Fiat Relationships — a clinical lens from my forthcoming book, applied to current news on this hub.
What this lens is
Which pattern is running your relationship?
Take the free three minute quiz and meet the creature behind the cycle you keep getting stuck in.
Most people believe modern relationship problems are about a lack of communication skills, incompatible attachment styles, or bad boundaries. As a couples therapist, I look at the landscape of modern intimacy and see something entirely different. I see an economic crisis of the heart. I call this Fiat Relationships.
Fiat money is currency printed out of thin air with absolutely nothing backing it. A fiat relationship operates on that exact same extractive logic. We try to build secure love on top of an unstable, hyperinflated culture. We print affection we cannot back with action. We want the dopamine hit of connection without paying the grueling cost of vulnerability. We use dating apps that gamify mate selection, treating human beings like disposable assets. We lean into transactional dynamics like trad-wife economics or endless situationships, desperately trying to find a stable floor in a world that refuses to provide one.
I see the devastating clinical results of this dynamic in my office every single week. A high net worth couple sits on my couch. They survived the brutal stress of an IPO, built a massive portfolio, and bought the beautiful second house. By every external metric, they have won the game. But their marriage is completely dead. They treat each other like investments that have stopped yielding returns. When inevitable conflict arises, they do not do the slow, costly proof of work required for real repair. They panic, they withdraw, and they look for an exit. They walk into therapy thinking they have a communication problem, but they actually have an unbacked emotional currency. The bank balance says everything is perfectly fine, but the body is the first ledger. Their nervous systems register the absolute fiat nature of their bond, keeping them in a state of chronic, lonely hypervigilance.
If you recognize your own exhaustion in this pattern, you are experiencing the biological reality of unbacked love. You cannot build a secure attachment on a counterfeit foundation. Real intimacy requires scarcity, low time preference, and the willingness to stay in the room and repair the bond when things get hard.
Explore the essays below to see exactly how fiat relationships are shaping our culture, our technology, and your own capacity to love.
Get the chapters as they are written
Fiat Relationships is one of the lenses in my forthcoming book, Proof of Work: From Fiat Life to Thriving in the AI Age, with Greenleaf in 2027. The waitlist is my Substack, where the chapters are being written in public.
Essays applying this lens to current events
Essays applying this lens to current news will appear here as they publish.
Read more about the book · About Figs
Every couple has a pattern they cannot see. Find yours.
In love, each of you is a Relentless or a Reluctant, which makes you one of three kinds of couple: Relentless and Reluctant, two Relentless, or two Reluctant. The free quiz reveals your creatures and the cycle they fall into together. About three minutes.
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The Relentless
The Reluctant