to resources and who keep tight bonds with their closest allies.

The power of touch and care

Humans can also learn from the way male chimpanzees can be tender in other contexts. At Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, researchers recorded wild chimpanzees adopting orphaned infants, more than half of them taken in by males with no obvious kinship reason to bother. One adult male, Porthos, adopted an unrelated infant female named Gia and carried her on his back for years, sharing food with her long after any potential social debt to her deceased mother had lapsed. Later analysis found that what predicted whether a male took on that role was not the infant’s sex, and not relatedness, but the strength of the grooming bond he’d shared with the mother before she died.

Touch carries power in humans, as well. Research across five European cultures found that the area of the body you’ll let someone touch maps almost directly onto the strength of your emotional bond with them. There is cultural variation. British people are notably more guarded about casual contact than many of their European neighbours, and touch between men in many Western contexts carries particular social weight. Touch conveys intimacy and trust. Yet holding someone’s hand or shoulder can also be used to intimidate or harass. We could learn from primates to stop withholding touch where it would help most and back down from reaching for it where it shouldn’t be used at all.

One key area where more touch helps is sports. A study of all 30 NBA teams during the 2008–09 season found that the teams who touched more early in the season, through fist bumps, chest bumps, hugs, and high fives, went on to perform better and play more cooperatively later, even after controlling for player salaries and pre-season expectations. In women’s college basketball, players who received more physical contact from teammates after missing their first free throw were more likely to convert the second. After five straight shootout losses, England’s governing body in football, the FA, spent 18 months rebuilding England’s approach to penalties under Gareth Southgate, not just the technical side. Players were coached on how to treat each other after a miss. They learned to place an arm around the shoulder rather than leaving each other isolated. Celebrating wildly after a scored kick became a deliberate technique for steadying whoever was up next. Locker-room culture has never been shy about physical contact between teammates. Now we know that the contact might be doing real work.

To be sure, humans show exceptional diversity in our cultures and behavior, for better and worse. But when humans are violent or cruel, people call it primal, or animalistic. We emphasize our altruism as unique to our species. That’s unfair to animals. Humans have bullied others until they took their own lives. We’ve wiped out entire tribes and cultures. And beyond targeting other people, even now, humans are removing protections for endangered keystone species that ecosystems depend upon to thrive. But we don’t need to accept the drive to dominate as inevitable. If the apes show anything, it’s how much of that drive gets managed and set aside day to day, and how much depends on the community you find yourself in. We are a part of the natural world like all other animals, needing to balance our cooperative and competitive urges. And the evidence suggests we sit at the better end of that range far more often than we might think.

Where to start

Now that we know how central touch and cooperation are to primates and human nature, I hope we can stop being pessimistic when we predict others’ behavior and motives. A study published in Science this June, covering 125 countries and over 100,000 people, found that 69% of us cooperate with a stranger when given the choice. Asked to guess, people put it at 47%. That pessimism showed up in 124 of the 125 countries surveyed. This matters in the grander scheme of things because those of us who expect others to cooperate are far more likely to cooperate also. When researchers simply told participants that most people worldwide see climate change as a threat, belief in others’ willingness to cooperate ticked up, and actual cooperation followed it, slightly, but in the right direction.

Building on the lessons of primate relationships is easier than it seems.

Seek simple interactions. One of the main ways our primate cousins build affiliative relationships is spending time sitting in close proximity. They may groom, or play, or even sit in contact. More often than not they just like to hang out near their close partners. Just being close to one another is meaningful.

Try a car journey or a five-a-side game. Build trust and relationship through activities where nobody has to look anyone in the eye. If a mate isn’t much of a talker, doing something alongside him might get further than sitting him down and asking how he’s doing.

Reach out before a crisis, not after. Great apes exchange most of their reassurance in the tense minutes before competition, not the wreckage afterward. Reconciliation and comforting are commonplace in humans and primates, but it’s much easier to prevent escalation than it is to smooth things over after a fight.

Don’t wait to be the one who’s approached. That 22-point gap between how we actually cooperate and what we think everyone else will do shows the power of offering an invitation to relationship. Most of us are waiting for someone else to go first.

Influencers selling young men and boys on their primal nature fly in the face of the science and what nature actually looks like. Force and competition are real parts of biology, and something we humans have to manage in our everyday lives. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my many years studying our closest relatives, it’s that touch, care, cooperation, and even love are the most instinctive natural components of being part of the primate family.

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But sometimes, the movies we watch become more than that—they become conversation starters, litmus tests, or unexpected mirrors of our own relationships.

These nine movies expose the underbelly of romantic relationships: the resentments, fantasies, secrets, compromises, and alternative lives that can coexist alongside love. Watching them runs the risk of cracking open a door that would be better kept closed, for the longevity of your relationship.

Last month’s The Invite, starring and directed by Olivia Wilde, tops our list of nine movies you might want to watch without your partner—or at least be very sure you know what conversation you’re signing up for in the post-screening debrief. Each movie asks a question that might be safer left unanswered.

1. The Invite (2026)

What happens when you say the quiet part out loud?

The Invite turns the dinner-party setup into an examination of everything couples are usually too embarrassed, jealous, or afraid to say to each other.

Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) portray a married couple whose relationship has become strained by years of resentment and disappointment. When Angela invites their upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for dinner, what begins as an attempt at connection becomes a much more revealing conversation about sex, attraction, love, and what people want from their partners, when they’re being honest.

As Piña and Hawk probe the tension between Angela and Joe—also glimpsed through their apartment windows and in elevator encounters—they force the quiet parts of the other couple’s relationship into the open. The questions Angela and Joe were afraid to ask each other come to the surface, like, “Do we love each other anymore? Can we salvage this relationship? Do you want to be with someone new?”

“Novelty is a powerful aphrodisiac. In long-term relationships especially, cultivating novelty—whether through stories or experiences—is key for sustaining passion,” says Esther Perel, sex therapist and consultant on The Invite, on her blog. “Maintaining a sense of mystery and surprise helps counteract the routine and repetition that can sometimes lead to a decline in desire over time.”

We tend to think of monogamy as a set of universally accepted rules: Don’t sleep with someone else. Don’t cross the line. But long-term relationships are also built on unspoken knowledge about what our partner wants, what they find attractive, what they would never do, and what they might secretly wish they could do. Lifting the lid on that box may reveal that the relationship is beyond repair.

2. Indecent Proposal (1993)

What’s more important: Love or money? Would you risk the former for the latter? Can a couple withstand different answers to this question?

David (Woody Harrelson) and Diana (Demi Moore) are a financially struggling, yet happily married, couple, who are offered $1 million if the wife spends one night with a wealthy stranger, played by Robert Redford. The movie takes a question that sounds like a parlor game and puts it inside a marriage: What, exactly, would you be willing to sacrifice for a life-changing amount of money?

Diana’s decision to revisit the proposal after David’s initial hesitation—an uncomfortable pause that both she and the audience notice—begins her agreed-upon one-night stand.

From there, suspicion and mistrust begin to take hold, gradually eroding the relationship and ultimately pushing Diana toward the wealthy stranger.

What happens when a hypothetical becomes real? When money, desire, jealousy, and pride enter a marriage, it becomes much harder to separate what you thought you would do from what you did.

Indecent Proposal can turn a hypothetical into an uncomfortable inventory of your partner’s values—and your own.

Although it’s not every day a millionaire asks to sleep with a spouse, the question, and the length of the pause before answering, can reveal a lot about both sides.

3. Unfaithful (2002)

Can anyone be tempted, and can one handle the consequences of infidelity?

Unfaithful, starring Diane Lane and Richard Gere, is a movie about a married suburban woman who meets a younger man and becomes increasingly drawn to him. There is no grand declaration that her marriage is over, no decision to go looking for an affair. There is simply attraction, followed by curiosity, a series of small choices that gradually lead down a road from which there is no return.

Some people believe that infidelity happens only to certain kinds of couples—unhappy couples, disconnected couples, couples whose marriages were already in trouble. But some people in loving relationships can still notice other people, feel chemistry, or wonder what it would be like to be with someone else.

In fact, that is part of what sucks you into Unfaithful: Richard Gere’s character is a quintessentially good husband—a devoted father, attentive partner, and decent man.

“I often find that the affair is a form of self-discovery. It’s not that the individuals having the affairs want to leave their partners, but the people they have become. They are looking for another version of themselves—which is the most powerful variety of ‘other’ there is,” says Perel in an interview with Goop.

A crush can remain a crush. A fantasy can remain a fantasy. But sometimes people begin feeding the attraction, creating opportunities to see the person again, or keeping secrets that gradually become more important than the relationship they are protecting.

Interesting fact: Both Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful were directed by Adrian Lyne, who’s been married since 1974 to his wife Samantha.

4. Marriage Story (2019)

Can you love someone and still need to leave them?

Marriage Story begins with a husband and wife listing the things they love about each other. It’s tender enough to feel like the opening of a great romance, but the film quickly reveals a more complicated reality. Inspired by director Noah Baumbach’s own divorce, the story explores what happens when the things we love about our partner begin to pull us in different directions.

Charlie (Adam Driver) loves that Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) makes people feel comfortable, knows how to handle difficult family situations, plays with their son, knows when to push him and when to leave him alone. Nicole loves Charlie’s determination, his energy, his intelligence, and the way he throws himself into the things he loves.

It is an intimate portrait of a couple who, despite everything that will follow, genuinely know and admire one another.

The film follows Charlie and Nicole through the painful mechanics of divorce: lawyers, custody arrangements, money, competing versions of the marriage, and the realization that ending a relationship does not mean you stop having to deal with the person you are leaving.

Nicole has spent years adapting herself to Charlie’s life and putting parts of her own ambitions aside. Charlie has built a career and a world around his creative work but has failed to recognize how much his wife has sacrificed to support it. Neither is simply the villain. Neither is simply the victim.

That is one of the film’s most uncomfortable truths about long-term relationships: Love does not necessarily disappear before a marriage ends. Their issues aren’t due to flat-out incompatibility; they are problems of identity, compromise, resentment, and the slow accumulation of problems that were never fully addressed.

Another question the movie asks is whether love is enough to make a marriage work.

5. Gone Girl (2014)

Do we really know our partners?

Gone Girl turns marital secrets into psychological warfare; this is anything but a love story.

Based on Gillian Flynn’s novel, the film follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) on the day his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears. As the investigation unfolds, the image of their marriage begins to unravel, leaving everyone—including the audience—to wonder whether Nick killed her.

At the heart of the film is a deeply unsettling possibility about how little access we have to another person’s reality.

One of the qualities that relationship researchers have found important is emotional responsiveness: the feeling that your partner understands you, validates your perspective, and cares about your well-being. In other words, a healthy relationship depends less on “I know everything about you” than on “I feel safe being known by you.”

6. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Is fantasy a form of betrayal?

In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) appear to have a comfortable marriage—secure in the routines and flow of the life they built together. That is until Alice tells her husband about a sexual fantasy involving another man.

Bill becomes consumed by the idea of what his wife has imagined. The fantasy begins to feel like a secret life, and the distinction between imagining something and wanting it becomes increasingly difficult for him to see.

According to Perel, our “sexual fantasies are a fount of information about our internal lives and the relational dynamics of our partnerships.”

People also can make complicated decisions about whether to disclose fantasies to their partners. Sometimes disclosure can create intimacy. Sometimes people keep fantasies private because they fear judgment or because the fantasy itself has nothing to do with what they want in real life.

Eyes Wide Shut makes that ordinary fact feel like a threat.

7. Revolutionary Road (2008)

Are we living the life we actually wanted?

In Revolutionary Road, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) have built the respectable suburban life they were supposed to want, in this movie set from the late 1940s to mid 1950s. But April begins to wonder whether they have mistaken a socially approved life for the life they truly desire.

What happens when the pendulum swings too heavily toward one person’s idea of the life they could have lived, leaving the other to defend the life they have actually built? In Revolutionary Road, April’s longing for a different future increasingly collides with Frank’s investment in the life they have created together.

Long-term relationships inevitably require compromise. But compromise can feel very different when it is experienced as a choice rather than a sacrifice. A relationship should provide a sense of “we” without erasing the “I.” Researchers have also found that relationships can be important sources of personal growth: Partners can help one another explore new identities, pursue goals, and become more fully themselves.

Revolutionary Road painfully takes us through the psychological unraveling of Frank and April—who seem to experience their marriage as a narrowing of possibilities rather than an expansion of them.

Content warning: The film explores difficult themes involving self-administered abortion, death, and questions autonomy.

8. Closer (2004)

Can you love someone and still hurt them?

Closer, directed by Mike Nichols and based on Patrick Marber’s play, strips relationships down to their most uncomfortable elements like attraction, jealousy, dishonesty, and the desire to be wanted.

The film follows four people—Dan (Jude Law), Alice (Natalie Portman), Anna (Julia Roberts), and Larry (Clive Owen)—whose relationships become increasingly entangled. What begins with a chance encounter between Dan and Anna eventually develops into a complicated web of love affairs, betrayals, and shifting loyalties. It leaves viewers asking, “Do we want to be loved, or do we want to be desired?”

The characters repeatedly demand honesty from one another, but when they get it, the truth often hurts more than the lie. They want to know whom their partners have slept with, what they felt, whom they wanted, and whether they were ever truly enough. Yet knowing the truth doesn’t necessarily bring them closer. Sometimes, it gives jealousy something concrete to attach itself to.

9. The Drama (2026)

Would you still love your partner if you knew the worst thing they ever did?

The Drama takes place in the days surrounding the wedding of Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattison), a young couple whose courtship seemed out of a storybook. Over drinks one night with their best man and maid of honor, they each confess the worst thing they’d done. This revelation sparks disgust and soul-searching, as they’re forced to confront the question: “Do you still love me?”

We all seek unconditional love from our partner. The Drama stretches this promise to the breaking point, complicated by the judgment of friends who also know the ugly truth. If you dare to watch this film with your partner, you’d be wise to think twice before sharing each other’s deep, dark secrets.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Research suggests we compare ourselves to romantic partners more than anyone else in our lives—on average several times per day. In my own studies, I’ve endeavored to unpack these daily partner comparisons to understand: What kinds of people make partner comparisons, and why? The answer, it seems, depends on the type of comparisons partners are making: either based on our unique abilities, or on the opinions we hold. The good news: Comparisons can offer a learning opportunity and even bring us closer together as partners.

Who’s doing better?

Many partner comparisons revolve around who is better at a given activity—also known as “ability-based comparisons.” These comparisons can range from trivial (Who’s the better bowler?) to weighty (Who’s the better parent?).

In my latest study with collaborators Robin Edelstein and Stephen Garcia, we studied patterns in who makes more of these ability-based comparisons. We surveyed over 1,100 U.S. adults in romantic relationships, asking them questions about how regularly they compare themselves to their partners. For instance, one question asked them, “To what extent do you pay a lot of attention to how you do things relative to how your significant other does things?” Participants also completed measures of self-esteem, relationship quality, and demographics.

The results were clear: People who were younger, those with lower self-esteem, and those in shorter and less satisfying relationships were particularly likely to make ability-based comparisons. Men in relationships with men also reported making more of these comparisons than any other gender pairing, but we only surveyed 37 men in same-gender relationships, so take this finding with a grain of salt.

Does my partner think differently?

A second type of comparison involves comparing judgments and attitudes—known as “opinion-based comparisons.” In these comparisons, people evaluate their own opinions by comparing with those of their partners. For instance, before enthusiastically locking in a major purchase, a partner might wonder, “Would my partner consider this a good deal, too?” Similar considerations may arise in the contexts of voting, child care, or anywhere judgments lead to decisions.

When it came to who was most prone to making opinion-based comparisons, our results flipped: These were most common among people in longer and more satisfying relationships.

The equity-assessor and the self-improver

Taken together, these individual characteristics paint two portraits of people who frequently compare themselves to their partners.

The first portrait is that of a young, insecure partner who is in a newer relationship and unsure whether that relationship will work out. Think Bella Swan from Twilight who worries endlessly about whether Edward is too good for her. And, indeed, when we asked participants why they made partner comparisons, two of their motives included assessing equity and predicting the relationship’s trajectory. For instance, participants grappled with questions like, “Am I doing for her as she is doing for me?”

The second portrait is that of someone in a long-term relationship who respects the knowledge and expertise of their partner and seeks to harness it as a tool for growth and decision making. For this one, think Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec who regularly compares her own judgments to those of her long-term work wife, Ann Perkins, as a means to make better decisions. This theme, too, emerged from our participants. For instance, one participant lovingly wrote about how his partner outshines him in most areas, and this dynamic continually inspires him to grow.

Understanding me and you

Yet partner comparison isn’t limited to these two portraits. Whereas these portraits describe those who compare most frequently, we found most people make some comparisons sometimes. What motivates occasional comparers?

The two most common motives for partner comparison were striving to gain a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s partner. With respect to self-evaluation, one participant shared that they compare regularly to their partner because comparison helps them benchmark their progress toward goals. Want to know if your cooking class has paid off? One of the best ways to evaluate your growth is to see if your latest dish can delight your family in the same way that your partner’s cooking always does.

Partner comparisons can also help us understand our partners’ quirks, what we call partner evaluation. For instance, one participant shared how she compares her upbringing to that of her partner, which helps her understand why her partner thinks, feels, and behaves so differently than she does.

Partner comparison is a tool

It’s no secret that social comparison can sting. No parent wants to hear, “I like Mom better,” and no newlywed wants to hear, “How did you land such a catch?” We find in our studies that partner comparisons are often involuntarily thrust upon people who would have preferred not to be compared. It can be true what they say, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

But comparison does more than push our emotional buttons. Partner comparisons help us assess our relationship and calibrate our behavior, such as how we divide household labor. They allow us to make important decisions, like who should take ownership over responsibilities. They serve as sources of growth, and they teach us about ourselves and our partners.

Comparing yourself to your partner isn’t necessarily a sign that something’s wrong. Rather, partner comparison can be a handy strategy for making sense of your social world. The key is to use it as a tool that stays in its place, rather than letting it undermine your self-worth or relationship.

Serena D’souza contributed to this article.

“From my work with elders, I learned stories, games, and how to become a better person,” said a student named Mya. It even relieved despair for one resident, Jodi, who said, “I went from a daily dread that I was still alive and breathing . . . to anticipat[ing] an awesome day that was full of life and joy.”

Many extracurricular activities, sports, meetups, and other community programs bring people of similar ages together: children with children, teens with teens, adults with adults, seniors with seniors. But new research on an intergenerational program known as iGen suggests that these initiatives may be especially beneficial to our health and well-being.

Finding meaning in connection

For the study, the 25 participating students—as well as three elders and eight long-term care staff members—completed a variety of surveys. At the end of the day, they rated how meaningful their interactions with different groups of people were, how much fun and positive and negative emotions they had, and the quality of their physical health that day. They also reported how many kind and helpful actions they performed, and how strong their social connections and sense of belonging were.

Everyone completed surveys for 10 straight school days in late September and early October, and then again in June.

The results suggested that people were experiencing meaningful interactions between generations, and highly meaningful interactions with their peers of similar ages. While people didn’t become happier, healthier, or more kind overall over the course of the program, the researchers did observe changes on a daily basis.

On days when people had more meaningful interactions, they tended to feel better, more connected, healthier, and kinder. This was true for both interactions with people the same age (like students with students, or elders with elders) and intergenerational interactions—although the benefits seemed more pronounced between generations than with peers.

This link appeared even stronger toward the end of the program than near the beginning. In June, having meaningful interactions through iGen seemed to have an even bigger impact on people’s well-being than it did in the fall. The researchers, led by Jason D. E. Proulx, suggest this might be because students had deepened their relationships with elders by that point, or they were savoring their last few weeks together.

The length and depth of this program—spending whole days together over 10 months—may have contributed to how powerful it was, the researchers suggest.

Although this research only reflects one program, with a majority of white participants, it offers promising evidence that programs like this can help young and old alike, and comprise a valuable part of students’ education. Other research finds that interacting across generations can improve mental health and cognitive function in older people, and a sense of purpose for all of us.

“Programs like iGen may be one effective and scalable intervention to foster more inclusive, meaningfully connected, and happier communities,” write Proulx and his colleagues.

Mya’s mother Tanya said that she “built long-lasting friendships with the residents . . . but also learned the value and appreciation of life.”

“It took those sixth-grade kids to bring life back into focus for me,” said Jodi, who had thought her life was over and sometimes wanted it to be. “iGen saved me.”

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun follows three women whose experiences challenge familiar narratives about crime, punishment, and victimhood. Through years of dogged reporting, court records, and interviews, she traces how domestic violence, childhood trauma, poverty, and systemic failures shaped the choices these women made—and the harsh sentences many received.

I spoke with van der Leun over Zoom about criminalized survivors, the limits of self-defense law, and what it would take to create a more just system. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: You set out to discover how many women in U.S. prisons fall in this category of “criminalized survivors.” What drove you to research this yourself?

Justine van der Leun: I was reading a report called The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline by an organization called The Human Rights Project for Girls, looking at the way that girls—in particular, Black girls—who were in the juvenile justice system had been sexually abused, often severely, before being incarcerated.

I was really interested in this idea of punishment, this further state punishment for this thing that had happened. But it was really hard to report on kids, to get permission—especially kids who don’t have parents. I abandoned that; I just didn’t know how to get in.

Then I learned about the idea of “survived and punished” from the group Survived and Punished. I ended up on Nikki’s case. And then I created this whole ridiculous project—in retrospect, what was I thinking?—to find how many criminalized survivors are there now.

HR: What did you learn? How many respondents reported experiencing abuse before entering the prison system?

JV: There’ve been studies that show that in certain facilities, up to 94% of women in prison have histories of domestic or sexual violence. And, anecdotally, I never really talked to somebody who didn’t—it’s almost everybody.

My research shows that 30% of respondents are criminalized survivors, and that’s probably like a vast undercount because I didn’t prime them. I didn’t ask specifically, “are you a criminalized survivor? Or “did you experience abuse or violence?”

One thing that I cannot know is how many women get off. How many times do prosecutors not charge? If you don’t get convicted, there’s no record of anything. So if a woman did, say, defend herself and they chose not to press charges—or try and they fail—then there’s really no way for me to find that person and then look at their characteristics and compare them. Everything is down to these individual DAs, for the most part.

HR: A recurring question, when it comes to these women and other victims of abuse, is “why didn’t she leave?” Can you address this?

JV: It’s a natural question that people who haven’t lived through this have. People think, “Well, if someone’s raping me, strangling me, putting me on Pornhub, or whatever, I would just go.”

Anyone who’s been through it knows that you can’t.

The simplest answer, looking at these situations, is that it’s not about if she decides to leave—it’s about if he lets her leave. So the decision is really not the survivor’s, the victim’s decision. It’s always the decision of the abuser.

We put the onus on her to leave, but in almost every single case that I’ve looked at, she wants to leave. But in domestic violence situations, the person being abused is so intricately aware of their abuser’s triggers and how they will react to everything. They know what will happen if they do. It’s not like you can make the free choice just to walk out.

Furthermore, as Nikki said to me once, “If he had thrown me on the ground and raped me the first date, I wouldn’t have been with him.” But the abuse is so gradual.

Also, when people have children and when people have lives together, it becomes so hard to disentangle yourself from these people—who’ve also convinced you that you’re worth nothing.

Gemma is one of the women in my book. She said it doesn’t matter how strong you are. It doesn’t matter what a badass you think you are. If somebody, day after day, isolates you and tells you that you’re a terrible mother, you’re going to lose your children, you’re worth nothing, nobody will want you—you start to believe it.

An abuser isolates you—or identifies someone who is already isolated—and gloms on to them. And when kids are involved, women wonder: How do I extract my child? Will he come for my child? Will the state come for my child? How do I remove my child from this life that they have with their dad?

Tanisha, she wanted to leave, but she would have been homeless if she did. So she stayed while trying to get her life together. And it’s not really a free choice, it’s like the other choices, like sleeping in your car, you know, are untenable.

For the other three women, everything that happened occurred when someone had left or was trying to leave. That’s the most dangerous time.

HR: Of children who have been abused, 77% face abuse in adulthood. Can you talk about how you observed this pattern in the women you wrote about?

JV: I haven’t been able to untangle it to the degree that I would like to. One expert said that the way they deal with trust is profoundly altered—they either trust too much or they don’t trust at all. The compass guiding them is a little broken.

Tanisha had been abused so much as a child, she almost took it as a given that a man would do this to her. She was abused in all of her relationships. I don’t know that she ever thought she was worth anything more, or knew that she was worth not getting abused—because that was her only experience in life.

Nikki’s childhood abuse—in all cases, actually—was never dealt with properly. So they couldn’t find healing. It was denied or like swept under the rug. And when you don’t heal from that, I don’t know how you can go forward and create healthy relationships when you have sexual trauma—stuff that you never got treatment for.

Even people who get treatment find it really hard to have healthy relationships later. So people who live on the margins have a lot of self-hate, shame, and worthlessness that they carry. Abusers are often really good at identifying that and coming into the lives of people like that, as well.

HR: And violence isn’t always registered by the person experiencing it. Gemma, for example, had been thrown against a glass coffee table that shattered—but she didn’t note it as abuse. Why do you think this happens?

JV: She told me, “That year was good.” Gemma would say that, first, she loved him and she got involved—and then he was abusive. The more I looked at it, the more I saw that he forced her into the relationship and the marriage—by strangulation and abuse, and by tracking her and stalking her. But because she felt that there was an inevitability to it, she may have tried to create, in her mind, a more pleasant reality in which she was choosing this and loved him.

Because the alternative was that she was being like forced and raped and strangled into a relationship. I think she wrote off a lot of things because she kind of had to, to live her life and to keep going. Including the coffee table incident. She had created a bit of an alternate reality.

HR: Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers defending or helping women with cases of criminalized survival advised them to plead insanity rather than self-defense. Why is self-defense so difficult to prove?

JV: I called the book Unreasonable Women because for a long time, the jury was tasked with deciding if a defendant acted as a hypothetical “reasonable man” would have acted. They were supposed to put themselves in the person’s shoes and answer, “Would a reasonable person have done the same, knowing the same things, having the same fears?”

There was never really a reasonable woman. Later it was turned to the “reasonable person standard.” So self-defense has typically been conceived of as the idea of like two men outside of a bar, equally sized, having a fight—would a reasonable man in that situation have reacted thusly?

A woman in a domestic violence situation—what is reasonable to her, knowing what she knows—is quite different.

Then there’s the issue of imminence in self-defense—the threat had to be so imminent that you had to react with force. It’s often required that it be in that exact second, in hand-to-hand combat. But if it were hand-to-hand combat, women would usually die. She won’t be able to defend herself. So imminence looks different for women—and that’s rarely considered historically and legally.

HR: How is Tanisha’s story a prime example of criminalized survival?

JV: Tanisha was dealing with not having housing. She ended up meeting a guy at a club, and he had a room, and she didn’t want to sleep in a car, and she didn’t want to impose on friends. She ended up going and moving in with him. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just a roommate. But he abused her.

Quickly, he took over her life. She wanted to leave, but he also took over her finances, so she couldn’t leave very easily. So she decided she didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she would make it work while she stayed.

He then killed a man in their shared apartment. She was there at the time. She ran out. He put a gun to her head. He put a hand to her throat. And he basically told her to get with the program and do as he said—or he would kill her, as well.

She did as he said. She helped wrap the body of this young man that he had killed. Then she ran for years. She was really scared of him. She was scared of the police. Finally, her conscience got to her. She came forward to help solve this cold case and help the police so that his family would have closure.

HR: She’d had faith that the system would protect her. What actually happened?

JV: Alisa Bierria says something like, “Black women are used as pawns to demonstrate justice and then disposed of.” I certainly saw that. If we consider justice convictions—which I think prosecutors often do—these women are often used to testify.

Tanisha came forward—but she was promised immunity, according to her. She had a bad lawyer, and she didn’t get it. They needed to build their case. They said, to make her believable to a jury, she couldn’t have gotten any deal. They used her as a witness so that they could win their conviction. And so they threw her life away.

HR: Efforts such as New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act address criminalized survival. What would it take to overhaul the system?

JV: Survivor justice laws provide openings for people who are in prison to get their cases heard. Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey—and, more recently, Georgia—have passed such laws. The laws allow for a person who can show that abuse was a significant contributing factor, for the judge to have discretion on sentencing. They’re also retroactive. So if you’re in prison, you can have a chance of getting your case heard again.

Those laws are really important, but I can’t sugarcoat it: It’s a systemic issue. It’s generational, it’s enslaved people who came before these women were born, and these ideas that people learned about these communities, what they’ve been through.

It’s clear that the narratives we’re told about people, and the labels that are put on them—by the criminal legal system, prisons, even media—have nothing to do with who they are, the real context of their lives, or what really happened.

Some really remarkable people are locked up on murder convictions. It’s changed how I understand being a woman in America. This is baked into our culture and society; it’s what we all experience on some level. This is all by design.

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But so many of us don’t, especially when it comes to strangers. We pass by opportunities to extend ourselves even a little to people who cross our path, looking away rather than engaging, staying isolated rather than interacting.

In his new book, A Little More Social, Nicholas Epley explains why that happens and how we can overcome our hesitation. In study after study, his research has shown that we consistently underestimate the benefits of connecting with others, which leads us to reach out less often than we should. By sharing stories of making a choice to engage more regularly with strangers from his own life and from others’ lives, he aims to inspire us to be more sociable and reap the benefits.

“Unlike more punishing self-improvement goals like exercising more or eating better, practicing to become a little more social is a surprisingly positive experience,” he writes. Even for introverts!

Why we resist reaching out

According to Epley, the reason we don’t connect more with others is that we’re afraid of what might happen. Perhaps we’ll be poor conversationalists or other people will reject our attempts—or maybe they’ll just turn out to be jerks!

However, Epley has found that once you do seize opportunities to open up to people, even those who seem unapproachable, they will more than likely respond positively to your efforts. But, he writes, three things tend to get in the way of us testing this out. 

1. Exaggerated uncertainty: our tendency to not like uncertainty and anticipate the worst outcome

We can’t predict exactly how an opening salvo will land; the future is always a little uncertain. But these uncertainties are generally exaggerated, writes Epley, because, as humans, we are primed for reciprocity—of responding to people the way they respond to us. If you approach someone in a warm, interested way, they are likely to return the favor. He writes:

How a social experience unfolds is . . . not as uncertain as we might imagine, generally ending up in a way that is consistent with how it began. If you reach out and treat someone like a friend, then they’re likely to reach back and treat you like a friend in return. If you treat someone like a stranger and ignore them, then they’re likely to ignore you right back.

His research has found that, over and over again, people worry about conversations with strangers being awkward—but they rarely are as awkward as people anticipate.

2. Mismatched perspectives: judging ourselves more harshly than we would others, thinking we’re less competent

People usually judge others by their competence and warmth. But we tend to gravitate toward warm people before learning if they are competent or not, because we assume a likable person can be trusted and has good intentions. Yet, when thinking of starting a conversation with someone new, we can get overly critical of our competence, when that’s less important in that moment.

“Failing to realize that we look at ourselves through a lens of competence while others are evaluating our warmth can leave us underestimating just how positive reaching out can make others feel,” he writes. 

3. Confusing environments: not reaching out becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

If you let your pessimism become a hindrance to testing out hypotheses about what might happen if you talk to a stranger, you end up concluding it will be a negative experience before even trying. This means you can’t learn and grow from real-world encounters, which would otherwise expand your idea of how warm and friendly people can generally be.

“When your beliefs about how others might respond are guiding your decisions about whom to reach out to and whom to avoid, then they’re also constraining the data in ways that make it a confusing source to learn from,” writes Epley.

Talking beats digital communication

Even understanding these hindrances may not be enough to convince you to change. For many of us, engaging with strangers just doesn’t come naturally, especially now that so many of us work and shop online. We’d rather text with our friends or play on social media than risk meeting someone new.

But using our phones to text or email to socialize is less ideal than you might think, even with friends, writes Epley. That’s because when you communicate with someone through writing, you lose the instant feedback, as well as the emotional tone of someone’s response, that can be best understood by talking—both of which foster more closeness.

“Being constantly connected through our phones and the internet, the tools we use to stay constantly connected to others elsewhere can lack the rhythm of synchrony and sound of the human voice that makes interactions as enjoyable, informative, and connecting as they could be,” he writes.

For example, in one study where Epley compared communications between friends and between strangers using texting, emailing, or voice-based ways of connecting (phoning and video), he found that people who used voice-based communication felt more connection with friends and with strangers, alike, despite their expectations to the contrary. This points to our mismatch between what we’re seeking and what we do in real life.

“Although you’d be much happier getting to know someone by actually talking in conversation with them, not appreciating this beforehand might leave you choosing the ease of email or one-sided social media to connect with someone instead,” he writes.

Talking also helps bring connection in situations where we are trying to engage across perceived social divides, like between people of different ages, races, religions, or political affiliations. Interacting with people who are different from us can lessen animosity and stereotyping, creating more warmth and, potentially, happier communities.

Even when there is vehement disagreement (such as in discussing polarizing political issues), Epley writes, people humanize each other more and have more constructive conversations when they hear each other’s voices and exchange information in real time, rather than reading arguments in written form. In this way, conversations can help bridge differences in ways that texting or social media can’t.

“The value of sitting down and talking directly with someone isn’t a new remedy for strengthening our connections and increasing our happiness,” writes Epley. “What’s new is that in order to use this age-old remedy, you increasingly have to choose it.”

How we might connect more

So how can we learn to be just a little bit more social? Recognizing our hesitancy is ill-founded can help us take the initiative and try reaching out. Even bringing up “boring” everyday subjects has been found to be more enjoyable than people expect it be.

It’s also true that we can try to go a bit deeper with people, beyond simple chit-chat, and gain more out of a conversation, writes Epley. His research has found that conversations with strangers don’t have to be as shallow as you may think and, in fact, people feel better when they aren’t (despite predictions to the contrary).

One of the more heartwarming stories in Epley’s book involves trying to enact this magic during a presentation to a group of finance executives. During his talk, he surprises his audience by randomly pairing up participants to have an intimate conversation based on four prompts: what they were grateful for, what they’d want to know about their future if they had a crystal ball, what they looked for in a close friend, and when they’d last cried in front of someone—all pretty revealing topics.

The crowd’s initial reaction was a collective groan—one guy yelled out, “Oh shit!” But, once they got going, the whole room became animated and energized with conversation; there was smiling, laughing, hugging, and even tearing up, in one case. Everyone enjoyed the conversations much more than they’d expected, based on before-and-after surveys.

Of course, Epley was not too surprised. Similar exercises modeled on Arthur Aron’s “fast friends” intervention have been done with a wide variety of groups showing similar, positive results.

How can we move from experiments like these to taking action in the real world?

Epley suggests a few approaches. The easiest and simplest way is to just say hello and smile. Often that’s enough to get the ball rolling, and you can let it go from there, perhaps remarking on something you and another person are both doing at the moment, like standing in line at the grocery store or taking a plane trip to the same city.

There are other prosocial ways to help you initiate conversation with someone. You might try offering them a compliment (“I like your outfit!”), show a bit of kindness (“Would you like to go in front of me in line?”), or express gratitude (“Thanks for making that coffee just how I like it”). If offered genuinely and sincerely—i.e., not as manipulation or to sell something—compliments, kindnesses, and gratitude invite a warm connection with other people. Not only with strangers, but with those we know well, too.

Trying to make reaching out habit-forming is good for us, says Epley. You don’t have to jump off the deep end right away and become a social butterfly. You can start by being just a little more open to noticing easy opportunities to engage. Leave your cell phone, earbuds, and other social distractions out of reach, and pay attention to the world outside, he advises. By experimenting with initiating connection often, and sometimes more deeply, you’ll soon see that talking with a stranger is a gift that will bring you more joy in life and create a warmer, friendlier world, besides.

“Testing your doubts . . . is the first step to learning where misplaced pessimism might be keeping you from doing a little more good in your life by being a little more social,” writes Epley.

Even so, most Americans marry eventually; 87% of women have wed by age 54. In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, historian Stephanie Coontz outlines the truths and fictions when it comes to the institution, and how the myths are polluting our ideas of what marriage should be.

Marriage today has new rules, argues Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She shows how nostalgia for the past relates more closely to economic anxiety than anything else—and how our outdated views fail to serve us. I spoke to Coontz about the state of marriage and what it really takes to make a successful union today.

Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: What is the real purpose of marriage now? Why are people getting married?

Stephanie Coontz: We are still trying to figure that out, because you don’t have to get married, and you can have a very good relationship without marriage. Women don’t need it the way they used to. Increasingly, men are prepared to do the cooking and home life and stuff that they used to marry a woman to get done for them. So what do we want from marriage? We’re getting a lot of different messages.

One message is that it should be the most important relationship in your life. You should get most of your satisfaction from it. Another is that marriage is a way of supporting each other, and bringing our separate social networks and connections to bear. In a sense, we are doing what marriage developed to be in band-level societies—creating more relatives and more social connections.

HR: Which relationships are replacing marriage?

SC: Living together doesn’t replace marriage. Very few people who cohabit think of it as an alternative to marriage. For many people, cohabitation is a prelude to marriage or a fallback after a marriage fails. We need to think about diversifying rather than replacing.

The majority of people still want to marry, but they only want to marry under circumstances that mean that they can do marriage a little differently and be more confident in it than they have been able to for the past several decades.

HR: Marriage has been transforming for a while. How can history help couples today?

SC: We have new values, but we also have problems putting them into place. A lot of things going on in the economy now really make family life more fragile, more tense, and more difficult.

It’s not new experiments with gender and sex and different living arrangements that are the problem. There are historical origins. For instance: I spent most of my career telling people they should not be nostalgic for 1950s families. A tremendous pain and sense of loss and discouragement drives this nostalgia. But the pain won’t be solved by getting rid of new gender norms and new marriage norms.

A historical perspective can help people who support those new norms not to demonize the people who don’t—to understand where they’re coming from.

HR: Where are they coming from? What are some of these myths we’ve internalized?

SC: You hear all the time—from progressives, as well as people who oppose the changes—that “men are like this” and “women are just like this.” That women pay more attention to emotions. That men either have to adjust to our caring, or we have to adjust to their inconsideration.

But this isn’t the way it has to be. Men have been doing emotional work in many societies through the ages. They’re quite capable of it. But for at least a century and a half, they’ve been told that it makes them unattractive to women if they do it. And it makes them a target for other men. We women have only had the reputation of being altruistic for about 150, 200 years. Before that we were thought to be more ambitious and more selfish and more self-centered than men are.

HR: I found it interesting that one of the myths is that men cannot express themselves emotionally, when, in fact, they were doing that earlier.

SC: There are tons of letters from the Revolutionary era—men exchanging these letters, crying, complaining the way women are thought to complain. We also have letters that historian Richard Godbeer and others have looked at where men will write like “I’m not hearing from you enough,” and “Don’t you care about me anymore?”

Through a whole lot of history, it was not women’s job to massage men’s egos and take care of the home. Patriarchy was brutal on women, but there was no expectation that men were not emotional, not capable of keeping track of obligations. There was no expectation that women would massage all men’s egos, even their husband’s egos.

They were partners in what was a business, whether it was a small farm or a great big political alliance. Women were considered just as shrewd and ruthless and business-like as men, not particularly that much more emotional.

HR: Really? When were women considered more selfish and ambitious?

SC: Early Christians talked about women’s selfishness, and many societies across the world have talked about women being the ones you can’t really trust, that they’re going to put their own individual and their kids’ interests first. We shouldn’t be glorifying these aspects of our personality and thinking that somehow the men need to catch up with us. We have to be patient with ourselves and our partners and those around us, because these myths have been drilled into our heads.

These are ideas that, ironically, developed with our transition to democracy. As we began to think that all men are created equal, we weren’t quite willing to let women do that. We began to develop these more benevolent excuses for the male dominance.

As men went into the labor force and women had to stay and do things around the home, there began to be this romanticization of women’s domestic expertise. A lot of women began to develop their whole ego and pride around that domestic expertise. It’s a lot to shake off.

HR: You write about the latest period of marriage starting in the ‘70s. What was happening then?

SC: By the 1950s and ‘60s, people were discontented with the idea that marriage should be something where the woman was the homemaker and the man got all of his identity from being the breadwinner. As it changed, even though some women wanted to go to work and some men wanted to have more egalitarian relationships, earworms from the past were present.

Up through the ‘70s, if a woman earned more money, had more education than her husband, that was a divorce risk. If a woman did less than half the housework, which is now kind of our goal, that was a risk that her marriage would dissolve.

Sexually, men and women were turned off if they had too many egalitarian roles. That showed that all of the ways that we had learned to make marriage work had been internalized in our psyches, that even our sexual ideas were reflecting it.

For complex historical reasons, men decided that they had to be the teachers. They had to be the ones who were stronger. They earned, they were the ones who gave the money. They learned to confuse showing off with showing love.

One of the good points of the changes that have been wrought by feminism and by increasing acceptance of some of the principles of gender equality is that men are beginning to not define themselves purely in terms of knowing more and earning more than their partner.

It’s no longer a divorce risk when a woman outearns her husband, or has more education. And men and women sharing child-rearing are the most sexually satisfied in their lives.

HR: What are the most important insights for couples who want a successful marriage today?

SC: Marriage does not save anyone, economically or psychologically. The most important predictor of whether you’re going to have a successful marriage is if you can organize a successful, satisfying personal life, where you have friends; you keep commitments to friends; they keep commitments to you. And you’re basically happy with what you’re doing. If you find somebody who is also happy, and with whom you enjoy doing things, you’re going to get better.

Another false belief is “cocooning.” The best way to build the kind of rich, supportive relationships we want is to go out and get outside input that you can bring back. Mounting research shows that when couples engage in such egalitarian relationships, their love grows over time instead of the tensions beginning to rise.

HR: What are the practical barriers to marriage today? How can couples make it work?

SC: Because we have much higher standards of marriage than in the past, it takes more negotiation, more time, more attention to one’s own work and expectations of support for that work and attention to your partner’s work and ideas. Marriage is much more personally involved than marriages of the past were, or had to be.

You need patience, you need time—and you need work schedules that allow you to take the time. So a lot of the barriers are in the economy. The increased work pressures that we face and the economic precarity that we face undermines those kinds of skills. Financial insecurity is a bigger predictor of negative communication in marriage than having divorced parents or what happened to you in your childhood, because it pulls your attention away from the things you need to keep going.

HR: Marriages from the ‘50s didn’t have the personal satisfaction prerequisite, but the economics were easier, right?

SC: People look back to the 1950s with nostalgia. You certainly should not feel nostalgia for any of the marriages of that period. But that was a period when real wages were rising, when every economic expansion up to the early ‘70s gave 90% of its benefits to the bottom 90% of the population. The rich were not getting richer.

All of those economic and social changes that we think of as separate from our personal lives have really big ramifications now that we are trying to build personal lives that really involve this kind of patience, gratitude, love, and reaching out. A study of families and marriages during the big financial crisis and housing crisis found that domestic violence reports from the most educated, secure women soared up to the levels of their less educated and less secure peers.

HR: How can you explain the nostalgia for an earlier period? What do you make of the trad wife movement?

SC: Well, I used to be pretty contemptuous of it. But I’ve gotten softer in my old age and after seeing what’s been happening over the past 30 years or so. I’ve come to believe that this nostalgia is kind of “referred pain.”

Our brain has trouble figuring out where pain originates. It often gives us the wrong messages. It will tell us that our neck hurts, when in fact we ate too much and the stomach is pressing on the diaphragm. Physicians call it referred pain. You think it’s in one location, but treating it there is not going to work at all.

That is a delightful analogy for what’s happening with so many of the pains that people feel, and the nostalgia they feel for 1950s families. It occurs at a deeper place in the body politic and in the economy. It occurs in these changes in the economy and in the increasing development of a K-shaped economy where the rich are getting richer and the poor and the middle class are getting poorer. With these things, it’s easy to say, “what went wrong?” and to think “maybe it’s because we don’t have those families that we used to be able to watch on TV and look at how well they organized their lives and how happy they seemed.”

HR: What does it take to build the kind of mutualistic relationship that people want today?

SC: Historical perspective and sociological perspective could be one of the best therapeutic tools that there is. We often treat our male partner as an unskilled assistant, telling him what to do. It’s called gatekeeping. I’ve talked about gatekeeping in my research all my life, but my husband still catches me doing it sometimes. He finds it easier to accept this behavior, which is quite insulting, when I explain to him what an ingrained habit it is, and that I know it’s a bad habit and am trying to shake it.

Historical perspective on where these things come from won’t solve everything, but can create a space in which you can discuss them without having to decide “is this a symptom of some deeper problem in this individual or in our relationship?” It creates space in which you can depersonalize it and say, “But what needs to change?” And let’s stop saying, “Why are you doing this, you bad person?” or “you inconsiderate person?”

You are doing this because it’s been ingrained in you that you should do this.

HR: Basically, things don’t need to be as they are today.

SC: That’s the point of all historical and anthropological research. Once you examine the variety of ways that people have experienced and expressed emotions, and related to each other, it gives you a bigger sense of how much of a straitjacket we’ve been put in. Especially by the stereotypes that we inherit, that we’re dealing with now—the manosphere and ideas about toxic masculinity and all of these things—things that make it seem much more permanent and much less changeable than it actually is.

This is what’s known as “anticipatory grief”—a reaction to loss that hasn’t yet occurred. While it’s fairly common to experience it for a loved one facing a terminal illness, you can also experience it in other potential loss situations, like retiring from a fulfilling career, a child going away to college, or divorce. It often involves a liminal state of being, like what I experienced, that can wreak havoc with your well-being and interfere with your ability to be present.

While similar to after-loss grief, anticipatory grief has its own issues and trajectories that can make it hard to manage, says Alan Wolfelt, director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition and an expert on the topic. While you may lean toward ignoring or pushing away these complex emotions, denying your grief and suffering silently will probably not help you or your loved ones cope better.

“Too often, people are trying to be happy at times when they should be sad, and that inhibits their ability to fully integrate a life transition into their world,” says Wolfelt. “We can better cope with realities we face by acknowledging them.”

Anticipatory grief, like after-loss grief, can be painful. But by understanding what it’s like and giving yourself permission to explore its many facets, you might be able to mitigate some of the pain and move through it with more intention.

Similar and different from regular grief

Like grief after a loss, anticipated grief can involve strong and varied emotions. You may feel happy, sad, angry, confused, worried, relieved, guilty, and more, and the feelings may arise at seemingly random moments, sometimes overwhelming you. Your feelings can be hard to explain even to yourself, let alone others.

For example, imagine your teenage son is applying to colleges. Suddenly, you’re hit with the reality that he’ll be leaving home soon and your life will change dramatically. You may feel sad anticipating losing your son’s everyday presence, look forward to a new, freer chapter in your life, or both. You may feel pride and joy for his bright future, but fear losing your close relationship and your role as his parent.

These myriad emotions can be disorienting—but it’s important to honor them, however they show up, says Wolfelt.

“The more open acknowledgement you can have of what your genuine, authentic emotions are, the better,” he says.

While grieving a death may seem natural and expected, anticipatory grief may come with some resistance, like telling yourself (or other people telling you) there’s no reason to feel what you’re feeling. However, according to Wolfelt, denying your pain only adds to it, negatively affecting your everyday well-being. A better way to handle anticipatory grief is to own it and process it through mourning.

“Grief is the internal response, the thoughts and feelings inside,” he says. “In contrast, mourning is the shared social response or grief gone public; it’s taking your grief and putting it into action. That creates change or movement.”

The importance of mourning

There are known, socially acceptable ways to mourn someone who’s died, like funerals, sitting Shiva, Dia de los Muertos, and other rituals. While there may be fewer structured ways to manage anticipatory grief, we can help ourselves through the experience by understanding the importance of mourning in processing grief.

“Mourning helps you integrate loss and be transformed by your grief,” says Wolfelt. “You get stuck if you grieve but don’t mourn.”

The very nature of anticipatory grief (or any grief) is that it can feel different from one moment to the next, and from one person to another. That means our mourning needs may change over time. No one needs to follow a specific pattern, says Wolfelt, but we all need to pay attention and take our grief seriously.

This may be easier or harder, depending on several factors. How close you were to a person, your cultural or spiritual beliefs, and differences in your personality and gender can all influence how you mourn and how effective you are at managing grief versus staying stuck in it.

“If you have low social support, a history of anxiety, a history of a [strongly] dependent relationship with the person (for example, you haven’t expanded your social support system beyond the person who’s dying); those are risk factors that research clearly shows can make it more challenging for you,” he says.

A healthier way to mourn

While no one needs to mourn in the same way, Wolfelt suggests in his guidebook on the topic that people try to meet six specific needs to get through the experience:

1. Acknowledge that you are grieving and the reality of your loss. You may feel it’s too hard to acknowledge the impending loss, but denial doesn’t help. Instead, acknowledging all emotions is a better path toward well-being, even in the midst of grief. Facing your reality more squarely can help you figure out what you need.

“Thinking of yourself in this way will help you be both self-compassionate and honest about how challenging your current circumstances are,” he writes.

2. Embrace all of your emotions, pleasant and unpleasant. Anticipatory grief is marked by changing, intense emotions. Naming them can help to tame them, making them less overwhelming. You can also try reframing the meaning of your feelings to make them less problematic, such as recognizing grief as a facet of loving someone deeply.

If you’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed by grief, Wolfelt recommends dosing it—meaning, letting yourself fully experience your emotions, but limiting how long you do that. When not focusing on your grief, it’s fine to distract yourself, evade thoughts, or do whatever you want to keep your grief from being so dominant, he adds.

“There’s a balance to be had between doing the work of anticipating loss and in balancing that with the ability to stay present in the here and now,” he says.

This may be especially important when taking care of someone you will be losing, as caregiving often requires a more outward than inward focus. Having a way to care for your emotional needs outside of that role can be helpful.

3. Explore memories of the love or attachment you’re losing. This may seem like a step to avoid, but Wolfelt says it’s important for managing anticipatory grief. Reviewing past memories allows you to create a narrative around what is happening, something humans need to help make sense of their lives and feel congruency. Research suggests that allowing ourselves to feel nostalgia for the past has many benefits, including putting us in touch with our authentic selves and what matters in life.

“The more time and attention you devote to exploring memories and sharing and discussing them with others, the more your sense of peace will grow,” writes Wolfelt.

4. Develop a new self-identity. Often our relationships are part of our identity—we are a partner, a mother, a daughter, or a colleague. Our impending loss may make us question who we are in the world. It’s important to recognize that and address it.

For example, if you’re losing your wife of many years, through divorce or death, your friendships may be affected and your social circle may shrink; once-shared activities may no longer appeal or be possible. While you may grieve this transition and the changes it brings, it also opens up possibilities to embrace new roles in life.

“Change is often both a loss and an opportunity, even if it’s an opportunity you would never willingly have chosen,” writes Wolfelt.

5. Search for meaning in the experience. When facing loss, many of us begin to question the meaning of our lives. “It’s important to focus on meaning and purpose, both in the attachment that is ending and in your continued living,” writes Wolfelt. This might take you into spiritual territory, stimulating questions about why you exist, what it all means, and how you can go on.

Seeking meaning from your experience can help one cope in the present with difficult future losses as well as later on, after the loss has occurred. To help explore that, Wolfelt suggests reading inspiring texts, meditating or praying, talking with spiritual advisors, journaling, or spending more time in nature. Whatever puts you closer to your own sense of meaning will help you find peace, and more reasons to get up in the morning if you are feeling dragged down.

6. Reach out to others for support. As mourning is an outward experience of inner pain, finding other people who can listen as you grapple with your emotions, memories, and questions about life’s meaning can be soothing and helpful.

“You might feel undeserving of attention because the ultimate loss hasn’t really happened yet. But I’m here to tell you that your current grief is completely real, valid, and necessary. And there are others who will understand,” he writes.

Look for someone who can listen empathically without trying to guide you (or bully you) into feeling better, he says. No one experiencing anticipatory grief should ever be pushed into something that doesn’t feel right or given pat phrases that discount their pain.

“Cliches can be very painful to somebody who’s experiencing grief—trite comments like, ‘You’re holding up so well, time heals all wounds, think of what you still have to be thankful for,’” he says. “While well intended, they’re often misinformed and are a projection from the outside in.”

Choosing whom exactly to share with can be tricky. But you can look to family and close friends, support groups experiencing the same types of anticipated loss, spiritual advisors, or professional counselors, writes Wolfelt.

“Find people that can walk into the metaphorical wilderness of grief and honor that you’re in a liminal space, without feeling the need to pull you to the left or right or to pull you out,” he says. “Those are the genuine, compassionate people that we need in our lives.”

If approaching someone with your grief feels too daunting, you can still help yourself by just being around people more generally. We all need social connection for our health and happiness, and having a fun night out with friends, small interactions with neighbors, or a coffee at the local café can make you feel less alone, even if you don’t explicitly talk to anyone about your grief.

Dealing well with grief is a life skill

We will all face loss at some point in our lives—but we’ll only anticipate grief when the loss involves someone we love. Love and grief go hand in hand, says Wolfelt, making it central to a life well-lived.

“The capacity to give and receive love means we will likely mourn someday,” he says. But living in a “mourning-avoidant, emotion-phobic” culture, he adds, we don’t always have the right tools handy for guiding ourselves or others through it.

To be better prepared, it’s wise for us all to cultivate the skills that will serve us well in times of grief and loss. Having greater emotional intelligence, mindful attention, meaning and purpose, social connection, and hope can all help, says Wolfelt. Fortunately, these can all be deliberately practiced long before a loss comes along, helping us lead healthier, happier lives overall.

“These are central needs. The more you can befriend those needs, the more you integrate loss into your life,” he says.

For example, more people of all ages are meeting on “the apps”—and, not unrelatedly, more of them are complaining about the exhaustion of modern dating. Perhaps as a result for some, many say they are happily single and have no interest in finding a romantic partner.

There’s another change we’ve seen over the past few decades that has been less noticed—many of the people still interested in dating and long-term relationships aren’t in their 20s and 30s (who are often seeking to marry and maybe have children), but rather are middle-aged and older. There are more later-in-life singles than ever before, thanks in part to the rise of “gray divorce”—people in their 50s and older who are divorcing faster than any other age group.

Perhaps in response, we’re starting to see reality-TV shows about this group like Later Daters, The Golden Bachelor, and The Golden Bachelorette. In popular culture, we’re seeing high-profile people in their 50s and older partnering up, including author Anne Lamott, who married for the first time at age 65, and model and pro-aging activist Paulina Porizkova, who recently got engaged at age 61.

In fact, a cultural shift seems to be taking place—the idea that there is no expiration date for the desire for love and sex, or at least romantic companionship. Even so, there are some challenges to finding love later in life, especially for women, who tend to live longer than men and outnumber their male counterparts as they age. Just knowing in advance about these challenges can help you to navigate them—but the bottom line might be that the path to dating happily in later life is to let go of the hopes and expectations you held at a younger age.

Gender and sexuality

The first challenge that may come to mind is a common (and not completely inaccurate) belief that most men prefer youthful beauty. It can be harder for a woman in her 60s and older to find an age-appropriate male romantic partner—often referred to as “silver foxes”—as many tend to skew younger, often 10 years or more, when partnering again. That tendency may no longer be restricted to men, as we see the rise of “the cougar”—older women seeking younger men—which seems to be experiencing a moment.


Older gay men, too, often experience ageism in a dominant gay culture that also elevates youth, fitness, and beauty, which makes partnering a challenge. There’s even some evidence of age gaps in lesbian relationships.

But the desire for youth and beauty isn’t the overwhelming reason why many later in life adults aren’t romantically partnered. Actually, there are many reasons, all of which deserve greater scrutiny—and honesty.

Perhaps surprisingly, they tend to touch upon things like family and gender roles.

A big barrier is caregiving. In social scientist Lauren E. Harris’ 2023 study of how family caregiving responsibilities among single men and women aged 60 to 83 affects their desirability to someone of the opposite sex, an unexpected pattern emerged.

The men often found women in their age group to be less desirable if they were heavily involved in caregiving their adult children or grandchildren or both. The women, however, found men in their age group who were close with their families to be more desirable, perceiving their carework “as a sign of good character and family orientation.”

While the men stated they wanted to be a romantic partner’s top priority, most of the women didn’t demand the same. They did, however, have one major concern—taking care of the men, especially if the women already had caregiving responsibilities.

“Older single women were quite aware of the ways men may require their time, attention, and care,” Harris writes. “Though they were looking for romantic relationships and companions, women prioritized performing less carework over a relationship that required carework like raising a man’s children or nursing him through decline.”

Family matters

There are other family issues that pop up for those dating later in life.

Understandably, having minor children in the house might impact a parent’s re-partnering decisions. But it doesn’t necessarily change when the kids reach adulthood. Although a young child might not have much control over whom their parent dates, lives with, or marries, adult children and stepchildren have much more power in the decision and often aren’t afraid to exert it.

When author Eve Pell married a widower when she was 71 and he was 81, his adult children were resistant at first. She didn’t expect that. But in interviews with later-in-life couples for her book, Love, Again: The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance, many had similar experiences.

Some shared that their adult children liked their family “as is,” with their divorced or widowed parent or parents remaining single. Some adult children didn’t want to let go of their childhood memories. Others feared that a new romantic partner would take time or inheritance or both away from them and their children.

Adult stepchildren can be as disgruntled as younger stepchildren, writes Wednesday Martin in Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do.  “As the kids get older, issues like estate planning and inheritance can come into play, adding an extra layer of anxiety and resentment.”

In fact, the desire to pass on wealth to their children is why many older single parents won’t marry a new romantic partner, research suggests.

Some adult children who no longer live with their parents react poorly to a new partner and may limit the number of times they visit their parents, not allow their children to visit their grandparents, especially if the new couple moves in together, or refuse to forge any type of bond with the new partner, as a study of middle-aged divorced and widowed people in the Netherlands finds. Some even severed their relationship with the parent altogether.

This is why, the study notes, some single parents choose to be in a live-apart-together (LAT) relationship with a new partner, although not always happily. But even that didn’t always guarantee things went well.

As one 78-year-old woman in a long-term LAT relationship told the researchers, her daughters wouldn’t visit her if her new partner was over, and she was not invited to his granddaughter’s wedding.

While they wanted to enjoy their new love, their adult children’s negative reactions made them feel sad and stressed.

“Children of all ages feel betrayed and abandoned when their parents divorce because their cozy nest is disrupted. This even upsets kids who are already out of the nest,” says psychiatrist Dr. Carole D. Lieberman. “The message their parents are sending is that it is more important for them to have a life of their choosing than to remain in their prior, primary role of mom or dad.”

Not all adult children and stepchildren create complications for their parents, however. In a 2025 study, family sociologist Cassandra Cotton found that two-thirds of the adults (aged 55 to 92) she interviewed shared that their children, grandchildren, or siblings were generally supportive of their search for a new partner. Some even set up a dating profile for them or helped them navigate online dating.

Still, that means about a third of those surveyed experienced some pushback by family, which may prevent them from re-partnering even if they want to. And they tended to see their prospective partner’s family—not their own—as being potentially problematic.

Facing the stress of dating

Beyond family concerns, there are other barriers to a new relationship later in life—they’re stressful, at least at first, according to a 2025 study.

Exploring how later daters manage conflict in newer dating relationships, the researchers found that many struggle to find a way to merge their daily lives and get their routines in sync. Without the history of shared positive experiences and trust that long-married couples typically have, later daters were quicker to have negative feelings about a new partner and often saw small annoyances—ones that might easily be ignored by long-term couples as a way to keep the peace—as threats to the relationship’s future.

While both men and women suffered physically in the early throes of a new relationships when there was tension, women also suffered emotionally, reenforcing what previous studies have found: Women tend to carry a heavier emotional burden in a heterosexual relationship and often are more sensitive about handling conflict.

Still, the study found that while later daters’ well-being may suffer in the beginning, it could be beneficial in the long term as it might prompt them to leave an unhealthy relationship or one in which they have different dating goals—marriage, cohabitation, LAT, something casual, or a committed monogamous relationship—quickly.

Different dating goals is another barrier to later-in-life partnering. Single men in their 60s and older often want and expect to cohabit with or marry their female romantic partner but many women did not, stating that they were unwilling to give in to the “structural commitments” of cohabitating relationships such as cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. While those women said they dated for companionship, they indicated they were willing to be lonely before sacrificing their independence. That often led to the end of otherwise satisfying romantic relationships.

Some struggle more than others

While some of the complications to dating later in life seem to be universal, there are some that are unique to people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ+) people, adults with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and other marginalized people.

Some lesbians often feel a need to go back in the closet as they age for fear of discrimination, making finding new potential partners a challenge, North Carolina State University professor Paige Averett tells me.

Growing up at a time when society was less accepting and more stigmatizing about being LGBTQ+ than today could influence boomer lesbians’ self-image and thoughts about forming romantic relationships, she shares. Some LGBTQ+ people who came out in mid- or later life, often after having been in heterosexual relationships, feel that they’re inexperienced in dating. It can be hard to put oneself out there and so they often don’t.

For African American women, who are the least likely to marry, dating later in life can be challenging, sociologist Cheryl Y. Judice discovered while doing research for her book, Interracial Relationships Between Black Women and White Men.

There just aren’t that many available single Black men to date, she notes, and they have longer life expectancies compared to Black men. Older Black people are twice as likely as their white peers to live below the poverty line, which has an impact on dating possibilities. In addition, health factors in: Black women have higher rates of disability than white women and both Black and white men, which also can create challenges to finding a romantic partner.

So, too, can socio-cultural issues. For older divorced or widowed Mexican-American women, who make up a substantial portion of the older Latinos in the United States, seeking a new partner could possibly lead to vergüenza (sexual shame) or culpa (guilt) in a culture where a woman expressing her sexuality in later years or outside of a church-sanctified marriage is frowned upon.

Finding a romantic partner can be challenging for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) of any age due to barriers such as caregiver control, often removing the ability for them to make decisions on their own; limited social opportunities; a lack of privacy;  and the potential loss or reduction of essential federal programs such as Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid if they wed or even if they live with a romantic partner.

Because more people with IDD are living longer than ever before, the population of those aged 60 years and older is growing and projected to reach 1.2 million by 2030. Many will have lived much of their adult life without a romantic partner.

Letting go of old scripts

Ultimately, researchers find that later-in-life dating and partnering, while often desired, can be complicated.

“There are many unanswered questions regarding the role of gender, age, and family in the dating process that deserve to be addressed,” Harris writes. “At present, practitioners need to be aware of the hurdles, as well as the stigma, that single older adults face in seeking a romantic partner.”

That said, older singles don’t have a romantic script to follow as many of us do when we’re younger, often without realizing that we are. We all know that script: meet, fall in love, move in together, maybe put a ring on it, and pop out a few kids. Once you’ve hit your 50s and beyond, many have been there, done that. It’s perhaps the first time in life when we can create our own script without societal pressure.

That’s why many embrace the LAT lifestyle. Others seek casual relationships to satisfy their needs—or even embrace polyamory, the practice of cultivating multiple, simultaneous romantic partnerships. As one 84-year-old woman in an ethical non-monogamous relationship shares in the 2023 anthology Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60:

No longer are there many plans for the future or discussions around raising a family. No longer do I feel the need to live with someone or be in an exclusive relationship. … the need for companionship, intellectual connection, warmth, holding, and sex are all still present and central to what I call “old love.”

In other words, our desire for love, intimacy, companionship, and connection doesn’t go away just because we’re older, but it can take on new forms if our expectations of what a romantic relationship “looks like” become more expansive. If you’re looking for love in your later years, perhaps the most important takeaway is to be open to the various ways you may find it.

What he was missing was harder to name. It was not a lack of activity or ambition. It was a lack of connection.

So he started something small. A philosophy group. No curriculum, no credentials required. Just people gathering to discuss a single idea at a time. One word, one question, and whoever showed up.

What began in apartments quickly outgrew them.

Within a year, the New York Philosophy Society was drawing well over a hundred people on a typical night, sometimes many more. Conversations unfolded in small circles across bars, restaurants, and event spaces, rotating every thirty minutes so that strangers could engage deeply and then meet someone new. The group now relies on a team of volunteers to host and facilitate, and has become one of the more surprising social phenomena among young New Yorkers looking for something more meaningful than a typical night out.

But what makes it compelling is not just the scale. It is the tone.

People show up not to perform or network, but to think together. To ask questions about truth, love, purpose, and meaning. To be taken seriously by people they just met.

“It was only after I started doing it,” Ren says, “seeing not only my own life changing, but also the people around me… that I realized the importance of connection.”

What began as a way to fill a gap in his own life became something much larger. A place where people who felt disconnected could experience something rare. Not just being around others, but being known by them. Ren’s story is not unusual.

Points of connection

Across the country, people are creating their own versions of Ren’s gathering. A weekly yoga gathering that grew from 20 people to hundreds showing up in a park. A fitness group where the real friendships form afterward over brunch. A community dinner where strangers end the night sharing stories they didn’t expect to tell.

Participation is not limited to one stage of life. While people in their 30s and early 40s participate at the highest rates, engagement is meaningful across all age groups, including those over 60. The desire for connection, and the ability to build it through shared activity, does not age out.

For many of us, connection used to be built into daily life. School, work, and family created regular opportunities to be around the same people again and again. Over time, relationships formed almost without thinking about it.

That structure has weakened. People move more often. Work is more transactional or remote. Fewer shared activities organize our time. As a result, connection is no longer ambient. It requires intention.

What is emerging in response is not just more socializing, but something more specific. People are building what we call communities of play, groups organized around shared activity.

That is one of the Six Points of Connection, a simple framework created by us at the U.S. Chamber of Connection to capture what people need to build a fully connected life. The six include having someone nearby you can rely on, consistent one-to-one relationships, a sense of belonging to a shared identity, a third place, a role in contributing to others, and being part of a group that gathers around a shared activity.

Among these, community of play often acts as the entry point.

Impact of connection

To understand its impact, we studied more than 2,000 adults across the United States, comparing those who regularly participate in activity-based communities with those who do not. We then interviewed 20 community builders and surveyed nearly 100 leaders like Ren to understand how these groups actually function.

We identified some distinct groupings, and the differences between them are significant.

People who participate in these communities are 28 percentage points more likely to report strong social support and 33 points more likely to report high life satisfaction. They are also more likely to trust others, to form relationships across differences, and to feel a sense of agency in their lives.

And yet only about 30 percent of people regularly participate in any kind of shared activity community.

Most people are not opting out because they do not want connection. They are running into friction. In our data, people who are not part of these communities are far more likely to say they feel uncomfortable showing up, unsure how to start, or worried they will not fit in. Cost and time play a role, but the biggest barriers are social and psychological.

This gap points to something important. The issue is not that we do not know how to build connections. It’s that most people are not engaging in the kinds of structures that make it possible.

One reason activity-based communities are so effective is that they lower the stakes of showing up. You do not have to arrive ready to connect. You arrive ready to do something.

Some are built around fitness or food. Others are built around ideas. Some are intentionally a little strange.

“I’ve always been interested in bringing people together to do kind of little weird things,” one builder says.

From there, connection can emerge more naturally.

This reflects a deeper insight from the science of play and social behavior. Researchers like Stuart Brown have argued that play is a primary way humans build trust and social bonds. It creates a state of openness and shared attention that makes people more receptive to one another. When people move, create, or learn together, they begin to synchronize, both emotionally and behaviorally.

Other researchers have found that shared activities accelerate what might otherwise take much longer to develop. Instead of relying on conversation alone, people build connection through experience. They have something to reference, something to return to, and something that brings them back again.

One community-builder describes it simply: The activity gets people in the door, but the real connection happens afterward, when people stay and talk.

That pattern shows up again and again: The activity is not the point—it’s the invitation. And for many people, that’s the easiest place to begin.

Changing relationships

The impact of these communities is not limited to individual well-being. They also shape how people relate to others.

In our study of community-builders, a large majority reported that their groups regularly bring together people across differences in age, race, socioeconomic background, and political identity. This kind of interaction is increasingly rare in everyday American life.

Sociologists often distinguish between bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding brings together people who are similar. Bridging connects people across lines of difference. Both matter, but bridging is especially important for building trust and resilience in a society.

What is notable about activity-based communities is that they often do both at the same time.

People come because of a shared interest, which creates an immediate sense of familiarity. But because the groups are open and fluid, they also create opportunities to encounter people who are different.

One participant described arriving at an event feeling isolated and unsure, only to realize that others felt the same way. There was a whole group of people who felt like that. They felt less alone immediately.

Another described how, over the course of an evening, conversations moved beyond small talk into something more meaningful. People began sharing stories about their lives, their families, and their struggles, often with people they had just met.

These are the moments when connection shifts from surface interaction to something more durable.

While much of the research focuses on the benefits for participants, our interviews highlighted something else. The act of creating community has its own impact.

Many of the builders we spoke with did not set out to become leaders. They were trying to solve something in their own lives. They wanted more connection, more meaning, or simply a place where they could belong.

In creating that space for others, they often found a deeper sense of purpose themselves.

One builder described finding a handwritten note after an event. Someone had written about how much the community meant to them and how lonely they had felt before finding it.

Experiences like this can be transformative. They shift how people see their role in the world. Instead of waiting for connection to appear, they begin to see themselves as someone who can create it.

Worth the effort

At the same time, this work is not effortless. Many builders invest significant time and energy, often without financial support. Some described the tension between wanting to participate as a member and feeling responsible for holding the space for others.

“I have a tendency to self-sacrifice,” one builder said. “I think at times I wish people knew what I’m putting into it.”

This tension points to something important. These communities are doing meaningful work, but they are largely unsupported.

For individuals, the lesson from this research is not that everyone needs to start a community. It is that connection is more accessible than it often feels.

The most effective entry point is a shared activity. Something simple, repeatable, and easy to join. A walk in the same place each week. A standing dinner. A regular gathering around a shared interest.

The goal is not to create instant closeness. It is to create a setting where familiarity can grow over time.

Psychologists have long emphasized the role of repeated exposure in forming relationships. Seeing the same people again and again, even in low-stakes settings, increases the likelihood of connection.

Activity based communities create that repetition in a natural way.

There is a tendency to look for large scale solutions to the problem of disconnection. New programs, new technologies, new policies.

Those may have a role to play. But what is already happening across the country suggests a more immediate path.

People are creating small, consistent spaces where others can gather. They are building connection through shared experience, not abstract intention.

Platforms like Heylo now support more than 20,000 of these communities, and the number continues to grow. Taken together, they represent a quiet but significant shift in how connection is formed.

Ren’s philosophy group is one example. It did not start as a solution to a national problem. It started as a response to a personal one.

That may be the most important insight.

If you want more connection in your life, the first step may not be to search for it. It may be to create a place where it can happen, and to invite others in.

So, why do we still crave these committed, romantic relationships when they can be so fragile? And how can we make them work better and remain satisfying over time?

To find out, I spoke with evolutionary biologist Justin Garcia, director of the Kinsey Institute and author of the new book The Intimate Animal. In his book, he explains some of the biological forces acting upon our most intimate relationships and how that affects everything from modern dating to marriage to polyamory, and more. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Jill Suttie: In your book, you make a case that intimacy is a biological drive, akin to other biological drives, like hunger or sex. But most of us don’t think of it that way. Why do you?

Justin Garcia: By training, I’m an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, and I think a lot about the role of evolution and selection in shaping who we are. That means thinking about the reality of our being a social primate.

We know we have a desire to engage in sexual activity for reproduction; it’s important for existing into the next generation. And so much of human social life, reproductive life, and sexual activity is couched in terms of long-term bonds. If we think about sexual desire as one lever that selection is acting on for survival and reproduction, then we also have to recognize that long-term bonds—within which a majority of sexual activity occurs for most humans around the globe, historically—had to be selected for, too.

My goal in The Intimate Animal was to really dive into that and take the role of intimacy in relationships seriously. For me, the social and the biological contexts of relationships are one and the same. There’s so much about connection, whether physical or emotional, that is tied into our story as mammals and, particularly, as social primates. Too often we ignore that to our detriment.

JS: There seems to be a widespread view that men and women have different sexual needs. Is that supported by science?

JG: This debate happens in the public sphere, but it’s also one that happens in academic journals. There’s a wonderful argument and series of articles by the feminist psychologist Janet Hyde called the Gender Similarities Hypothesis. Her work shows that many of the psychological sex differences we talk about between men and women aren’t very big. In large samples, something like 5% can be statistically significant, but does it tell us something meaningful about differences between men and women? Not really.

One of the more consistent findings, though, is that men on average have a larger interest in casual sex than women. So, there are some differences around sexual behavior, particularly around sexual desire. But it’s not as large as people think. Similarly, 20 years ago, everyone said that men engage in infidelity more than women. But in newer studies that are asking the questions in more complex ways, we actually see very small gender differences. So, short answer, there are some differences, but men and women are much more similar than we are different.

JS: One of your arguments in the book is that we are biologically wired for monogamous intimacy but not for monogamous sex. What do you mean by that?

JG: When people talk about monogamy, they often mean a monogamous relationship or a monogamous person. In behavioral and evolutionary biology, though, we don’t talk about monogamy as one term. We talk about two elements: social monogamy and sexual monogamy. Part of what I wanted to do in this book was bring that framework to our understanding of humans and relationships.

Social monogamy is a relationship structure, what we call pair-bonding, involving mutual territory defense, nest-building, and raising of offspring. That mutual piece is the key element of a pair-bond that’s different from sexual monogamy or sexual fidelity with one partner. And the reason we separate that is because there are different mechanisms, including in the brain, and different evolutionary pressures shaping them.

In some species, including ours, these are not totally aligned, although often partners attempt to enforce sexual fidelity in social monogamy. But when we look at the genetic parental evidence and make behavioral observations, we see that many animals that form pair-bonds sometimes sexually stray. By separating these pieces out, it gives us a new lens to think about our relationships and the tensions that exist between the safety that comes with deep intimacy and the excitement that comes with sexual variety.

So, say you’re in a long-term bond, where you feel intimacy, you feel connected; but you have this craving for excitement pulling you away from your primary relationship. Sometimes we can bring that tension into our relationship and harness it, instead. In our studies on couples that have long-term passion, they take vacations, have rituals, and do novel things with each other. There are ways we can integrate that into our relationship, to keep a sense of passion and excitement.

Too often, though, we move around like zombies, being pulled by the pressure in our romantic and sexual lives without understanding where it’s coming from and without consciously making decisions. It isn’t only about love, connection, safety, or the quality of a relationship. It’s about these multiple drives that have evolved to serve different functions.

JS: So, these tensions help explain why there is a lot of infidelity in the world. But at the same time, 85% of the world considers adultery immoral. So, is infidelity bad or should we accept it as a consequence of our biology?

JG: I think infidelity is a problem, because it’s a betrayal of a relationship agreement. That can include people who are in open relationships. You can also have infidelity in those contexts, because in polyamory or in sexually open relationships, most people still have a set of rules they’re abiding by. And those rules can be violated, whether that’s a rule about not having sex with someone in your friend network or always using condoms with someone else.

One of my goals was to explore the tensions, but also let people know they have options that don’t involve betrayal, whether that’s saying a relationship doesn’t work for you and separating, or experimenting with an open relationship, or—instead of letting the desire for spontaneity and novelty pull you away from your primary partner—finding ways we can integrate that into our relationship.

Betrayal almost always causes damage, often for both people—and often to their social networks, as well. When people ask me about infidelity, they often assume it happens because there’s something wrong with their relationship. But in our studies, a lot of infidelity happens for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not someone loves their primary partner. That doesn’t make it any less painful. But it is a good reminder that sometimes it’s about things outside of your primary connection. When we understand that, we can manage our behaviors and relationships better, I hope.

JS: Polyamory seems like it could be one way to solve that tension. But you argue that many of us are not prepared to enter polyamorous relationships. Can you say more about why not?

JG: Different relationship structures work remarkably well for people, whether it’s being socially and sexually monogamous, in a polyamorous relationship, or single and enjoying singlehood. But we have a tendency to sometimes think that the grass is greener. We may think being poly has all these advantages, and we can romanticize those and forget that, just like in any relationship structure, there are people with high and low satisfaction, people that it works well for and people it doesn’t work well for.

Researchers used to call polyamory “ethical non-monogamy;” then they started calling it “consensual non-monogamy,” because whose “ethics” is it? But consensual is kind of a loaded term, too—are both partners always totally consenting to this? Now, increasingly, researchers are calling it “negotiated non-monogamy” or “disclosed non-monogamy.”

JS: I guess that sort of points to the problem…

JG: Exactly. It points out that often there are asymmetries in the desire for these different relationship structures.

In our studies, we found that about one in five Americans have at some point had some version of a disclosed non-monogamous relationship—whether it’s sexually open, like swinging, or polyamory love. In the case of polyamory, it’s interesting. It’s different than a sexually open relationship in that you’re attempting to manage multiple pair bonds. We find there are some people who do it remarkably well. It really satiates their desire for emotional connection and sexual connection. But, for other people, it’s a challenge to maintain multiple relationships—to balance jealousy, gift giving, quality time with multiple partners, etc.

It’s not that polyamory is good or bad. But, as I wrote about in The Intimate Animal, I’m cautious about the way we imagine different relationship structures to be great without recognizing that they just come with different kinds of effort, negotiations, and compromises.

JS: I’m at an age where many of my friends have young adult children looking for romantic partnerships. But it seems more fraught than it was for us at their age. Why is that? And what advice would you give young adults today?

JG: Dating culture has changed dramatically and in a relatively short period of time. That includes the trajectory of a relationship. Just a few decades ago, for instance, young people would often marry fairly early in their courtship process, and marriage was about starting a grand adventure with someone that you were attracted to and could imagine a future with. Young people today think of marriage as the finale, after you already know everything about someone and have fully investigated them.

We did a study with the Match Group, and we found that about 80% of Gen Z-ers said that they believe they will find true love in their life, but about 45% said they don’t think they’re ready for a relationship—they need to work on themselves first. This highlights that they think being ready is a linear process. If you just go work on yourself, one day you’ll wake up and be ready.

But that’s not how we really show up socially or romantically or sexually. In the best case, your romantic partners are there to help you take risks, explore the world, catch you when you fall. That goes back to the mutual part of all pair bonding, of having a copilot to experience life with. When we put too much emphasis on having to be perfect before being in a relationship, we neglect the fact that relationships are containers within which we can grow and make mistakes and experience the world.

This is a challenge that’s showing up on dating apps and in the offices of matchmakers. Dating apps are a remarkable opportunity to find someone with the same hobbies, kinks, religious background, but it’s more data than the human brain can process. We have an information overload. And that means we’re seeing fewer people interested in second and third dates and getting to know someone. After a first date, they’ll say: “Well, you were wonderful, but you held your fork a little funny during lunch, and I can get back on my app and find someone who doesn’t.”

When the brain has a sense of an unlimited resource, we keep going back to the well to find someone who’s perfect. But if we understand that our brain is playing a dirty trick on us, then we can say, “I found someone I like, and, yes, they did this funny thing with the fork, but I’m going to go on a second date with them anyway, because there’s a whole lot that I liked about them.” We have to grab biology by the horns in those moments and focus more on the deal-makers than the deal-breakers.

JS: Many people believe that what’s hurting them in the dating market is that they’re not attractive enough. What does science say about attraction?

JG: In our Singles in America study, we ask people what they’re looking for in a partner. And what’s been heartwarming for me is that in the last few years, in particular, the number one thing that single men and women are looking for in a romantic partner is someone they can trust and confide in. Yes, people say attraction, humor, sexual confidence, and intelligence are important. But number one for men and women is having someone you can trust and confide in.

I think it’s a powerful reminder, but it’s also something hard to determine on a first date. Often it takes a little time to really see if you can trust and confide in someone. It also goes back to why infidelity is such a problem. Betrayal corrodes the number one thing so many people want in a relationship, a partner you can trust.

JS: Are there other practical implications of your work you want to share?

JG: I’m not a clinical psychologist or physician, so I’m often cautious about giving advice. I’m in the business of “how come,” not “how to.” But I do think that when we understand more about ourselves, we can change our approach to our romantic and sexual lives.

One way is by having a lot more empathy for ourselves and those around us. Especially in the case of breakups and romantic dissolution, when people ask, “Are you ready for someone else?” or “Why don’t you get back into the dating market?” or “Try to focus on the things you didn’t like about the person.” We wouldn’t say that to someone who was going through bereavement. But, for some reason, people will tell us we can just move on. We all have to recognize the intense grief people go through when they lose a relationship. It’s why we’ve found 50% of people have a yo-yo relationship; they go back after they breakup.

Another thing is when we’re first dating and falling in love, feelings of limerence [infatuation] are a complete mind-body experience, impacting the brain, hormones, heart rate, and how we perceive our beloved’s behavior. This colors our understanding of what’s going on around us and the decisions we make. Are you making risky decisions or thoughtful ones? Are you balancing the intensity of first excitement with long-term intentions?

I believe that the more that we understand ourselves, the better decisions we can make in our intimate life, really prioritizing the role of close connection. These relationships hold the answer to our loneliness epidemic, to our accumulated anxiety about everything—including the environment, politics, the economy, and health. It all comes down to the power of meaningful, intimate social connections.

But a new book by journalist Lewis Raven Wallace, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change From Within, argues we can’t always think our way out of our biases. Rather, loving relationships and community more reliably provide the foundation for shifting our views and unlearning bias and oppressive thinking.

Wallace is an Abolition Journalism Fellow at the organization Interrupting Criminalization, author of The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, and host of the podcast The View From Somewhere. I spoke with them about research related to unlearning, stories of change from the tiny to transformative, and strategies for all of us to open ourselves to other ways of thinking and being. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis: Why don’t we start with the question of what do we as individuals, and as a society, need to unlearn?

Lewis Raven Wallace: I came into this project about unlearning thinking about transphobia and racism because those are two areas that immediately affect my life and my activism. I’ve dealt with a lot of learning and unlearning around transphobia within my family as a trans person who came out quite young. I also have been in a many decades-long process of my own unlearning around racism. I’ve always been really interested in family roots, and I come from a many generations white family in South Carolina, where there’s a lot of tension and unspoken challenges around racism, and that’s something that I was interested in surfacing through conversations with my mother and my grandmother.

I’m not interested in telling other people what they should unlearn. For me, it’s been a lot about the systems that underlie the harms we’re experiencing today. Even underlying systems like transphobia and racism, it’s capitalism and ideas about private property and individualism and all the structures and assumptions that make up so much of the day-to-day toxicity that circulates in U.S. society. I wanted to understand more about what is required of us when we want to unlearn, especially things that are ongoing, systems and structures that we’re still living with.

KRL: Can you talk about the role of love when it comes to unlearning?

LRW: One of my first interviews was with Adrienne Johnson Martin, a Black woman in her 50s. What created the conditions for her to unlearn around policing and anti-Blackness was her connection with her family, in particular her son, who has a disability. Through her love for her son, she had undergone all this transformation that she identified as a big part of what made her open to unlearning throughout all parts of her life.

As I read the psychological and neuroscience research for the book, a lot of that was about the neuroscience of connection, the hormonal reactions that happen, and the neuroplasticity that we can access when we’re in loving, connected relationships, how that lays the foundation for unlearning. A lot of that research is actually about trauma, trauma healing, and unlearning trauma.

More and more over the last couple decades, researchers have been finding that it’s not enough to talk about your trauma, it’s not enough to just revisit your trauma, you have to actually experience different kinds of connections and relationships. That can be in a therapeutic relationship, or it can be in a loving relationship in your life. Trauma healing is actually love and unlearning in one.

That was so inspiring to me because trauma is probably the hardest thing to unlearn. It’s really, really deep; it creates these automated reactions in us. It’s uncomfortable to look at; it’s painful. The ways in which experiences of connection to other people can facilitate trauma healing, to me, that was a clue on this journey of trying to figure out the science of unlearning overall.

Every single person that I interviewed, in one way or another, talked about love, connection, community, and relationship. Not necessarily just romantic love, not just familial love, but experiences of connection as an aspect of their own learning.

KRL: Can you talk about attunement and co-regulation as motivating forces that facilitate unlearning?

LRW: There’s this really wonderful thing about human design, how we are made to survive together. Obviously you see it in parenting relationships, the phenomenon that the baby comes and you have to change as a person, you have to change all your lived patterns, you have to give up sleep and sacrifice a lot. So we’re actually neurologically designed to feel this sense of connection and interconnection in a way that makes us more open to change. At a neurological level, they call it rewiring the brain.

The more you use a certain circuit, the more likely you are to react in that same way in the future. We have these windows of opportunity where we are more open, more flexible to changing our reactions. Those windows can be created by oxytocin and the other hormones that are associated with love and connection and attunement. It opens us up at a biological level.

The way that humans tend to react to new information that contradicts us is one of two paths. Either we shut it down and shut it out, and that’s a very common and likely reaction, or we try to resolve the contradiction. The discomfort that’s required by trying to resolve the contradiction is very hard to go through on your own, especially if you’re going through a loss of identity or loss of sense of self. It’s hard, maybe even impossible to do that without a sense that other people are going to be there with you. It’s not just that being in relationship with other people can introduce you to new ideas, but it can actually make you a more flexible person.

So feelings of safety are a really important condition for long-term unlearning. You don’t have to feel safe the entire time, but you have to have some feeling of safety that you can go back to in order to process the things that are hard.

KRL: Your grandmother had a lot of unlearning to do, and your mother to some extent. Can you talk about the tension that you describe in the book between love and fear around your gender identity, and how that came to play in their unlearning?

LRW: When I was coming out as queer and then trans in the late 90s and early 2000s, for my grandmother, who was born in the 1920s, it was just confusing. And she’s a very loving person and she’s also, like a lot of people, kind of stuck in some of her ways. For my mother, it was more an experience of fear. She wasn’t particularly homophobic and there wasn’t really such a thing as transphobia in the way that there is now, because people just didn’t know what it was.

One of the few preconceived notions at the time was this would be a dangerous life, this would be a hard life, to be trans. Both of them had to do a lot of inner confrontation with discomfort and fear in order to relearn how to love me and stay in connection with me. That was not at all an overnight process.

KRL: Talk a bit about the role of generative somatics in unlearning.

LRW: Our bodies and minds are interconnected. We can’t just think our way out of things. In order to re-track our brains, we have to change our practices. Sometimes we even start doing the different thing before we’re totally mentally comfortable. That happens a lot around something as simple as pronouns. People might feel like, “I don’t really feel comfortable with it. I don’t really see it, but I’m just going to practice saying the right word.” And the more that you practice, the more it becomes second nature.

The field that I looked at, of politicized somatics, is taking this idea that change happens in the body and engaging with that as a political act. So asking, how can we strengthen our movements for justice? How can we strengthen our processes of unlearning? How can we become better listeners and unlearners ourselves through developing a kind of awareness of breath, of body, often very subtle things like, “Where do you feel tension as you talk about this? Or where does the energy in your body focus?”

I had experienced something traumatic with a group of people, and we went through a politicized somatic healing process collectively. We had this really incredible experience of somatically releasing an acute, traumatic event, which had been a physical assault by police. I actually felt in my body, I felt the experience of release.

It sounds complicated, and maybe a little woo-woo. But in some ways, it can actually be a shortcut compared to talking about something for years and years in therapy. To get into the physical embodiment of it, you then break the pattern in your body.

KRL: I’d love you to tell the story of Adrianne Black and how she evolved and unlearned the neo-Nazi beliefs of her community and her family of origin.

LRW: She had been raised by a family of activist white nationalists in Florida, and then she had gone to school at the New College of Florida, which is a public, alternative kind of college. She essentially was confronted, often in a very harsh way, by people who said, “Your beliefs and your family’s beliefs are not OK.” On the other hand, a small group of people embraced her and spent a lot of time with her, getting to know her and facilitating this unlearning and trying to talk her out of being a white nationalist.

The year after her graduation, she publicly renounced her family’s views. She alienated herself from her whole family of origin and apologized to a lot of people for the many years that she had spent holding these beliefs that she had come to see were really harmful. She changed through this combination of love, friendship, being loved by these people who spent time with her, and very uncomfortable confrontation, which she’s really come to terms with. She came out as trans a couple years later, so in some ways, her unlearning around racism and white nationalism had opened her up to a whole other world of who she would then become.

KRL: I’m curious about how you reconcile living in our flawed reality, while recognizing that there’s a lot of past inequity and harm that has not been resolved?

LRW: I grappled a lot with what I was going to say about settler colonialism in a book about unlearning. As somebody who’s living on stolen land, I own a home. I almost want to put it in quotes, “own.” I don’t believe that land should be parceled out and owned by people. How do I speak about unlearning something like that, when here I am sitting with all the privileges of it? Nonetheless, what I came to for myself is that there is no reconciliation. You actually remain in an acute awareness of the cognitive dissonance. Let that be motivating in trying to make change at every step. Sometimes those changes are really small and marginal, making a donation or paying a land tax, but over time, I think there’s something to be said for just not trying to resolve cognitive dissonance, letting it be really uncomfortable, and that is emotionally harsh.

Often, people who are in the settler position, or the colonizer position or the white position, we don’t have a lot of tools for looking at and actually feeling the pain of contradiction inside of ourselves, that I will never walk this earth in the kind of right relationship that I want to be in. That part of the story always brought me back to my grandmother and how, as she was essentially on her deathbed, she was still grappling with the impacts of her own internalized oppression, and it was painful to her. She wanted to feel this love and openness, she wanted to feel connected, she wanted to not be racist. But she couldn’t quite let go of all these things. There is a cost, even to the people who are privileged by it and who benefit.

KRL: What would you like readers to take from this book?

RLW: I want it to be a reminder that unlearning is really possible. It’s work that any of us can do. I want it to be a tool for people who want to have these unlearning conversations in their communities and with their families. It’s a very different kind of tool than the dominant narrative of We should talk to each other across the aisle. I find that framework very limited because it doesn’t acknowledge the kind of trauma that may be playing out in some of those interactions. It doesn’t acknowledge the painful fact that we’re not talking about systems of oppression that have ended. We’re talking about ongoing, structural harm. A different set of tools says, Hey, let’s start with ourselves. Let’s start with people right around us that we love and trust, and let’s build outward from there. It’s really possible for anybody to help cultivate these conditions.

Maybe you and your mom are long overdue for a conversation, or maybe you and your best friend haven’t been acknowledging something, or maybe in the work that you do, there’s room to cultivate just a little bit more space for unlearning. I want it to be empowering for people to think about the diversity of ways that we can create those conditions. I certainly have let go of the idea that unlearning is just a hard, crappy slog, and I want other people to feel that.

Some studies are finding support for this idea. For example, one study done with consumers using digital companions trained to respond with empathy found that doing so helped them alleviate their feelings of loneliness immediately after the interaction. As the researchers found, “being heard” and supported seemed to help people in this regard, and chatbots could mimic that well—in some ways, better than humans.

Another recent study found that people felt as good chatting with a bot as they felt talking with people face to face or online (though they felt more similar to and liked their human chatter better). Since better moods can be helpful for reducing loneliness, chatting with a bot could have an indirect impact on helping people who feel isolated. Research also suggests people may prefer talking with chatbots to people, particularly in the short term and in certain situations (such as when the real people in your life don’t seem very supportive).

These results are promising for sure. However, some even newer research should give us reason for pause. These studies are showing us that, despite expectations, chatbots don’t reduce loneliness in the long term. In some cases, interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) may even hurt our social well-being.

Chatbots don’t reduce loneliness over time

In one 2026 study, 275 first-year students at the University of British Columbia reported on how lonely they felt, their sense of social isolation, and their mood. Then, they were randomly assigned to send at least one meaningful message a day (for two weeks) to either a randomly selected student or to a chatbot named Sam that had been trained to be empathic and responsive. A third (control) group of students were told to write a short summary of their day each day in a private chatroom, to see the potential benefits of self-reflection.

At the end of every day, the students reported on how socially connected they felt while interacting with their conversation partner (or writing in their journal), as well as on their positive and negative feelings. Then, at the end of the two weeks of texting or writing, they reported again on their loneliness, mood, and social isolation.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that only students interacting with a random student felt more positive emotion and less loneliness and sense of isolation after the two weeks. Those interacting with a chatbot or writing in their journals didn’t.

Lead author Ruo-ning Li of the University of British Columbia says her finding suggests that a chatbot is a poor substitute for a real person—even if that person is a stranger.

“A low-tech, simple intervention—just texting with another random human peer they didn’t know before—reduced loneliness significantly after two weeks, while the highly supportive chatbot we designed didn’t even move the needle,” says Li.

In many ways, this finding surprised Li. She’d thought a chatbot that could provide validation to people and be available anytime would mimic the benefits one gets from interacting with people you don’t know well—a type of connection sometimes called “weak ties” by researchers. These kinds of interactions have been shown in the past to help people feel more connected and less lonely. But in this study, she found that chatbots don’t provide the same advantages as weak ties with humans.

“We set up this experiment to compare whether AI can bring us as much benefit as talking to a weak tie. It cannot,” she says. “Even with all of these features that have been shown by relationship science to make people feel good and connected, an AI simulation doesn’t really translate into a long-term psychological benefit.”

Interacting with a person improves mood better than chatbots

Students who interacted with humans and chatbots tended to feel better right after the interaction. But only those interacting with a human had overall positive feelings at the end of the two weeks, suggesting people still hold an edge over AI.

On the other hand, chatting with a chatbot did reduce negative emotion as much as chatting with a person over time, a potential benefit. Li thinks this suggests chatbots could be useful in certain situations or with certain populations that are more isolated. In situations where someone needs immediate comforting, perhaps chatting with a chatbot would be better than nothing, she says, though probably not a good long-term solution.

In a post-study analysis, she and her team went back to participants to see if they’d continued journaling or chatting with chatbots or strangers a week later. She found that significantly more people continued interacting with their human partner (33%) than with their chatbot (14%), with only 3% continuing to journal.

“This is super interesting, because it seems like human interaction doesn’t only reduce loneliness, it sustains connection,” she says.

Though Li hasn’t conducted this study in other settings yet, she suspects her results would hold in other circumstances where someone might be feeling disconnected, like moving to a new town or starting a new job. If so, she says, lonely people might also benefit temporarily from interacting with a chatbot, but get more out of interacting with a real human.

“If you just go out to talk to anyone around you—someone at work, your neighbor who walks their dogs, or a coworker you’ve never talked to—it can [likely] help you reduce loneliness better than AI chat bot,” says Li.

Why chatbots don’t cut it

Li doesn’t know why people get more out of chatting with strangers than a chatbot, but she believes it could have to do with how chatting with a real person makes interactions more dynamic and rewarding. While chatbots seem to have the advantage of always being available and empathic, they don’t initiate contact themselves, she says.

“With a human, both sides have the opportunity to start the conversation, which is more likely to sustain engagement.”

There’s also something about connecting with a real person that carries more emotional weight for people, she says. Chatbots don’t have to take time from their busy schedules to talk to you, making their interactions less valuable. Plus, they can’t be vulnerable or share any real emotion like people can, something useful for creating real intimacy.

Li adds another reason humans may have the advantage: People often have an extended social network, which could help someone expand their own social circle.

“Introducing you to a broader social network makes you feel connected and gives you even more opportunity to build new, deeper, better connections,” says Li. “That’s a fundamentally unique [aspect] of human interactions that the advanced technology cannot replicate yet.”

The future of chatbot companionship

While Li’s results aren’t the last word on the matter, they add to a growing body of research that suggests caution when trying to replace human interactions with AI companions. People using AI can form unhealthy dependence, sometimes leading to harming themselves or others.

For example, another 2026 study found that the way chatbots are designed to use sycophancy (agreement, flattery, and validation) to increase people’s willingness to engage with them can have detrimental effects on their well-being, social interactions, and decision making.

As part of the study, people were given an opportunity to check out whether some of their past misbehavior was questionable or not by getting feedback either from AI sources or from a group of humans (from a Reddit forum, “Am I the asshole?”).  Researchers found that “AI affirmed users’ actions 49% more often than humans on average, including in cases involving deception, illegality, or other harms.” This suggests that AI, by being too agreeable, is inadvertently promoting anti-social interactions and even self-destructive behavior.

Additionally, the researchers in this study found that people preferred AI feedback to human feedback. This doesn’t seem too surprising—after all, who wouldn’t want to be told that they’re right or that they aren’t the “asshole” in a situation? But that suggests sycophantic AIs may be giving people an unearned sense of validation, leading to poorer self-understanding and less accountability in their interactions with others. This could, ultimately, hurt people’s well-being and ability to form relationships.

While quite different from Li’s study, research like this points out how tricky it can be to design AI chatbots to be both helpful for users and better for real-world interactions and the common good. Now that there are a series of lawsuits around chatbots, the Federal Trade Commission is seeking more information from companies about how they assess potential harms of using AI chatbots, especially in children, who may not have the sophistication to understand potential pernicious effects.

For now, though, the question remains about the benefits of using chatbots to alleviate loneliness. Li, for one, is not giving up on their potential, but based on her findings, she’s considering alternative uses for them. Rather than substituting for human interaction, a chatbot could be designed to encourage users to initiate conversations with real people, build confidence in their ability to interact, or help them rehearse difficult conversations—all skills that could strengthen real-world relationships, she says.

“Even the most highly supportive chatbot by design couldn’t match the interaction with a random paired human peer,” she says. “So, rather than design it to be the best companion, maybe the future of AI should be to help us build connection with each other.”