Marriage & Family
Divorce, dad trips, parenting two boys, and the unlived life of the parent who keeps choosing the laptop.
My divorce was the best thing that happened to my marriage and also the worst week of my adult life, which were, somehow, the same week. I wrote about it because nobody else seemed willing to say the obvious thing — that some marriages end well, that some endings are kindnesses, and that the cultural script around divorce is written by people who haven't had one.
The pieces in this section are the ones I almost didn't publish. There's the divorce essay, which got me more email than anything else I've written and a couple of very firm phone calls from family members. There's the dad-trip writing — annual one-on-one travel with each of my boys, which I started after a therapist quietly pointed out that "providing" was not, in fact, the same thing as "showing up." There's the island weekend where I tried to engineer the kind of community my kids would want to grow up around, because I'd noticed I didn't have one of my own.
I'm still figuring most of this out in real time. The writing is one of the ways I figure it out. If you've been through a divorce, are mid-divorce, or are quietly wondering whether the marriage you're in is the one you should stay in, the essays here might be useful.
You might also like the friendships and forums pieces — same problem, different room.
More on marriage & family
Have babies with the wrong person
On the birth of my daughter, why young people are obsessed with the prep work of dating but refuse to eat the meal, and why you should just have the freaking baby.
Fight with a pulse oximeter
How John Gottman's Aftermath of a Fight conversation plus a $20 pulse-ox sensor turned our worst arguments into something productive.
The house is the patient
Mine was. Why airtight modern houses trap VOCs, mold, radon, and EMF—and what I found when I finally got a proper test done.
Divorce is awesome
On unhappy marriages, the science of staying together for the kids, and why divorce is shameful when it shouldn't be.
Start a group thread
Why I stopped trying to make friends by accident and started building deliberate rituals — forum, pickleball, lunch club, Camp Dad, and the group text that started it all.
The snoring score
I ignored the box for three months. Then Zoe's sleep got better, then mine did, then I cut my snoring by 70% and she stopped elbowing me at 3am.
2,800 years of the kids aren't okay
Twenty quotes spanning 2,800 years of grown-ups being convinced civilization is doomed and the next generation is feral.
The tail end
Tim Urban's tail-end essay haunted me for years. The realization it triggered: I hadn't danced in over a decade. So I found a sober Sunday-morning rave and started again.
Parent lazier, not harder
Modern parenting is a stress-induced crisis because we've abandoned how humans actually raise kids. The fix isn't more effort. It's alloparenting, free-range play, and trusting your kids to entertain themselves.
Your new house is gassing you
When David Heinemeier Hansson's energy-efficient dream house started making his wife collapse, the culprit was formaldehyde and not enough airflow. Here's what I changed in my own home after I heard the story.
Introducing Flow
Before Flow became my $10 million lesson, it was a simple idea: one place for work tasks, home tasks, delegation, and the grocery list I kept forgetting.