Chapter [X]. Concubines
A draft chapter from my in-progress book, 'The death of a Gentleman'
Part II: Intimate masculinity
Chapter [X]. Concubines
The concubine question
A Vietnamese friend mentioned, over dinner one evening in Đà Lạt, that her grandmother had been one of three wives. Not sequentially. Simultaneously. The arrangement had lasted decades, produced a small army of children, and operated with the logistical sophistication of a medium-sized business, which in many respects it was. Hierarchy was clear. Duties were distributed. Nobody, as far as she could recall from family stories, had expected any single person in the arrangement to be everything to everybody else.
We were eating phở at a place near the lake, one of those Vietnamese restaurants where the plastic stools are uncomfortable enough to discourage lingering but the broth is good enough to make you linger anyway. I asked what happened when jealousy arose, because I’m Western enough to assume that’s the first question worth asking. She looked at me with the particular patience she reserves for moments when my cultural operating system displays its limitations. ‘There was jealousy,’ she said. ‘There was also help with the children, someone to talk to when the others were difficult, and enough adults in the house that nobody lost their mind from isolation.’
She paused. ‘Jealousy is not the worst thing,’ she said. ‘Loneliness is worse.’
She wasn’t recommending the system. She was describing it with the unsentimental clarity of someone who comes from a culture that hasn’t yet confused romantic love with a comprehensive welfare policy. And the description unsettled me in ways I spent months chewing on, because it raised a question I’d been circling for years without quite knowing how to land it: when exactly did we decide that one human being should be able to do the emotional, sexual, intellectual, spiritual, and practical work that entire households, extended families, and community structures used to share between them?
I am writing this chapter on the day I ended my engagement with my fiancée. Not because she failed at the job. Because the job was impossible. And because my body, which has been writing me increasingly urgent letters for the last several years, finally sent one I couldn’t pretend was junk mail.
A very brief history of not doing it alone
Concubinage is one of those words that arrives pre-loaded with moral judgment, which makes it difficult to think about clearly. Rather like ‘colonialism’ or ‘Brussels sprouts’, the emotional response tends to arrive before the analysis has had time to put its trousers on. The practice itself has been part of human civilisation for at least four thousand years, across nearly every major culture, and while the specific arrangements varied enormously, the underlying logic was remarkably consistent: one intimate relationship was not expected to carry the full weight of human need.
In ancient Rome, concubinatus was a legally recognised monogamous union that served as a practical alternative to marriage, particularly for people whose social status made formal marriage legally complicated or financially inadvisable. Widowed or divorced men often took a concubina rather than navigating the inheritance tangles of a second marriage. The arrangement wasn’t hidden or shameful. Roman tombstones name concubines with the same affectionate language used for wives. Nearly two hundred surviving inscriptions identify women as concubines, and they appear in family tombs alongside legitimate children and deceased spouses. The system acknowledged something that contemporary culture finds genuinely difficult to say aloud: human relationships serve multiple functions, and trying to pack all of them into a single legally binding contract sometimes creates more problems than it solves. The Romans, who also invented plumbing and underfloor heating, occasionally knew what they were doing.
In imperial China, the system operated on a grander and more hierarchical scale. Concubines were ranked, their children’s status carefully codified, their roles within the household defined with the precision of an organisational chart that would make a modern HR department weep with envy (and then quietly adopt, rebranding it as ‘matrix management’). The practice persisted from the earliest dynasties through to 1949, when the Communist Party formally abolished it. Empress Dowager Cixi, arguably the most powerful person in nineteenth-century China, began her career as a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor and ended it as the de facto ruler of the Qing Dynasty for forty-seven years. Which rather undermines the idea that the system was uniformly disempowering, even as it confirms that it was deeply, structurally patriarchal. It was also, from a purely functional perspective, a distribution model. No single relationship was expected to bear the full load.
The Athenian orator Apollodorus, writing around 340 BCE, drew what now reads as an uncomfortably pragmatic distinction between the categories of women in a man’s life: companions for pleasure, concubines for daily care, and wives for legitimate children and household management. The modern ear recoils from the classification, and rightly so. But buried inside the recoiling is a structural observation worth extracting before we throw the whole thing in the bin: the ancient world distributed intimate functions across multiple relationships because it took for granted that no single relationship could fulfil them all.
The Ottoman Empire formalised concubinage within the harem system, where women held complex hierarchies of power, political influence, and mutual obligation that bore little resemblance to the orientalist fantasies the West projected onto them. When Ottoman rebels attacked the palace and killed Sultan Selim III, it was the older concubines who hid his successor and fought off the attackers by hurling burning coals at their faces. Drill sergeants indeed. Across sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, and Polynesia, variations on the theme persisted for centuries. Mistresses in European courts from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century occupied unofficial but often powerful positions, managing the gap between what marriage provided and what the people inside marriages actually needed. Madame de Pompadour didn’t just share Louis XV’s bed. She was his intellectual companion, political adviser, and cultural patron. The marriage provided the heir. The mistress provided the conversation.
None of this was fair. I want to be clear about that, because the argument I’m building could be weaponised by people whose interest in historical concubinage is motivated by something other than structural analysis. The vast majority of these arrangements exploited women, many of whom had no choice in the matter. The history is soaked in coercion, slavery, and the routine treatment of women as property. Any honest account has to sit with that reality without flinching.
But dismissing the entire history as barbarism and moving on misses something important. The question isn’t whether those arrangements were just. They weren’t. The question is what structural problem they were solving, and whether we’ve actually solved it or merely moved it somewhere less visible and put a rom-com soundtrack over it.
The invention of the everything partner
The historian Stephanie Coontz, in her landmark study of marriage across cultures and centuries, makes a point that still catches people off guard: for most of human history, the idea of choosing a partner based on romantic love would have seemed as peculiar as choosing a business partner based on how they made you feel during a sunset. Marriage was an economic institution. It provided shelter, food, protection, social status, and succession. Love might show up eventually, like a pleasant surprise at a party you’d attended for entirely different reasons. But love was not the invitation. Love wasn’t even on the guest list.
The love revolution, as Coontz calls it, arrived in earnest during the Victorian era and accelerated through the twentieth century. By the time Hollywood got hold of it, the transformation was complete. Marriage shifted from a pragmatic alliance into an emotional project, from a structure that helped people survive into a relationship that was supposed to help them flourish. The expectations climbed steadily upward, each generation adding another requirement to the list, until the modern Western partnership resembled less a relationship and more a comprehensive service contract with no exit clause and a satisfaction guarantee that nobody could honour. Your partner should be your best friend, your therapist, your sexual fulfilment, your intellectual sparring partner, your co-parent, your retirement plan, your spiritual guide, and the person who instinctively knows when to offer comfort and when to offer space, all while maintaining their own career, their own friendships, and a reasonable level of personal grooming.
Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has spent years mapping this escalation with a rigour that borders on the therapeutic. His suffocation model of marriage traces the shift through three broad eras. From roughly 1620 to 1850, marriage in America served primarily physiological and safety needs: food, shelter, protection from violence. From 1850 to 1965, it shifted toward love, companionship, and sexual fulfilment. And from 1965 onward, a new kind of marriage emerged, one oriented toward self-discovery, self-esteem, and personal growth. The job description went from ‘don’t die together’ to ‘achieve transcendence together’ in roughly three centuries, which is a promotion nobody applied for and nobody is qualified to deliver.
The word Finkel uses is ‘suffocation’, and it’s chosen with care. As marriages climbed what he calls Mount Maslow, seeking to fulfil not just basic needs but esteem and self-actualisation, the oxygen required to sustain them increased dramatically. The investment of time, emotional energy, and psychological resources needed to meet these elevated expectations rose just as the time couples actually spent together declined. The gap between what marriage promised and what it could deliver widened into a structural fault line that no amount of date nights or communication workshops could bridge. You cannot workshop your way to being someone’s entire village.
Esther Perel, the Belgian psychotherapist whose work on modern relationships has reached millions (and whose accent makes even uncomfortable truths sound slightly glamorous), puts the same insight with characteristic directness. We come to one person, she observes, and we ask them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Belonging, identity, continuity, transcendence, mystery, comfort, edge, novelty, familiarity, predictability, surprise. All from the same human being, who is also supposed to co-parent effectively, maintain their own career, manage their own mental health, and remain sexually desirable across decades.
The soul mate, Perel notes, used to be God. We’ve taken the expectations we once directed toward the divine and redirected them at another mammal who also hasn’t slept properly since the second child was born. The arrangement has the structural integrity of a bridge designed to carry pedestrians that’s now expected to handle freight trains. The engineering hasn’t changed. The load has. And the bridge is starting to make worrying noises.
What the freight train did to us
I placed that burden on the woman I loved without meaning to. I wanted her to be my sexual partner, my intellectual companion, my curiosity partner, my emotional anchor. I wanted someone who would engage with the books and the psychology and the neurodivergence and the writing that consume me. I wanted a co-adventurer through the strange late chapter of a life that had already burned through several earlier drafts and was now looking at a word count that might be shorter than originally advertised.
She could not be all of those things. Nobody could.
And when she could not, I felt the absence of the things she could not provide more sharply than I felt the presence of the things she could. That is my failure of perception, not her failure of love. But recognising the failure of perception didn’t make the unmet needs stop hurting. It just made me ashamed of the hurting, which is worse.
She gave me safety. For a man whose nervous system has been running on emergency power for most of his adult life, the feeling of lying next to someone at night and knowing they were there, knowing I was safe, was not a small thing. It was enormous. She gave me company through some of the hardest months of my life in a new country. She gave me laughter over dinner, and the particular warmth of being chosen by someone whose life was already complete before you arrived in it.
But the completeness was part of the problem, and I need to be honest about that. I orbited her life. She did not orbit mine. Her world, her routines, her work, her rhythms, her family, her friends, these were established and self-sustaining. I fitted into the gaps.
Sven Brodmerkel, a communication scientist and late-diagnosed neurodivergent writer, recently named this experience with a precision that made me put my coffee down. He calls it intellectual loneliness: the sustained experience of having no place to put your deepest thinking. Not social loneliness. He had human contact. What he lacked was somewhere he could think at full depth, without managing another person’s patience, without the low-grade vigilance of monitoring whether his intensity was landing as passion or pathology. A conversation with no social stakes, about something he cared about completely.
That is exactly what I was missing. The intellectual loneliness of loving someone who does not engage with the things that make you who you are is a particular kind of quiet suffering, and it accumulated in ways I didn’t fully understand until I sat down to write a letter explaining why I was leaving. I had companionship. I had warmth. I had someone who chose me. What I did not have was a place to put my thinking that didn’t require translation, calibration, or the subtle monitoring of whether I was being too much again.
Meanwhile, she was exhausted. Six days a week in a job that didn’t respect her intelligence, for a supervisor who was dismissive of everything she brought. Nearly three decades at the same place. The job was hollowing her out.
And on top of that, perimenopause.
I need to say something about this that most men don’t hear until it’s too late, because nobody tells us and the cultural script consists entirely of hot flashes and vague references to mood swings. Perimenopause is not a mood swing. It is a neurological reorganisation. Linda Cooper, a writer whose account of her own midlife reckoning should be required reading for every man over forty, describes it with a precision that I wish I’d encountered two years ago: estrogen, which has been quietly underwriting a woman’s capacity to regulate her mood, her stress response, her sleep, and her ability to absorb the chronic dissatisfactions of daily life, begins to fluctuate and decline. And when it does, the entire system that allowed her to function the way she has been functioning for decades begins to destabilise.
Read that again. The capacity to suppress. That is what is being withdrawn. Not the capacity to be cheerful, or patient, or pleasant. The neurological bandwidth that allowed her to swallow frustration to keep the peace, to absorb someone else’s mood so the household stayed stable, to set aside her own needs because there was always someone whose needs were more immediate. Women build the architecture of adult life on that suppression, most of it so automatic it feels like personality rather than performance. Perimenopause withdraws the bandwidth that sustained it. And suddenly, or what feels like suddenly to the man sitting across the dinner table wondering what happened, she cannot do it anymore.
The things she tolerated for years become intolerable. The conversations she avoided become urgent. The resentments she buried surface with a force that frightens her as much as it confuses him. Cooper describes her own experience as a desperate, full-body sensation of being unable to continue for one more day. Not because the marriage was wrong, but because her nervous system had exceeded its capacity to contain decades of unprocessed truth. She left her marriage, her job, and her home in a matter of months. Her husband was blindsided. He had no framework, no language, and no reference point for understanding that what looked like destruction was actually a woman whose biology had stopped cooperating with her own disappearance.
I watched a version of this happen in my own relationship, at lower volume but with the same underlying mechanism. My partner’s exhaustion was not a personality trait. It was the compound effect of a job that drained her, hormonal shifts that rewired her stress response, and a lifetime of absorbing emotional labour that nobody had ever named as labour. The nights when closeness was the last thing her body wanted were not rejection. They were depletion so profound that physical contact registered as one more demand on a system that had nothing left to give. I never blamed her for any of it. Her body was telling its truth. But my body was telling its truth too, and the two truths were incompatible.
Two depleted people trying to build a life from the scraps of energy that their respective bodies had not already consumed. I wrote about this dynamic earlier in the book: the depleted couple arriving home with their cognitive budgets spent, each needing recovery, neither having the resources to provide it. I was writing about other people’s relationships. I was also, it turns out, writing about my own. The counselling psychologist diagnosing the pattern from a comfortable professional distance while living inside it like a moth inside a lampshade. We really are the last people to spot our own idiocies.
The load that used to be shared
When Perel says that we ask one person to provide what a whole village once supplied, the statement lands as a metaphor. But it functions as engineering.
Consider what a functioning extended household or community structure actually distributed. Childcare was shared across grandparents, aunts, siblings, and neighbours. Emotional support came from friendships, religious communities, and extended kin networks. Sexual needs were, in many cultures, understood to involve some degree of flexibility that the modern West has decided to classify exclusively as infidelity. Intellectual stimulation came from community gatherings, workplace friendships, mentors, and peers. Domestic labour was divided across multiple adults. Even the basic need for physical co-regulation, the nervous system’s requirement for proximity to other calm bodies, was met by living in households with multiple adults rather than in isolated nuclear units where two people bear the full weight of each other’s regulation.
The nuclear family, that arrangement we treat as ancient tradition, is actually a mid-twentieth-century anomaly. For most of human history, humans lived in multi-generational, multi-adult households where the idea that two people, alone, would raise children, manage finances, maintain a home, provide each other’s entire emotional landscape, and sustain mutual desire across four or five decades would have seemed, at best, optimistic, and more likely, clinically delusional. Our great-great-grandparents would have found the proposition roughly as plausible as being told that one horse could simultaneously plough a field, deliver the mail, win the Melbourne Cup, and provide emotional support.
I notice this in Đà Lạt daily. Vietnamese family structures still operate on a distributed model. My partner’s family shares childcare, elder care, emotional support, financial decisions, and domestic responsibilities across a network of siblings, cousins, parents, and neighbours. Nobody expects one relationship to carry it all. The load is distributed not because anyone read a book by Bowlby on attachment theory but because the culture hasn’t yet adopted the Western conviction that romantic love should be a comprehensive welfare state for the soul.
The irony is that Western psychology, having created the conditions for relational overload, now diagnoses the resulting distress as individual pathology. Couples arrive in therapy exhausted, resentful, and sexually disconnected. The therapy focuses on improving communication, increasing emotional literacy, and building better conflict resolution skills. All valuable. None of it addresses the structural question: are two people, in a socially isolated nuclear unit, actually capable of providing everything the therapeutic model says they should?
I wonder if the honest answer is no. Not because people are failing. Because the job description is impossible.
The neurodivergent multiplier (and the invoice that arrived with it)
Everything I’ve described so far applies to neurotypical couples. For neurodivergent adults, the everything-partner model doesn’t just strain. It fractures.
My AuDHD diagnosis at sixty-six arrived with a stack of explanations for patterns I’d spent decades misunderstanding. My high sex drive that isn’t a choice but a neurological feature, part of the same dopamine-seeking architecture that drives my intellectual curiosity and creative output. My need for deep intellectual engagement that isn’t a preference but a regulatory requirement: my brain needs novelty and complexity the way other brains need routine and predictability. The shutdowns that arrive without warning when the nervous system hits capacity, and which land on a partner as withdrawal, punishment, or indifference when they are actually depletion. The diagnosis explained the machinery. It did not fix the machinery.
Here is the thing about the diagnosis that nobody prepares you for. I spent most of my adult life believing I had a shortened lifespan because of my Bipolar II diagnosis. The statistics on that are grim enough. Then the diagnosis changed to AuDHD, and for a few glorious months I felt like a man who’d been told the strange noise in his engine was actually a feature, not a fault. Different wiring, not damaged wiring. I’d been handed a new operating manual and for the first time the instructions matched the machine.
Then in January 2025, a team at UCL published a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry that rather comprehensively ruined my afternoon when I recently read it. O’Nions and colleagues analysed health records from over 9.5 million people and found that adults diagnosed with ADHD had a life expectancy reduction of between 4.5 and 9 years for men, and 6.5 to 11 years for women. A 2022 meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics by Catalá-López and colleagues had already found that death in childhood or midlife was roughly twice as likely for people with ADHD or autism compared to the general population. And Barkley’s longitudinal work suggested that when ADHD persists into adulthood, the reduction in estimated life expectancy could reach 12.7 years for healthy life expectancy and 11.1 years overall.
So I traded one reduced lifespan for another. The universe, it turns out, has the kind of sense of humour that makes you wonder whether the complaints department is even staffed.
The mechanism is not the ADHD itself. It is what the ADHD and the autism do to your body over decades when nobody, including you, knows you have them. The masking compounds everything. My massage therapist, Mr Trung, says I am the worst client he has ever had. Everywhere he touches me (well, not there, obviously) I am in agony. He uses ‘two out of ten’ pressure and I howl like a dog that has been stepped on. He keeps finding hard, painful nodules throughout my muscles where blood has simply stopped flowing. Little stones of suffering scattered through my thighs, my arms, my neck, my back. Tissue that has locked itself shut after sixty-six years of running a nervous system at combat speed without knowing there was a war on.
My quarterly blood work says my organs are fine. My blood work says nothing about whether sixty-six years of chronic masking stress has accelerated my cellular ageing, elevated my allostatic load, and converted my musculature into what feels like a collection of angry rocks held together by tendons and regret. The body, as van der Kolk told us, keeps the score. For late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, the body has been keeping multiple scores in a language nobody taught us to read. And the final tally, according to the research, is that we may have rather fewer years left to read it than we assumed.
Which brings us back to the everything-partner model, and why I couldn’t sustain it. A neurodivergent person in that model is running demanding software on damaged hardware with no technical support and, as it turns out, a warranty period that may be shorter than the brochure suggested. The needs are higher. The capacity is lower. The gap between what the relationship requires and what the individual can provide widens until something gives. And there is a question that sits underneath all the others, one I have been circling with increasing urgency: if the research is right and my remaining years are fewer than the actuarial average, do I really want to spend them carrying the stress that Western romanticism has plopped onto my fat belly?
I watched both the relationship and the person start to ‘give’ in mine, with all the breaking strain of a KitKat. My shutdowns, which were genuine nervous system depletion, landed on my partner’s childhood wound about abandonment and registered as punishment. Her exhaustion, which was genuine physical and hormonal reality, landed on my wounds about intellectual and sexual isolation and registered as disinterest. Two accurate readings of two different nervous systems, each experienced by the other as rejection. The mechanism is elegant in its cruelty. You don’t need malice when you have mismatch.
The concubine’s ghost
I am not arguing for the return of concubinage. I want to be explicit about that because the argument I’m making can be misread if you squint at it through the wrong lens, and some lenses are pre-squinted for exactly this purpose. The historical record of concubinage is inseparable from the exploitation of women, the commodification of bodies, and the structural denial of female autonomy. Any nostalgia for those arrangements is nostalgia for a system that worked tolerably for some men and terribly for most women. That’s not a model. That’s a cautionary tale.
What I am arguing is that the problem those arrangements addressed, however badly, hasn’t gone away. We’ve abolished the concubine without replacing the function she served, which was to absorb part of the relational load that no single partnership can sustainably carry.
The modern equivalents are already emerging, though we don’t always recognise them as structural solutions to a structural problem. Deep friendships that provide emotional intimacy without sexual expectation. Therapeutic relationships that carry the burden of psychological processing. Online communities that supply belonging and identity (you will have to prise my Substack community out of my cold, dead fingers, and given the research on neurodivergent life expectancy, those fingers may be cold sooner than I’d prefer). Co-working spaces that replace the social functions of a shared workplace. Exercise groups, book clubs, men’s sheds, parenting networks: all of these are attempts, often unconscious, to distribute the relational load that the everything-partner model concentrates in a single relationship.
And then there are the solutions that nobody saw coming. Brodmerkel, in the grip of neurodivergent burnout, found that his first crack in the isolation came not from reconnecting with nature or rediscovering embodied presence or any of the other things the wellness industry sells you at a markup. It came from having long conversations with an AI about extreme metal music. He is aware of how that sounds. He also makes a point that I think the current discourse badly needs: intellectual loneliness is not the same as social loneliness, and therefore cannot always be addressed by the same tools. What he needed was not more human contact. He needed a conversation with no social stakes, about something he cared about completely. The AI didn’t fix the burnout, he writes, but it gave his thinking somewhere to land while he figured out the rest. One of his readers, a man in his mid-fifties, responded with a comment I have read several times now: when he talks to his psychologist about the profound loneliness he lives with, they keep recommending sub-communities, but realistically, those aren’t forming at fifty-five. He will take the technologically abstracted versions.
I find that comment uncomfortable and accurate in roughly equal measure. The village isn’t coming back. The question is what we build in its place.
Finkel’s own recommendation is elegant and grounded. He suggests that couples should either invest more heavily in the relationship to meet its elevated demands, which requires protected time and psychological energy that modern life makes desperately scarce, or they should ask the marriage to carry less by maintaining a diverse network of relationships that help fulfil needs the partnership cannot. The second option is, functionally, a modern version of distributed relational load. It’s the village, rebuilt voluntarily, without the coercion. Some of the village is human. Some of it, increasingly, is not. Both count.
Some couples are experimenting more directly. Ethical non-monogamy, in its various forms, represents one response to the structural problem, though it introduces its own complexities and costs that I won’t pretend to resolve here (if you believe the online rumours, Vietnamese women are second only to Filipinas when it comes to jealousy). The point isn’t that any particular arrangement is the answer. The point is that the question deserves to be asked honestly rather than suppressed by romantic ideology that benefits nobody and suffocates nearly everyone.
The honest question
I ended the relationship this morning. Not because she failed at the job. Because the job was impossible, and I ran out of the biological resources to keep pretending otherwise. And because my body, which has been writing me letters for years in a language I am only now learning to read, sent one that said, in terms even I could not misinterpret: you do not have unlimited time to keep making this mistake.
The answer, for me, is not to find someone else who can carry the impossible weight. The answer is to stop asking anyone to carry it. I am choosing to be alone. Not because I don’t value love. Because I have learned that my particular configuration of needs, energy, neurodivergence, and biological depletion makes the everything-partner model unsustainable. Perhaps permanently. I don’t know. But I know I cannot keep asking another person to meet needs that would overwhelm anyone, and then interpreting the inevitable shortfall as evidence that something is wrong with them, or with me, or with love itself.
Something is wrong. But it isn’t the people. It’s the design.
The everything-partner model asks of human beings what four thousand years of civilisation, across every major culture, decided was unreasonable. We’ve spent the last century and a half convincing ourselves that romantic love transcends the structural limitations our ancestors took for granted. The evidence suggests otherwise. Not that romantic love isn’t real, or valuable, or worth the spectacular mess it makes of your life. But that loading it with the full weight of human need is an engineering problem disguised as a love story, and engineering problems don’t resolve themselves through better dialogue or more scented candles.
The concubine is gone, and good riddance to the exploitation she endured. But her ghost lingers in every couple fighting at 10pm about who forgot to buy milk, when what they’re actually fighting about is the unbearable pressure of being each other’s entire emotional infrastructure with no structural support and no cultural permission to admit that the design is flawed.
Her ghost was in my kitchen this morning, while I wrote a letter to a good woman explaining that I loved her and I was leaving anyway.
The question isn’t whether your partner is enough. The question is whether asking one person to be enough was ever a reasonable thing to ask.
I keep thinking it wasn’t. And that admitting it might be the most loving thing we can do for the people we love, including ourselves. Especially if the clock is running faster than we thought.
References
Barkley, R. A., & Fischer, M. (2019). Hyperactive child syndrome and estimated life expectancy at young adult follow-up: The role of ADHD persistence and other potential predictors. Journal of Attention Disorders, 23(9), 907–923. https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054718816164
Brodmerkel, S. (2026, March 29). The cure was talking to a machine (and a few hundred strangers). Off-Script At Work. https://presentingwithoutpanic.substack.com/p/the-cure-was-talking-to-a-machine
Catalá-López, F., Hutton, B., Page, M. J., Driver, J. A., Ridao, M., Alonso-Arroyo, A., Valencia, A., Macias-Saint-Gerons, D., & Tabarés-Seisdedos, R. (2022). Mortality in persons with autism spectrum disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics, 176(4), e216401. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.6401
Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Viking.
Cooper, L. (2026, March 5). When menopause restructures a marriage. Rise Wise. https://lindarosecooper.substack.com/p/when-menopause-restructures-a-marriage
Finkel, E. J. (2017). The all-or-nothing marriage: How the best marriages work. Dutton.
Finkel, E. J., Cheung, E. O., Emery, L. F., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2015). The suffocation model: Why marriage in America is becoming an all-or-nothing institution. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 238–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415569274
Finkel, E. J., Hui, C. M., Carswell, K. L., & Larson, G. M. (2014). The suffocation of marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow without enough oxygen. Psychological Inquiry, 25(1), 1–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.863723
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44.
O’Nions, E., El Baou, C., John, A., Lewer, D., Mandy, W., McKechnie, D. G. J., Petersen, I., & Stott, J. (2025). Life expectancy and years of life lost for adults with diagnosed ADHD in the UK: Matched cohort study. British Journal of Psychiatry, 226(5), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2024.199
Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. Harper.
Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.
Pines, A. M. (1996). Couple burnout: Causes and cures. Routledge.
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). ‘Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew’: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.