The AI girlfriend who texts you firstPage 8 of 8.
Updated Jan 31, 2026 · 10 min read
A partner takes over the confiding and small children take the free hours, and between them the friendships get moved from necessity to luxury without anybody deciding it. What actually goes, and what shape the survivors take.
Updated Jan 28, 2026 · 11 min read
Distance does not kill friendships. The disappearance of unscheduled, pointless contact does, and the catch-up call is a bad substitute for it. What actually holds across an 8-hour offset.
Updated Jan 24, 2026 · 10 min read
Time by yourself is a capacity with named components, a failure mode and a training method. What it consists of, why it quietly degraded over the last decade, and how to get it back.
Updated Jan 22, 2026 · 11 min read
The most common major bereavement there is, and the one with the least room made for it. What changes in the second and third year, and what a difficult relationship does to the grief rather than for it.
Updated Jan 21, 2026 · 11 min read
A weak tie is a specific thing with a definition, and what matters about it is the count rather than the quality. What the research measured, what emptied the layer out, and why converting them into friends defeats the point.
Updated Jan 17, 2026 · 11 min read
Four sentences get handed to lonely people constantly, and they share one property: none of them can fail. What each one gets wrong mechanically, and the version of each that can actually be acted on.
Updated Jan 15, 2026 · 10 min read
Estrangement is workable for ten months of the year and then the calendar starts demanding an account of where you are going. The second problem is everyone else, and their assumption that any rupture should be repaired.
Updated Jan 13, 2026 · 11 min read
The burden feeling comes from a ledger nobody else is keeping. What makes a request easy to grant, why granting one tends to pull people closer rather than wear them out, and the quieter risk of being the friend who has never needed anything.
Updated Jan 10, 2026 · 10 min read
Attentiveness is the kind of effort that disappears when it works. Why the people receiving it cannot see the standard being kept, why both obvious readings of the asymmetry are wrong, and what to narrow instead of what to lower.
Updated Jan 7, 2026 · 10 min read
The 25th is an ordinary day with the entire infrastructure of distraction switched off. What actually makes it hard, why the week either side is worse, and what helps when make plans is not an instruction you can use.
Updated Jan 5, 2026 · 11 min read
Seven items on the structure of a circle rather than the feeling of it: how many people you could call, who reaches out first, and when you last said something you had not rehearsed. Scored plainly, with an honest account of what the number cannot tell you.
