Why You’re Not Reflexively Impressed With Your Partner Anymore (And What Changed) (opens in new tab)

At some point—and no one sent a memo—the rules of attraction stopped making sense. Not emotionally. Structurally. For most of the twentieth century, marriage followed a pattern so stable it looked like preference: Men tended to marry women with less education. Women tended to marry men with more. Sociologists gave it a name—hypergamy—which sounds like something that requires a glossary but really just describes a quiet asymmetry: one partner is, by the most legible social metric available, “a...