There is something deeply unsettling about realising that mean girls don’t disappear after school. For my entire childhood and teen years, I genuinely believed they would. I thought adulthood was supposed to be the great equaliser; that once we all left behind school uniforms, university halls, and the social hierarchies of our twenties, we would naturally evolve into kinder, more self-aware versions of ourselves. Surely by thirty-three, we would all be too busy paying mortgages, navigating careers, caring for ageing parents, managing relationships, and trying to remember to drink enough water to spend our energy excluding other women.

And yet.

Recently, I’ve found myself having conversations with friends that sound eerily similar to the ones we had as teenagers. Different people. Different settings. Different stakes. But the same underlying dynamic. The whispered comments. The strategic exclusions. The group chats you’re somehow not in. The dinners everyone knows about except you. The subtle digs disguised as jokes. The strange competitiveness that appears whenever another woman seems happy, successful, attractive, or simply comfortable in her own skin.

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The difference now is that nobody is standing beside a locker calling you ugly.

The modern mean girl has had years to refine her craft.

She understands optics. She knows how to maintain plausible deniability. She has learned that outright cruelty reflects badly on her, so she wraps it in politeness instead. She’ll tell you she’s “just being honest.” She’ll insist you’re “overthinking things.” She’ll post inspirational quotes about supporting women while simultaneously making sure certain women never feel supported by her. She has mastered the art of appearing kind while behaving otherwise.

What fascinates me most is not that mean girls still exist. Human beings have always been messy, insecure, tribal creatures. What surprises me is how shocked we continue to feel when we encounter them. Every single time, I find myself thinking, surely we’re too old for this now. Surely by our thirties we’ve moved beyond treating friendship like a popularity contest.

But perhaps age and maturity aren’t the same thing.

One of the great lies we’re sold as children is that getting older automatically makes people wiser. It doesn’t. Age simply gives people more experience. What they choose to do with that experience is entirely up to them. Some people become more empathetic. Some become more secure. Some learn how to celebrate other people’s successes without viewing them as threats. Others simply carry the same insecurities they had at sixteen into adulthood, dressing them up in designer handbags, wellness jargon, and professional titles.

The older I get, the more I realise that some women don’t actually want connection. They want ranking systems. They want to know where they stand. They want to know who is prettier, more successful, more desired, more accomplished, more admired. Every interaction becomes a silent scoreboard. And when life is viewed through that lens, another woman’s success can never simply be good news. It becomes evidence that they’re somehow losing.

The truly secure women in my life don’t operate this way. They’re easy to spot because they make you feel larger rather than smaller. They celebrate your wins without immediately redirecting the conversation back to themselves. They recommend you for opportunities. They introduce you to people. They speak highly of you in rooms you’re not in. Most importantly, they understand that life is not a reality television competition where only one woman gets to leave with the prize.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in understanding mean girls and more interested in recognising genuinely kind women. One group drains your energy. The other expands your world.

Because eventually, if you’re lucky, you reach an age where you stop asking why certain women don’t like you. You stop trying to decode their behaviour. You stop wondering what you could have done differently. You realise that not every exclusion is a reflection of your worth, and not every friendship is meant to be yours.

And then something shifts.

You stop chasing invitations to tables where you’ve never truly been welcome and start building your own instead.

That, I suspect, is the real lesson of your thirties.

The mean girls are still here.

But thankfully, so are the women who make you forget they ever mattered.

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I spent my childhood and teen years believing life moved in neat, predictable chapters. There was school, then a career, then a relationship, then a home, then marriage, then children. Not necessarily in that exact order, but close enough. Somewhere along the way, I’d absorbed the idea that adulthood was a destination you eventually arrived at. One day, you would wake up and simply know what you were doing.

The problem is that nobody talks about what happens when life doesn’t unfold according to the schedule you had quietly drawn up for yourself.

Nobody talks about the years where you feel suspended between versions of yourself. You’re no longer the person you used to be, but you’re not yet the person you’re trying to become. You’re building something, healing from something, changing something, chasing something, but you can’t quite point to a finished product and say, “There. I’ve arrived.”

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Lately, I’ve started thinking that an awful lot of people are living in this strange middle ground. We scroll through engagement announcements, house purchases, promotions and pregnancy photos while quietly wondering why our own lives feel less certain than they did five years ago. We assume everyone else is moving forwards while we’re somehow standing still.

But I don’t think that’s true.

I think we’re all just getting better at hiding the unfinished parts.

For years, I treated uncertainty like a problem that needed solving. If I could just get the right job, earn the right amount of money, move to the right place, feel healthier, become more confident or make a particular dream happen, then life would finally begin. Happiness always seemed to exist on the other side of some future achievement.

The trouble with that mindset is that the finish line never stays where you left it. Every time you reach one milestone, another immediately appears in the distance. You lose the weight and decide you need a different body. You get the job and start thinking about the next promotion. You move house and begin imagining another city. The version of yourself that finally has everything figured out remains permanently out of reach.

At some point over the past few years, I realised I had accidentally turned my entire life into a waiting room.

I wasn’t enjoying my life. I was preparing for it.

I was waiting until I felt more successful, more healed, more established, more confident, more certain. I kept assuming that the real story would start later. The problem is that later has a habit of never arriving.

What nobody tells you about the in-between years is that they aren’t an interruption to your life. They are your life.

The friendships you build while you’re figuring things out. The hobbies you try before you’re good at them. The random opportunities that appear out of nowhere. The moments of courage that seem insignificant at the time. These are not things that happen before life starts. They are the story.

Maybe adulthood isn’t about reaching a point where everything finally makes sense. Maybe it’s about becoming comfortable with the fact that it rarely does.

The older I get, the more I suspect that most people are improvising. Some are simply better dressed while doing it.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe the goal isn’t to arrive. Maybe the goal is to stop treating uncertainty like a temporary inconvenience and recognise it for what it really is: evidence that you’re still growing, still changing and still moving towards something.

Nobody warns you about the in-between years because, from the inside, they don’t feel particularly important.

But I have a feeling they’re the years that end up changing everything.

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A few weeks ago, I found myself deep in Bravo TikTok watching the fallout from the West Wilson saga on Summer House. If you don’t watch Summer House, West was supposed to be one of the good ones. Funny. Charming. Self-aware. Slightly awkward in an endearing way. The golden retriever boyfriend of reality television. The kind of man women root for because he doesn’t immediately register as a fuckboy. Then the story started to shift. Ciara spoke about feeling misled. Other women emerged. Different timelines appeared. Different stories surfaced. Suddenly people weren’t discussing one disappointing relationship. They were discussing a pattern.

As I watched the discourse unfold, I found myself thinking less about West and more about somebody I used to know. We all know a West Wilson eventually. Mine wasn’t a boyfriend. Mine was a friend. And seeing West on television reminded me of a chapter of my life that ended years ago, but still occasionally reappears whenever another charming man gets exposed and the internet collectively asks the same question: “How did nobody see this sooner?”

The truth is, I think that’s the wrong question. Because whenever these stories emerge, there is always an assumption that the women around these men must have been naïve, blinded by attraction or somehow incapable of recognising what was happening in front of them. I reject that completely. I am not somebody who blindly gives men a free pass. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing the opposite. I believed women during Me Too. I have called out bad behaviour when I saw it. I’ve challenged men in friendships, workplaces and relationships. I have never been interested in protecting men from the consequences of their actions.

Which is exactly why my own West Wilson still bothers me.

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Looking back, I don’t think the question is how I missed it. The question is why I explained it away. The answer has very little to do with him and a lot to do with where I was in my own life at the time. I was carrying my own trauma. I was struggling with confidence. I was desperate to believe that people were fundamentally good. I wanted to be understanding. I wanted to be compassionate. I wanted to be fair. Unfortunately, those qualities can sometimes become liabilities when they are not balanced with strong boundaries.

The thing about West Wilson types is not that they’re criminal masterminds. It’s that they’re excellent at controlling information. Everybody gets a different version of the story. One woman hears one narrative. Another woman hears something completely different. Friends hear one explanation. Partners hear another. Nobody is comparing notes because nobody even realises there are notes to compare and everyone is kept separate. Everybody believes they understand the situation because they have been given just enough information to think they do.

Watching the Summer House conversation unfold reminded me of the moment Ciara began connecting dots with other women in West’s life. Suddenly things that seemed isolated no longer looked isolated. Patterns started appearing. Contradictions became impossible to ignore. Information that didn’t make sense suddenly made perfect sense when viewed alongside somebody else’s experience. That resonated with me because the same thing happened in my own life.

For years, I defended my West Wilson. When people in my life criticised him, I explained him. The reality is that I wasn’t hearing from the other women. I wasn’t comparing notes. I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture because, like many West Wilson types, he was very good at keeping people separate. Everyone existed in their own little bubble, hearing their own version of events and believing they had the full story. I certainly thought I did.

Not because I was a pick-me. Not because I wanted male approval. Not because I thought women were lying. Quite the opposite. I genuinely believed I was making a fair judgement based on the information I had available to me. What I eventually realised was that the information itself was incomplete. I didn’t have the fuller picture at all. I had one piece of a much larger puzzle, and it wasn’t until the dots started connecting that I understood just how much I hadn’t been seeing. It was realising that people who had never spoken to each other were describing remarkably similar patterns of behaviour. Suddenly what looked like isolated incidents became something much bigger. Once I saw that pattern, I couldn’t unsee it.

I also want to be clear about something. I did not end that friendship because my feelings were hurt. I did not end it because of a disagreement. I did not end it because somebody disappointed me. I ended it after serious allegations emerged that fundamentally changed how I viewed the situation. The friendship ended years ago. I haven’t spoken to him since. I have absolutely no regrets about that decision.

What the West Wilson discourse reminded me of wasn’t heartbreak. It was recognition. Recognition of a type of man who survives because everybody around him is separated. A type of man whose greatest strength isn’t necessarily his charm but his ability to ensure that different people never compare experiences. The moment people start talking to each other, the illusion starts to crack.

The older I get, the less interested I am in understanding why people behave badly. Trauma may explain behaviour, but it does not excuse it. At some point, adults become responsible for the damage they leave behind. And at some point, the people around them have to decide whether they are going to keep carrying those excuses or finally put them down.

The truth is that most women will meet a West Wilson at some point in their lives. Some will date him. Some will work with him. Some will be friends with him. Some will spend years defending him. But eventually, if we’re lucky, we compare notes. We connect dots. We see the pattern for what it is. And once you see it clearly, there is really only one thing left to do.

Leave.

I did. And watching Summer House reminded me exactly why.

P.S. If this topic interests you, you might also enjoy my recent column on race, Ciara and Summer House. One of the reasons I love Bravo is that beneath the cocktails, chaos and confessionals, these shows often open up conversations about much bigger issues. Sometimes reality television tells us more about ourselves, our relationships and the world around us than we’d like to admit.

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There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending years treating yourself like a problem to solve.

Not a person.
Not a life.
A project.

I think a lot of millennials - especially women - quietly live like this now.

We optimise ourselves constantly. We monitor ourselves constantly. We analyse ourselves constantly. We narrate ourselves constantly. Somewhere along the line, self-awareness stopped being a tool and became a full-time job.

Every habit is tracked.
Every emotion is unpacked.
Every bad date becomes a psychological case study.
Every period of sadness becomes a “healing journey.”
Every flaw becomes something to improve, soften, reshape, regulate, fix.

Sometimes I wonder if we accidentally replaced living with self-management.

And I understand why we did it.

A lot of us spent our twenties in survival mode without even realising it at the time.

Financial instability.
Burnout.
Body image issues.
The internet permanently rewiring our brains.
Constant comparison.
Relationship trauma.
A collapsing economy every four business days.
Pandemics.
Political chaos.
Trying to build careers during the death of stable careers.
Being told to “manifest” through situations that actually required government intervention.

For some people, survival mode looked dramatic.
For others, it looked incredibly functional.

You still went to work.
Still posted.
Still replied to emails.
Still looked “fine.”

Meanwhile your nervous system was somewhere underneath the floorboards fighting for its life.

I think that’s why so many people now feel strangely lost when things finally begin getting calmer.

Because once your entire identity becomes built around coping, improving, striving, healing, fixing, achieving, processing — who are you without the constant emergency?

I realised recently that I genuinely do not know how to relax without trying to optimise the relaxation.

I cannot simply go for a walk.
The walk must become:
mental clarity,
step count,
hormone balancing,
future content,
sunlight exposure,
healing,
wellness,
personal growth,
and somehow also a personality trait.

Even rest has become performance based.

And I don’t think this is entirely our fault. We were raised during the peak rise of “becoming your best self” culture. We absorbed the idea that happiness was hidden inside enough self-improvement.

So we kept improving.

And improving.

And improving.

Until some of us woke up one day deeply emotionally intelligent but unable to experience joy without analysing it in real time.

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Lately I’ve been thinking maybe healing is not supposed to feel like managing yourself forever.

Maybe at some point healing is actually:
letting yourself become a little less hypervigilant,
a little less self-monitoring,
a little less obsessed with earning your own existence.

Maybe healing is learning how to become a person again instead of a project.

I don’t mean becoming reckless.
I don’t mean abandoning growth.

I just mean there has to be a point where life stops being a constant renovation.

Where you can sit at dinner without mentally rewriting yourself between courses.

Where you can flirt without turning it into attachment theory homework.

Where you can buy clothes because they delight you instead of because they align with your “ideal self.”

Where your body becomes your body again instead of an endless improvement plan.

Where your future stops feeling like a performance review.

I think that’s the phase I’m entering now.

Not a transformation.
Not a glow-up.
Not a reinvention.

Just a quieter question:
What would happen if I stopped treating my life like something constantly waiting to begin?

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Watching Ciara on Summer House, there’s a moment you start to recognise.

Not the argument.
The shift.

The second people stop listening to what she’s saying and start watching how she’s saying it.

Her tone. Her face. Her reaction.

And suddenly, that becomes the story.

Not what happened.
Not what led up to it.

Just her.

There’s an unspoken rule when it comes to Black women on reality TV - and honestly, everywhere.

You can be hurt.
But keep it contained.

You can react.
But make sure it’s soft enough for everyone else to sit with.

And the second you don’t, everything flips.

Which is exactly what’s happening with Ciara.

Because if you actually watch her, she holds a lot in. She listens. She gives people space. She lets things go longer than most would.

But those moments don’t get attention.

The moment she finally reacts does.

What made this season different is that Ciara said something people usually avoid saying out loud.

That a lot of white men see Black women as an experience.

Something exciting.
Something different.
Something to try.

But not necessarily something to choose.

So watching West play this out - the interest, the closeness, and then the lack of clarity - feels less like messy dating and more like a pattern you’ve seen before.

And then there’s Amanda.

Amanda, who for years has been allowed to be sharp, dismissive, even a mean girl at times - while still sitting comfortably in a victim narrative around Kyle.

That version of her has always been protected.

So it’s hard not to notice the shift now, where Ciara is expected to be mindful of Amanda’s mental health.

To soften.
To manage how she reacts.

Leaving girl code aside - which feels like it’s been completely crushed here, or maybe never really existed in this relationship - the contrast is obvious.

Amanda is allowed edges.
Ciara is expected to smooth hers out.

I’m a white woman. I studied race in my B.A. & M.A, I’ve looked at this structurally, and now I’m watching it play out on reality TV in a way that’s hard to ignore.

But you don’t need to have studied it to see it.

You just need to pay attention.

Because Black women don’t get read the same way.

They don’t get the same space to be emotional, reactive, human - without it becoming the problem.

And it’s not just the edit doing that.

It’s the audience too.

Every time the conversation focuses on Ciara’s reaction instead of what led to it, it keeps the focus exactly where it shouldn’t be.

The problem isn’t that Ciara reacted.

It’s how quickly everyone decided that was the most important part of the story.

Subscribe to Second Draft if you want more takes like this - the things we’re all watching but not always questioning. I publish guides for a how-to, essays for a deeper look, and columns for thoughts on current topics.

And follow me on TikTok @ emma444vibes for the unfiltered version in real time.

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Across cities, cultures, and continents…. London, Rome, Cairo, New York - the pattern is strangely identical.

Connection appears quickly.
Chemistry is immediate.
And commitment becomes… suspiciously unavailable.

If the twentieth century gave us romance, and the early 2000s gave us dating apps, the 2020s appear to have given us something else entirely:

The situationship economy.

Plenty of emotional labour.
Plenty of access.
Very little definition.

For context, I’ve spent the past decade living and working across different countries - Ireland, the UK, Egypt, North America and mainland Europe…. which means I’ve had the rare sociological privilege of discovering something fascinating.

Men behave exactly the same everywhere.

Different languages.
Different cuisines.
Different political systems.

Identical commitment phobia.

There was once a structure to dating.

Not necessarily a perfect one - but at least a recognisable one.

You met someone.
You went on dates.
At some point, someone asked the question:

Are we actually doing this?

Modern dating has quietly replaced that structure with something far more ambiguous.

Now the timeline looks more like this:

You meet.
You talk constantly.
You become physical.
You share emotional intimacy.

But introduce the concept of commitment and suddenly the atmosphere shifts.

The language becomes philosophical.

“I’m just seeing where things go.”

“I don’t want to label anything.”

“I’m focusing on myself right now.”

Which is fascinating, because the only thing these men are not focusing on is the part where they stop dating you.

The problem isn’t that modern dating lacks connection.

Connection, in fact, seems easier than ever.

The problem is that connection now arrives without consequence.

For many men, the incentive to define the relationship disappears almost immediately.

Why clarify something that already offers access without expectation?

And so we end up with the defining relationship model of the modern era:

The almost-relationship.

You see each other.
You text every day.
You sleep together.
You support each other emotionally.

But suggest the word relationship and suddenly everyone develops a deep interest in “taking things slow.”

Not casual.
Not committed.

Just permanently undefined.

For women who still believe in intentional partnership, the experience can feel like running a marathon with no finish line.

You’re not asking for a grand romantic gesture.

Just clarity.

And yet clarity has somehow become the rarest commodity in the modern dating market.

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question.

Did commitment disappear…

Or did we accidentally remove all the reasons someone might offer it?

A Note Before This Series Begins

This column isn’t about blaming men. It’s about examining the strange cultural moment we seem to be living through — where everyone claims to want love, but very few people appear willing to behave in ways that actually produce it.

The topic of dating in this column will look at various issues such as:

• situationships
• modern commitment anxiety
• dating apps and emotional outsourcing
• the quiet return of courtship (yes, it’s happening)

Because if modern dating has become a social experiment… we may as well study the data.

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Every few years, a reality show appears that feels less like entertainment and more like cultural anthropology.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is one of those shows.

On the surface, it looks like many other reality franchises: beautiful women, large houses, dramatic friendships, whispered scandals. The format is familiar enough that viewers know exactly what they’re supposed to watch for - the conflict, the alliances, the carefully timed revelations.

But what makes the show fascinating is the cultural world it exposes.

The women at the centre of the series live inside a social structure where expectations around marriage, motherhood, and morality remain unusually visible. The image of the perfect wife - attractive, devoted, socially polished, spiritually grounded - is not simply aspirational. It is part of a community identity.

And like most ideals, it becomes difficult to sustain.

Reality television thrives on this tension. The genre works best when people attempt to maintain a certain image while the cameras slowly reveal the pressure behind it. What viewers end up watching isn’t just interpersonal drama.

It’s the strain of performance.

In The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, that performance is particularly striking because it reflects something larger than the show itself. Many cultures still quietly expect women to embody contradictory roles simultaneously: nurturing but glamorous, devoted but independent, morally upright but socially entertaining.

The difference is that in this particular social environment, those expectations are unusually visible.

Reality television simply turns up the volume.

Watching the show, you begin to realise that what’s unfolding isn’t only gossip or spectacle. It’s a glimpse into the psychological balancing act required to maintain an image of perfect womanhood in a world where perfection is both expected and impossible.

Which is perhaps why audiences find these shows so compelling.

They aren’t really watching scandal.

They’re watching the moment when carefully constructed identities begin to crack under the weight of reality.

And sometimes I wonder whether reality television isn’t actually revealing something deeper about modern culture - that behind many of our most polished social performances lies a quiet exhaustion from trying to live up to roles no one could realistically sustain.

PS: Excuse me while I go to sit down and binge-watch the new season - obsessed!

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Most people grow up believing that conflict should be resolved through communication. At least that is what I was taught.

Explain yourself clearly. Defend your position. Address misunderstandings. In theory, these are healthy instincts. Honest conversation is often the foundation of good relationships.

But not every confrontation operates in good faith.

Some people do not want resolution. They want reaction.

In recent years psychologists have popularised something called the “grey rock method.” The idea is simple: when someone thrives on emotional engagement, the most effective response is often to become uninteresting.

Neutral. Calm. Non-reactive.

Like a grey rock.

I first heard the term in therapy while venting to my psychologist about dealing with a few particularly determined mean girls. She introduced me to the grey rock method, and once I understood it, I began noticing how often certain social dynamics revolve around provocation. Occasionally, you encounter a personality who thrives on conflict - subtle criticism, passive-aggressive remarks, quiet smear campaigns behind the scenes, and small theatrical gestures designed to pull you into emotional participation.

The instinct, at first, is always to engage.
Injustice has a way of demanding a response.

You want to correct the narrative.
Defend your reputation.
Clear your name from the quiet sabotage unfolding around you.

Eventually, you realise engagement is exactly what they want.

These days, within my inner circle, the phrase has become something of a shorthand. When someone difficult enters the room, someone inevitably whispers the same two words under their breath:

“Grey rock.”

And suddenly everyone understands the assignment.

No reactions. No drama. No emotional oxygen.

Interestingly, working in marketing and communications has made this concept feel even more familiar. In many ways, marketing is a form of controlled attention management. Every day you’re strategically deciding what deserves amplification and what does not.

Sometimes that mindset becomes very useful in real life.

Because occasionally you watch someone attempt what can only be described as a small-scale reputation manoeuvre - a whisper campaign, a subtle attempt to shape a narrative about you or someone you care about - and the instinctive reaction is outrage.

But outrage is attention.

And attention is exactly what fuels the behaviour.

Grey rocking reminds you that not every narrative deserves oxygen.

Some dynamics collapse entirely once the audience disappears.

Which makes me wonder whether the real power of grey rocking isn’t silence itself - but the quiet confidence of recognising that the most valuable thing you can sometimes withhold from someone is your attention.

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Loneliness in adulthood rarely looks the way we imagine it will.

It isn’t always dramatic. It doesn’t necessarily involve being physically alone. Many people experience it while living in busy cities, maintaining careers, and staying in regular contact with friends and family.

The loneliness that tends to appear somewhere in your thirties is quieter than that.

It often arrives gradually, as life becomes more fragmented. Friends move cities. Work schedules diverge. Relationships deepen into family life. The casual proximity that once held social groups together begins to dissolve.

Recently, after a difficult weekend, I found myself thinking about how easily adulthood can slide into isolation without anyone quite noticing.

Over the past few years I had been recovering from a serious illness, working freelance from home, and spending long stretches in what I jokingly called hermit mode. When you don’t share an office, didn’t grow up locally, and aren’t part of the traditional rhythms of school or corporate life, it becomes surprisingly easy for social life to narrow.

None of this feels dramatic in the moment. It happens slowly.

But eventually you begin to notice the small signals. A Saturday night where you realise you haven’t spoken to anyone all day. Walking through a busy café or restaurant and feeling strangely outside the rhythm of the room. Looking around and noticing how many social structures - offices, school networks, long-standing friend groups - quietly organise other people’s lives.

And you start to realise that adulthood, for many people, is not simply about building a career or finding stability.

It is also about rebuilding a social world from scratch.

Because the structures that once created daily interaction - school corridors, university campuses, busy offices - are gone.

Friendship no longer happens automatically. It has to be arranged.

The cultural script tells us our thirties should feel stable and socially secure. Yet many people quietly discover that adulthood is far less structurally social than earlier phases of life.

Connection now requires time, planning, energy, and aligned circumstances.

When those conditions don’t align, loneliness begins to feel personal.

But perhaps it isn’t.

Perhaps the quiet loneliness many adults experience says less about individual lives and more about the way modern adulthood is organised.

Perhaps we are living through a period where independence has expanded dramatically, while the social infrastructure that once held people together has quietly weakened.

We built cities that are bigger than ever, careers that are more mobile than ever, and lives that offer unprecedented freedom. Yet somewhere along the way, the invisible systems that once made belonging feel automatic became far less stable.

And sometimes I find myself wondering whether loneliness has become the hidden condition of contemporary adulthood - not because people stopped caring about each other, but because the structures that once made connection effortless quietly disappeared.

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Friendship, like dating, has red flags.

Some are obvious: jealousy, passive-aggressive compliments, the friend who mysteriously disappears whenever something good happens to you.

But lately I’ve started wondering if the biggest red flag isn’t behaviour at all.

Maybe it’s empathy.

More specifically…. who someone’s empathy includes.

A while ago, someone I once considered a close friend was furious about the U.S. Presidential election result. She talked about it constantly - how upsetting it was, how unfair it felt, how worried she was about what might happen next.

But as she unpacked it, something about the conversation started to feel… narrow.

Her anger wasn’t really about the bigger picture.

It was about how it might affect her.

Her healthcare. Her situation. Her future.

Which, to be fair, is human. Self-preservation tends to get everyone’s attention.

But what struck me was what wasn’t in the conversation.

There was very little curiosity about people who might be affected more. Very little concern for those whose safety nets were thinner than hers. In fact, I had never heard her express concern for who else might be affected more.

It wasn’t cruelty.

It was containment.

And then, not long after, she mentioned she’d started casually seeing someone who worked for the U.S. federal government and was involved in ICE.

She said it the way you’d say someone works in healthcare.

No pause.

No tension.

Just information.

And that was when I realised the problem wasn’t politics.

It was perspective.

Because some people experience outrage the way others experience weather: intense when it passes directly over their house, theoretical everywhere else.

I didn’t confront her about it. I didn’t debate it. I simply stepped back a little.

Less enthusiasm.

Less performance.

And interestingly, when you stop clapping on cue, the room tends to notice.

Instead of a conversation, there was what I can only describe as social choreography. A shift in tone. A subtle sense that the narrative had changed and I had somehow become the difficult one.

Which fascinated me more than anything else.

Because sometimes the real revelation in a friendship isn’t disagreement.

It’s realising how differently two people define empathy.

Politics, after all, isn’t just party affiliation.

It’s who enters your concern when the conversation stops being about you.

Shared history is comforting.

Shared values are stabilising.

And when the two begin to diverge, the shift rarely arrives with a dramatic fight.

More often, it arrives as a quiet realisation.

And just like that…

I stopped mistaking shared history for shared values.

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Something interesting seems to be happening socially.

In conversations with friends, across podcasts, and even in casual online discussions, the same phrase appears again and again.

“I just don’t have the energy for people anymore.”

It isn’t hostility exactly. It’s closer to exhaustion.

After years of constant communication — group chats, social media updates, digital notifications — many people seem to be experiencing a quiet shift in their tolerance for unnecessary social friction.

Where earlier phases of life encouraged endless discussion, emotional processing, and social diplomacy, more people now appear comfortable stepping back from dynamics that feel draining.

Part of this may be a natural consequence of adulthood.

As responsibilities increase, emotional bandwidth becomes a limited resource. Careers demand attention. Financial pressures grow. Personal wellbeing becomes something people take more seriously.

Tolerance for drama declines.

But there may also be a broader cultural factor.

The past decade has produced an unusually intense social environment. News cycles move rapidly. Social media amplifies conflict. Conversations about identity, politics, and morality often unfold in public spaces where disagreement can escalate quickly.

Against that backdrop, many people seem to be recalibrating their social priorities.

The instinct to maintain harmony at any cost is slowly being replaced by something more selective.

People are learning to quietly withdraw from dynamics that feel unnecessary.

And once you experience the peace that comes from stepping back, it becomes surprisingly difficult to return to environments that revolve around chaos.

There is also something generational happening here.

For years many people were socialised to tolerate behaviour that drained them — difficult colleagues, antagonistic friendships, performative arguments online. The cultural expectation was that maturity meant managing everyone’s emotions at once.

But a quiet shift is underway.

More people are recognising that emotional energy is finite.

And once you begin to treat it like a limited resource, your social landscape changes quickly.

Relationships that feel supportive become more valuable. Conversations that feel genuine become easier to prioritise.

Everything else begins to fade.

Which makes me wonder if this collective exhaustion with unnecessary drama isn’t actually a sign of cultural maturity.

Perhaps people aren’t becoming more antisocial.

Perhaps they are simply becoming more protective of their peace.

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Something subtle has been happening culturally over the past decade.

Emotional detachment has become fashionable.

Across dating culture, friendships, social media, and even professional environments, there is a growing admiration for the person who appears unbothered. The one who does not chase, does not react, does not appear overly invested in anything that might reveal vulnerability.

Nonchalance has become a social currency.

In dating, this often shows up as a kind of emotional minimalism. People signal that they are relaxed, easygoing, unattached to outcomes. They insist they “don’t take things too seriously.” The person who appears least invested frequently holds the most power.

But this cultural shift isn’t limited to romantic relationships.

You can see it everywhere.

On social media, where emotional restraint is often framed as maturity. In friendships, where people quietly withdraw rather than address conflict. Even in workplaces, where appearing overly enthusiastic can sometimes feel socially risky.

Some of this detachment is understandable.

The past decade has produced a culture saturated with stimulation. Constant news cycles, social media discourse, digital visibility, and emotional labour have left many people feeling overstimulated and psychologically tired.

Detachment becomes a coping mechanism.

But when emotional restraint becomes a widespread social strategy, something else happens.

Connection becomes more difficult.

Vulnerability requires a willingness to risk appearing invested. To care visibly about another person, a relationship, or an outcome. When everyone is attempting to maintain a carefully calibrated level of cool distance, those moments become harder to reach.

Which creates an interesting paradox.

Many people feel lonelier than ever, yet the cultural signals we send each other increasingly reward emotional self-containment.

No one wants to appear too eager. Too expressive. Too invested.

And occasionally I wonder whether modern culture has quietly convinced us that emotional detachment is sophistication - when in reality it may simply be self-protection disguised as confidence.

Because perhaps the real challenge of connection today isn’t finding someone interesting.

It’s finding someone willing to care openly enough to make the risk worthwhile.

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Every generation rediscovers Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s novel has never been a polite love story. Catherine and Heathcliff are obsessive, irrational, emotionally destructive. Their connection is less a relationship than a force of nature.

Which is precisely why the story keeps returning to the screen.

But the internet’s current obsession with the newest adaptation hasn’t centred on the windswept Yorkshire moors or the gothic drama of the plot.

It’s centred on a moment now known online simply as the corset lift.

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In one scene, Heathcliff - played by Jacob Elordi - lifts Catherine, played by Margot Robbie, by the corset of her dress. The gesture is sudden, physical, almost reckless. Catherine rises slightly off the ground, the movement both theatrical and strangely intimate.

Within hours of the scene circulating online, women across TikTok and Twitter were reacting in unison.

Not politely.

Wildly.

At first glance the reaction might seem exaggerated. After all, it’s just a dramatic flourish in a period film.

But the intensity of the response says something interesting about the cultural moment we’re living in.

Modern romance has become cautious. Dating culture often emphasises emotional restraint, ambiguity, and a kind of social coolness that discourages visible intensity. People are careful not to appear too invested, too eager, too expressive.

Desire is frequently filtered through irony.

The corset lift is the opposite of that.

It is unapologetically dramatic. It communicates attraction through physical confidence rather than hesitant conversation. It belongs to a romantic world where people do not carefully calibrate their interest.

They act on it.

What viewers (and myself) seem to be responding to isn’t simply the gesture itself. It’s the emotional clarity behind it. The scene captures a kind of romantic boldness that feels increasingly rare in modern dating culture.

In a world of cautious text messages and carefully timed replies, the idea of someone expressing desire with that level of confidence feels almost radical.

Of course, Wuthering Heights has never been a manual for healthy relationships. Catherine and Heathcliff are famously disastrous for one another.

But the story has always understood something about attraction that modern culture sometimes forgets.

Romance, at its core, is rarely subtle.

And sometimes I wonder if the reason the corset lift has captured people’s imagination isn’t simply because it’s dramatic.

It’s because it reminds viewers what it looks like when desire isn’t afraid of being obvious.

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For a genre often dismissed as frivolous, The Real Housewives franchise has become an unexpectedly precise study of female social dynamics.

On the surface, the shows are structured around familiar reality television ingredients: extravagant lifestyles, explosive arguments, shifting alliances, and the occasional dramatic exit from a dinner party. The format is so recognisable that viewers know exactly when the tension will escalate - usually somewhere between the entrée and the dessert course.

But beneath the spectacle, something more interesting is happening.

The franchise quietly functions as a sociology of female friendship.

Unlike scripted dramas, which often reduce women’s relationships to either perfect loyalty or outright rivalry, The Real Housewives reveals something far more realistic: friendships are fluid social ecosystems shaped by loyalty, status, insecurity, humour, and the occasional strategic alliance.

Women on these shows rarely exist in simple categories of friend or enemy. Instead, relationships move constantly along a spectrum. Someone can be a confidante one season and an adversary the next, depending on shifting loyalties within the group.

In that sense, the franchise mirrors something many women recognise instinctively about social life.

Female friendships can be intensely supportive, deeply affectionate, and emotionally sustaining. But they can also contain subtle hierarchies - questions of status, proximity, influence, and belonging that are rarely spoken aloud but often felt.

Reality television simply makes those dynamics visible.

The dinner table arguments that appear absurd at first glance often revolve around surprisingly complex emotional negotiations: who defended whom, who failed to show loyalty in a moment of conflict, who appears to be gaining influence within the group.

In other words, viewers are not simply watching drama.

They are watching social power shift in real time.

Perhaps that is why the franchise continues to captivate audiences long after critics predicted its demise. Beneath the champagne glasses and dramatic confrontations lies something recognisable.

A reminder that friendships, like all relationships, involve their own quiet politics.

And sometimes I wonder if The Real Housewives remains so addictive not because viewers enjoy conflict, but because the show captures something most scripted series struggle to portray honestly - the complicated, constantly evolving choreography of women’s social worlds.

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Watching Bridgerton can sometimes feel like stepping into an alternate emotional universe.

The gowns are extravagant, the scandals theatrical, the orchestral covers of pop songs slightly surreal. But beneath all the spectacle lies something surprisingly simple: a world where people are actively looking for love.

In the universe of Bridgerton, courtship is the central project of social life. Families organise introductions. Conversations carry meaning. Even flirtation unfolds with a kind of deliberate intensity.

People pursue each other.

Modern dating, by contrast, often feels like a strange performance of emotional restraint.

In today’s dating culture, enthusiasm can be interpreted as desperation. Expressing interest too directly risks appearing overly invested. Many people have internalised the idea that the most attractive posture is nonchalance - the ability to appear relaxed, unbothered, and slightly detached.

Which makes the emotional clarity of Bridgerton feel almost radical.

The characters are not shy about desire. They declare their feelings dramatically, sometimes disastrously, but always visibly. The central tension of the story isn’t whether anyone is interested - it’s how two people will navigate the intensity of that interest.

In other words, vulnerability is not socially punished. It’s the engine of the story.

Watching this unfold in a modern context can feel strangely disorienting. The show reminds viewers of a version of romantic culture where emotional risk wasn’t considered embarrassing.

Where wanting someone was simply part of the narrative.

Of course, the world of Bridgerton is fictional, and the historical reality it draws from was far more restrictive than the show suggests. But the emotional framework it presents still feels striking.

Because it depicts a culture where people were not afraid to pursue connection openly.

And sometimes I wonder if the real fantasy of Bridgerton isn’t the dresses or the aristocracy.

It’s the idea that love might unfold in a world where people aren’t afraid to show that they care.

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Something interesting has happened to television over the past few years.

For a long time, prestige drama dominated the cultural conversation. Shows like Succession, Mad Men, and The Crown trained audiences to expect complex writing, cinematic production, and psychologically layered storytelling.

Television became serious.

But recently, another genre has quietly reclaimed centre stage.

Reality television is everywhere again.

From The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to Love Is Blind to the seemingly endless expansions of The Real Housewives universe, audiences appear newly captivated by unscripted social drama.

At first glance, this might seem like a simple return to escapism.

Reality television offers spectacle, conflict, glamour, and a sense of unpredictability that scripted stories sometimes struggle to replicate. But the renewed cultural appetite for these shows may also reflect something deeper about the current moment.

Modern life is emotionally exhausting.

News cycles move rapidly. Social media constantly amplifies conflict. Political discourse feels perpetually heightened. Even everyday digital life requires a surprising amount of psychological processing.

Against that backdrop, reality television offers something strangely comforting.

The drama it presents is immediate, contained, and oddly manageable. The conflicts unfold within clearly defined social groups - dinner parties, vacations, cast trips - and the stakes, while intense within the narrative, remain fundamentally personal rather than existential.

In other words, reality television provides emotional stimulation without the weight of real-world consequences.

There is also something refreshing about the genre’s relative transparency. Unlike scripted prestige drama, which often presents carefully structured narratives about morality and power, reality television embraces its own chaos.

People behave irrationally. Arguments escalate unpredictably. Alliances form and dissolve with startling speed.

The result feels strangely honest.

Watching reality television doesn’t require intellectual analysis or moral interpretation. It simply invites viewers to observe human behaviour in all its messy, occasionally absurd complexity.

And sometimes I wonder if the renewed popularity of reality TV reflects something simple about modern audiences.

After years of navigating a world that often feels overwhelming, people may not be searching for deeper complexity on screen.

They may simply be looking for something chaotic enough to feel entertaining - but contained enough to feel safe.

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There was a time when dating followed a fairly clear cultural storyline.

Two people met - usually through friends or proximity. Something awkward happened. Someone made a grand gesture. Eventually, they chose each other. The romantic comedies of the 1990s built entire universes around this structure. The details varied, but the arc remained recognisable.

Love, we were told, had a narrative.

But somewhere between the rise of dating apps and the collapse of those cultural scripts, the structure changed.

I’ve dated in a few different countries over the years, and what fascinates me most is not the differences between cultures, but the strange sameness of modern dating everywhere. Whether you’re in Dublin, London, Cairo, or anywhere else, the pattern increasingly looks familiar. Conversations start quickly, flirtation is easy, attraction appears almost instantly.

But depth rarely arrives.

There is a curious disingenuousness to modern dating. Not necessarily dishonesty, exactly - but a sense that everyone is performing a version of themselves rather than revealing one. People arrive with pre-packaged identities: the ambitious one, the emotionally evolved one, the cool detached one who insists they “don’t take dating too seriously.”

Everyone seems to be trying to fit an image.

At the same time, something else has shifted culturally. People are tired. Emotionally drained by work, by constant digital life, by the quiet pressure to optimise themselves professionally, physically, psychologically. And when people are tired, they often choose the path of least emotional resistance.

Surface-level connection becomes easier than vulnerability. Instant validation becomes easier than commitment.

Which is perhaps why modern dating can feel strangely hollow even when there is plenty of interaction happening. The apps are full. The conversations are constant. Yet the deeper structure of romantic connection feels increasingly unstable.

Our parents’ generation experienced dating in environments where people encountered each other repeatedly - workplaces, neighbourhoods, mutual social circles. Even the films we grew up watching reinforced the idea that love unfolded through coincidence and persistence. Someone ran through an airport. Someone realised they’d been in love all along.

Today the environment is completely different.

Connection begins through algorithms. Attention spans are fractured. Identity itself has become something people curate carefully for public consumption.

And when identity becomes performance, intimacy becomes complicated.

Everyone still says the same reassuring phrase: it will happen when you least expect it.

But sometimes I wonder how that’s supposed to work in a culture where dating often begins through carefully curated profiles, emotional energy is increasingly scarce, and people are constantly aware that there might always be someone else just one swipe away.

Perhaps modern dating isn’t confusing because people don’t want love.

Perhaps it’s confusing because the culture that once made love feel inevitable quietly disappeared.

And sometimes I find myself thinking that what many people are really searching for now isn’t another match.

It’s the feeling that connection might still be possible without performance.

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Not the reckless thrill of your twenties - where you jump without looking and assume the net will appear.

No.

This is a different thrill.

The kind where you know exactly how hard life can be…

and decide to do it anyway.

Which is how I ended up here.

Writing again.

Publicly.

Because somewhere between adulthood, careers, relationships, disappointments, reinventions, and the quiet drama of everyday life, I realised something simple:

Everyone gets a first draft of their life.

But the interesting people?

They eventually start revising.

For years, writing has been the thing that followed me around like an unfinished sentence.

I studied history and politics.

American history and politics, which makes watching today’s news feel like a thesis-level mindfuck.

I wrote essays and a thesis that could probably clear a dinner table.

I built a career in marketing - a world where words are everywhere but honesty sometimes isn’t.

And yet the urge to write the way I actually think never really left.

Which is why this column exists.

If the essays are where I unpack culture and power, and the guides are where I break down the strange rules of modern life, columns are where the observation gets a little more personal.

Not diary-personal.

The kind where a small moment-a conversation, a dinner, a strange social dynamic-suddenly reveals something bigger about how we’re all navigating modern life.

Because lately I’ve noticed something about adulthood.

Everyone thinks the chaos stops after your twenties.

It doesn’t.

It just becomes better dressed.

People are still figuring things out.

Friendships shift.

Careers pivot.

Love appears in the most inconvenient places.

And sometimes the life you thought you were building quietly asks for a rewrite.

Which is where the idea of a second draft comes in.

Not starting over.

Just… revising.

Keeping the good paragraphs.

Deleting the parts that never really worked.

And writing the next chapter with slightly better instincts.

That’s what these columns will be.

Shorter observations.

Sharper reflections.

The kind of thoughts that don’t need an essay to dissect.

Observations about modern life.

The strange politics of friendship.

Dating in the age of algorithms.

Culture, ambition, reinvention - and all the little social moments that reveal something bigger underneath.

Think of it as the part of Second Draft where the conversation loosens up a little.

Still thoughtful.

Just with better lighting and trending audios.

And just like that…

The column begins.

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