Category: The Conversation – Canada

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Julie McCarthy, Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, University of Toronto

As loneliness reaches epidemic levels worldwide, work has become one of the main settings where connection is either strengthened or lost. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general of the United States, labelled loneliness an “epidemic,” warning that its consequences rival those of other major health risks.

This concern is echoed globally. The World Health Organization now estimates that roughly one in six adults worldwide experience significant loneliness.

Work sits at the centre of this crisis. For most adults, work is the primary social environment outside of family and close friends. Drawing on a comprehensive review of more than 200 studies, my colleagues and I synthesized decades of research across the fields of management, psychology and health.

We found that loneliness at work is not a marginal or temporary issue, but a systematic and consequential feature of modern working life. It shapes employee wellbeing, behaviour and performance in ways that extend well beyond the individual.

Why workplace loneliness matters

To understand why workplace loneliness matters, it helps to recognize that loneliness is a complex experience. It emerges when people perceive a gap between the social connection they want and what they believe they have. Because it is subjective, people can feel lonely even in busy, collaborative workplaces.

Loneliness is inherently distressing, but it does not remain confined to emotions. It shapes how people think and behave, influencing attention, motivation and everyday interactions at work.

Loneliness also differs in duration and form, with important implications. For some employees, loneliness is temporary, triggered by transitions such as starting a new role or moving into leadership. In these cases, loneliness can sometimes prompt reconnection.

For others, loneliness becomes chronic, settling into a self-reinforcing pattern that is harder to reverse and more damaging over time. These distinctions help explain why loneliness affects employees and organizations so differently.

Psychological and performance costs

The consequences of loneliness at work are both personal and organizational.

Employee well-being erodes. Loneliness, much like chronic stress, places sustained strain on people’s mental and emotional capacities. Research consistently links workplace loneliness to emotional exhaustion, psychological distress and feelings of alienation.

Loneliness has also been associated with physiological stress responses, including heightened cortisol levels. Beyond strain, loneliness also reduces positive emotions, life satisfaction and a sense of meaning, while increasing negative emotional experiences.

Engagement and effectiveness may also decline. Research consistently shows that lonely employees are less engaged in their work. They are more likely to withdraw from their roles, invest less energy and reduce their overall contribution to organizational outcomes.

Loneliness is also associated with impaired cognitive functioning, including diminished focus and concentration, which undermines productivity.

Behaviour and organizational outcomes

The psychological effects of loneliness have clear downstream consequences for behaviour, performance and health.

Workplace performance can suffer, as loneliness is negatively related to both self-reported and supervisor-rated job performance. Lonely employees have been found to be less committed and are often perceived as less approachable, which can translate into lower performance evaluations. There is also evidence that loneliness is associated with reduced creativity at work.

Research links workplace loneliness to higher levels of counterproductive work behaviours, including cyberloafing, problematic internet behaviours, poorer cybersecurity practices and higher absenteeism.

Loneliness is also associated with a diminished capacity for self-regulation, which plays a critical role in controlling attention, emotions and behaviour at work. When self-regulation is compromised, employees may struggle to stay focused and manage emotional responses effectively.

Health can also be affected. Loneliness is consistently linked to poorer mental and physical health. Among working adults, loneliness is associated with psychological distress, while broader research shows that loneliness is related to mental health difficulties.

How to reduce loneliness at work

Research points to several evidence-based approaches that can reduce loneliness when implemented thoughtfully. First, providing social support is one of the most reliable ways to reduce loneliness, particularly for people already at higher risk. Peer mentoring, group-based support and structured opportunities for connection are especially effective because they create safe environments where relationships can develop.

Building social skills also helps. Loneliness is not always about a lack of opportunity; it can also reflect difficulty initiating or sustaining social connections. Interventions that strengthen interpersonal skills, such as communication and relationship-building, can reduce loneliness by helping people feel more confident and about social interactions at work.

Volunteering reduces isolation. Volunteering has emerged as a particularly promising strategy for reducing loneliness. Engaging in meaningful, pro-social activities outside one’s core role can strengthen social bonds and increase feelings of connection, making it a valuable component of broader organizational strategies.

There is also growing evidence that mindfulness-based approaches can reduce loneliness by targeting unhelpful thought patterns, such as negative self-talk and pessimistic expectations about others. By encouraging present-focused awareness, mindfulness can help disrupt these patterns and support more adaptive social engagement.

Rethinking the design of work

The prevalence of loneliness at work raises a deeper question about the kind of workplaces we’re creating. Environments that consistently reward speed, output and constant availability without equal attention to connection can unintentionally foster isolation, even among highly capable and committed employees.

It is critical that employers design workplaces that allow people to belong as well as perform. Intentionally structuring work to include things like peer support programs, collaborative team rituals and opportunities for mindful focus can strengthen social connection while also improving engagement and performance.

Organizations that take this seriously are not just responding to a social problem but are investing in healthier, more resilient ways of working.

Julie McCarthy receives funding from SSHRC.

– ref. Loneliness at work matters more than we think – https://theconversation.com/loneliness-at-work-matters-more-than-we-think-265845

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nicholas Marcelli, PhD Candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing, Queen’s University, Ontario

In an age of inequality and exploitation, a 1906 novel that exposed hazardous working conditions and unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meat-packing plants at the turn of the 20th century still pops up in discussions about unjust labour.

A 2025 Current Affairs story about health problems for workers in poultry and pork processing plants reported on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests “we never left Upton Sinclair’s Jungle”.

A 2024 book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry explains how the Department of Labor’s discovery, in 2022, that “a contractor hired … to clean slaughterhouses employed over a hundred children in ‘hazardous occupations’ seems as if it came “straight out of ‘The Jungle.’”

What is it about Upton Sinclair’s 120-year-old novel that endures?

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Read more:
Radicals in the Democratic Party, from Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders

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Novel’s origins

In 1904, Sinclair was commissioned by an editor of the socialist newspaper the Appeal to Reason to write a novel about wage slavery. Sinclair reveals in his autobiography that he chose the Chicago stockyards as its setting because of a recent failed strike led by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.

Beginning in October 1904, Sinclair lived for seven weeks among those he described as the “wage slaves of the Beef Trust” and went undercover in the plants by posing as an employee. He began writing on Christmas Day 1904, and three months later, the book was complete.

The Jungle appeared serially in the Appeal to Reason from February to November 1905 before being published as a full-length novel by Doubleday, Page & Co. in February 1906.

Harrowing conditions

The book tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus, who is drawn to the stockyards by the promise of wealth after immigrating with his family from Lithuania to Chicago’s Packingtown neighbourhood. When family members, including the children, find work in the plants, they experience harrowing conditions.

As tragedy befalls them, the novel becomes a condemnation of early 20th-century capitalism, ultimately celebrating the virtues of socialism.

Although Sinclair’s novel is not without its flaws — for example, an unnamed critic in the March 3, 1906 edition of The New York Times wrote Sinclair’s “art is too obvious, his devices too trite” and “there is nothing spontaneous in the book save his imaginative descriptions of human misery” — the book portrayed vivid scenes.

Notably, The Jungle depicted child labourers, primarily Stanislovas Lukoszaite, a 14-year-old member of the family who is sent to work in a lard-canning factory.

Novel’s reception

While The Jungle was a novel, it simultaneously continues to be regarded as one of the most significant pieces of muckraking journalism —
pre-First World War writing concerned with exposing hardships or corruption and promoting social and political reform.

In journalism historian Bruce J. Evensen’s book, Journalism and the American Experience, he describes how Sinclair had hoped that when the novel was published, “it would expose the deplorable working conditions of killing and cutting gangs. Instead, it was his frightful description of food processing that provoked public outrage.”

This misplaced attention famously led Sinclair to declare in his autobiography: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

All but one of Sinclair’s claims were proven true in a special investigation into the Chicago stockyards conducted in June 1906 at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt. Investigators confirmed the unsanitary working conditions in the meat-packing plants, but made no reference to child labourers.

In author Jack London’s review of The Jungle for Wilshire’s Magazine, he called the book “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery,” a reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, first serialized in an abolitionist newspaper.

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How ‘Uncle Tom’ still impacts racial politics

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London described how Sinclair “painted a horrifying picture of the industry, which still haunts the American imagination.”

Depictions of child labourers

I contend that the endurance of The Jungle in the current popular imagination stems from its representation of children’s work in the meat-packing industry, particularly at a time, as Sinclair writes in the novel, when packers “worked all but the babies.”

Children were seen as essential because, as described by a character in the novel, Grandmother Majauszkiene, “there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and for a third of the pay.”

When Sinclair was writing, there may have been anywhere between 700 and 1,600 children under 16 years old working in the plants. Economist Edith Abbott, drawing from the 1905 Census of Manufacturers, writes that out of 74,134 employees nationwide, 974, or two per cent, were children.

Scant statistics around working children

In my doctoral research, I have found there are few statistics on the number of children working in meat-packing plants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, either due to the lack of reporting or efforts by employers and families to avoid child labour laws. This view is reaffirmed by Sinclair’s contemporary, Algie Martin Simons, in his 1906 pamphlet, “Packingtown.”

Because of the scant statistics and lack of accurate reporting or testimony from child workers in the meatpacking plants of the early 20th century, The Jungle, as a literary work, is an important piece of evidence that children worked in these plants at all.

Today, advocacy groups like the Economic Policy Institute and The Child Labor Coalition and journalists who include Alice Driver and Hannah Dreier have been documenting the ongoing, simultaneous rise in child labour law violations. There has been a decrease in labour law protections — not just in meatpacking and agriculture, but in industries throughout the U.S.

The continuous necessity of reporting on child labour law violations reaffirms the view that we never left The Jungle.

‘The Jungle’ continues to resonate

Ultimately, while The Jungle has maintained a 120-year legacy as a buzzword for child labour and exploitative labour practices more broadly — in addition to its exposé of early 20th century meatpacking — my interest in the text stems from Sinclair’s work as author and mediator who represents exploitative labour to the public.

How does he, as someone who only lived in Packingtown for seven weeks, portray the workers and the community they belong to, or depict the abuse of workers? What issues are raised around fact-based reporting and fictionalization?

The same questions, of course, are relevant for all reporting and narratives, especially about exploited and marginalized groups.

Nicholas Marcelli has received an Ontario Graduate Scholarship from Queen’s University and the Province of Ontario to fund his doctoral research.

– ref. ‘The Jungle’ at 120: How a 1906 novel continues to surface in discussions about unjust labour – https://theconversation.com/the-jungle-at-120-how-a-1906-novel-continues-to-surface-in-discussions-about-unjust-labour-265234

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Maha Khawaja, PhD Student, McMaster University

Do you know how you prefer to give and receive love? Do you need words of affirmation? Spending quality time? Acts of service? Gifts? Or physical touch?

Figuring out what your “love language” is has become one of the most successful relationship ideas of the past two decades.

Why? Because the idea is simple, flattering and easy to apply.

Introduced by Gary Chapman, an American Baptist pastor, author and marriage counsellor, in his 1992 book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, the idea is now a dominant framework in modern relationship advice.

While incredibly popular and often used as a “go-to” tool on first dates, recent research suggests that the idea lacks strong scientific evidence for its central claims.

Instead of scientific theory, love languages function like a culturally appealing system that individualizes relational strain, obscures power and substitutes a checklist for the harder work of understanding how relationships actually function over time.

A simple idea replacing scientific evidence

That popularity of love languages is exactly what makes them an archetype of bad pop psychology as they package a complex set of relational processes into a simple idea, providing a memorable vocabulary, and then get treated as explanation, diagnosis and solution all at once.

Most notably, this framework emerges from a pastoral counselling context rather than systematic research, and its core claim — that people have a stable primary language that should be matched for relational success — doesn’t apply well to how relational needs operate.

People typically value all five domains: quality time, words of affirmation, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. They shift depending on stress, life stage, illness, caregiving demands and conflict history.

What gets named as a “primary” language is often better understood as a moving indicator of current deprivation — “this is what I’m not getting” — and not a durable trait. Because the categories are broad and emotionally resonant, they also invite the Barnum effect, in which the model feels deeply accurate precisely because it is flexible enough to fit most people most of the time.

When intimacy becomes a simplified checklist

Another problem with the five love languages is what they do to how people think about relational support. They turn intimacy into a problem of translation: if you just deliver the right behaviours in the right format, your partner will feel loved.

That can push couples toward transactional care (“I did your language, so you should be satisfied”) and away from curiosity and context (“What is happening for you this week? What support do you actually need?”). It also promotes a form of individualization in which relational issues become framed as mismatched preferences instead of relational processes that require ongoing work.

Once the label enters the relationship, it can function like a conversational dead end.

It also doesn’t seriously address conflict regulation, responsiveness or how couples cope under stress, all of which are areas where relationship science has far more to say. Many “love language” conflicts are not actually about the absence of gifts or affirmation, but are about chronic misattunement, uneven emotional labour, perceived disregard or an unsafe climate.

The structural conditions love languages ignore

Love languages can also obscure power and normalize inequality.

Some categories are easily folded into gendered divisions of labour, like how acts of service and emotional affirmation often land on women as feminized care work, while other partners receive the benefits without addressing uneven burdens.

The framework also sidesteps structural constraints like poverty, disability, illness, class and religious norms that shape what is possible.

When someone is overworked, sick or carrying the relationship’s invisible labour, the problem is rarely that their “language” is being spoken incorrectly. It is that relational and structural conditions make mutuality difficult, and “speaking languages” can become a way to manage the symptoms while leaving the conditions untouched.

The model is also particularly risky where consent and vulnerability are involved. Physical touch as a love language, for example, can be used to moralize access to someone else’s body, especially in contexts of sexual pleasure, coercion, post-partum recovery, trauma or chronic pain.

What sustains relationships beyond labels

The love languages framework tends to treat touch as an unambiguous good instead of a context-sensitive practice shaped by consent, safety, timing and bodily autonomy in health contexts like having cancer, disability, medication changes and depression. Intimacy largely shifts because bodies and conditions shift.

A model that encourages partners to “deliver touch” can easily misfire when what’s needed is patience, alternative sexual scripts and co-ordinated coping, not increased physical contact as proof of love.

Above all, love languages only thrive because they are marketable. They offer the satisfaction of self-knowledge, compatibility narratives and quick fixes.

Relationships, of course, are not solved by personalization alone. Importantly, they are shaped by mutual responsiveness, practical and emotional equity, the ability to repair after harm and the capacity to adapt to changing bodies and lives.

If love languages are useful at all, it is as a thin starting vocabulary for talking about care, and not as a diagnostic framework or substitute for confronting misattunement, power and the real conditions that make intimacy sustainable.

Maha Khawaja does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The seductive simplicity — and danger — of pop psychology’s ‘love languages’ – https://theconversation.com/the-seductive-simplicity-and-danger-of-pop-psychologys-love-languages-273296

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Tanya Joseph, PhD Student, Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Ontario

As I walk into the classroom as a newly graduated teacher, I see children — each with unique abilities, interests and an eagerness to learn. This Ontario classroom was designed to be inclusive — a space where all students, regardless of their needs, can thrive.

Yet, as an educator, I find myself asking: Am I truly prepared to support every child? Have I received the training I need to guide each student on their learning journey including students with disabilities such as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)?

Many teachers entering the classroom after graduating from teacher education programs in Ontario will ask similar questions.

In the past, schooling for students with disabilities was accomplished through segregated education. However, in the last 20 years, Ontario has reformed its educational structure to include all students within the general education classroom.

In accordance with Ontario education policies, classroom teaching must be designed for all students and inclusive approaches must be used to mitigate discrimination and exclusion. One way educators seek to meet the needs of many diverse learners is through implementing frameworks like Universal Design for Learning or “differentiated instruction” in their classrooms.

Yet despite expanded teaching approaches and policy changes, a dual system still exists that involves children with disabilities such as FASD being excluded from the rest of the class.

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder

FASD is a condition that occurs due to maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy. As a consequence, children are born with brain damage and delays in neurodevelopment.

FASD may be the most prevalent disability in Canadian classrooms. FASD affects between 1.4 per cent and 4.4 per cent of the population in Canada — a prevalence greater than Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Down Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy combined.

FASD affects each individual in varied ways, and each person has unique strengths and faces varied challenges. Children with FASD exhibit a range of symptoms and varying degrees of impairment, including difficulties with motor skills, sensory processing, communication, academic achievement, memory, executive functioning, abstract reasoning, hyperactivity and adaptive behaviour.

As children with FASD experience academic difficulties and behavioural challenges, they require multifaceted supports, including instruction tailored to their unique learning profiles, individualized academic interventions and modified curricula aligned with the child’s developmental and ability levels.

Teachers must be responsive to the needs of students with FASD and proactive in providing supports to promote students’ success.

Teacher knowledge of FASD

In teacher education programs, teacher candidates receive training through a combination of coursework and placements. Although courses offered to teacher candidates that reflect special education may be compulsory, explicit instruction on specific disabilities, such as FASD, may be limited.

Currently, there is a lack of research completed in Ontario reflecting how teachers are prepared to support students with FASD. To gain deeper insight into the nature of teacher candidates’ knowledge and understanding of FASD — and their preparedness to teach these students — I collected data using a questionnaire administered to final year teacher candidates graduating in 2024 in a teacher education program accredited by the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT).

In this questionnaire, I examined teacher candidates’ knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, self-efficacy and overall preparedness and readiness to support students with FASD as they enter the profession.

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Read more:
The truth about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder

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Preliminary findings revealed teacher candidates reported feeling inadequately trained to support students with FASD, and most reported that they had not discussed FASD in their teacher education programs.

Experiences with disabilities were variable and specific knowledge of the needs of students with FASD was limited. While teacher candidates possessed knowledge of strategies to support students with disabilities such as ASD and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they were largely unaware of the challenges faced by children with FASD.

Further learning opportunities

Although teacher candidates were familiar with Universal Design for Learning and differentiated instruction, they need to be flexible, prepared to advocate for their students and able to adapt these frameworks to the individual needs of students with FASD.

These teachers may face the challenge of supporting a child with FASD in their first year of teaching.

The assumption that teachers are ready upon entering the classroom with the training they receive must be revised. Additional curricular and/or learning opportunities should be provided that are responsive to teachers’ particular contexts to further develop their knowledge and preparation, including around strategies to support a child with FASD.

Resource to support children with FASD

As teacher candidates continue to prepare to support students with FASD in the classroom, it is necessary to review the curriculum taught in teacher education programs to ensure that FASD is discussed with emphasis on the nature of the condition and best practices to support the child.

A valuable resource for both teacher candidates and current teachers in the classroom is the Canada FASD Research Network, which provides evidence-based information on FASD.

This resource includes past and current research completed in Canada, and provides tools and resources for parents/caregivers, educators and professionals who may support individuals with FASD.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Queen’s University Knowledge Forum.

Tanya Joseph does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The most prevalent disability in classrooms may be FASD — and supporting students is vital – https://theconversation.com/the-most-prevalent-disability-in-classrooms-may-be-fasd-and-supporting-students-is-vital-272553

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Erica Kilius, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Northern British Columbia

In northern climates, February has a particular heaviness. Even though we’ve passed the longest night of year, the days often feel darker, longer and more draining than December ever did. For society’s “night owls,” whose internal clocks naturally run later, this stretch of winter can be especially challenging.

As a biological anthropologist who studies sleep (and a night owl living in the North), I see this unfold every winter, and science offers a clear explanation for it.

The major reason can be found in our circadian system, the body’s internal 24-hour clock, which relies on morning light to stay aligned with the Earth’s day. After months of dim, delayed sunrises, that system is running low on the cues it needs to keep us alert and energized.

To understand this winter misalignment, it helps to look at our evolutionary history. Early human ancestors evolved near the equator, where sunrise and sunset are consistent throughout the year. In this stable environment, daylight serves as a reliable zeitgeber (German for “time giver”), synchronizing our internal clock to the external world.

But at higher latitudes, the light-dark cycle swings dramatically across seasons. Winter brings long nights, weak sunlight and more time indoors, and our internal clocks slowly drift later without that consistent morning light. Many people feel this misalignment as fatigue, irritability, low mood, difficulty waking or even difficulty falling asleep despite exhaustion.

These symptoms can intensify as winter progresses. Seasonal Affective Disorder, a seasonal pattern of depression, is more prevalent in northern regions.

February’s perfect storm

Our chronotype, or our biological preference for mornings (people known as “larks”) or evenings (night owls), can shape how strongly we feel these effects. It’s influenced by genetics, age and environment, and research has found that chronotype shifts later with increasing latitude. In other words, the farther north you live, the more likely you are to be a night owl.

This makes intuitive sense: when sunrise creeps toward 8 a.m., the body’s clock shifts later in response . The problem is that our social schedules don’t shift with it. School and work start times remain rigidly fixed, regardless of daylight hours.

In fact, our society is built around early chronotypes — it’s a lark-centred world — and these larks are often praised as disciplined or productive. In contrast, late chronotypes are often blamed for staying up late or struggling to wake on time.

But from an evolutionary perspective, chronotype variation may have been adaptive. The sentinel hypothesis proposes that having different chronotypes in a group staggers sleep and wake times across the night, thus helping early humans maintain vigilance against night-time threats.

We all had our shift on the night watch — a built-in, rotating system of protection in our species. Yet in the modern world, the strengths of night owls (including increased openness and extraversion) are often overlooked.

What’s important to note is that late chronotypes aren’t choosing a different schedule. They are biologically tuned to a later rhythm. Forcing them into early mornings creates what researchers call social jet lag — the chronic mismatch between biological time and social time.

Social jet lag is strongly associated with increased caffeine use and alcohol use, higher rates of smoking and greater risk-taking behaviours. The chance of being overweight has been found to increase by 33 per cent for every hour of social jet lag.

February creates the perfect storm: while limited daylight affects everyone, late chronotypes face the added burden of social jet lag layered with this circadian misalignment. So what does this mean for health, and in particular, getting through the dark days of February?

Winter strategies for night owls

There are several practical, evidence-based strategies that can help align our circadian rhythms and reduce social jet lag during this last sprint of winter.

First, seek morning light, even if it’s weak. Morning light is the most powerful signal that synchronizes your circadian clock. If you can, get outside within the first hour of waking. If you can’t, use bright, indoor light strategically: bright light therapy in the first 30 minutes of waking can help shift the circadian clock earlier and improve mood.

In the afternoons and evenings, switch to using warm-toned bulbs instead. And avoid blue light from screens in the last hour before going to bed, as it’s a known suppressant of melatonin (the “darkness” hormone).

For late chronotypes, it’s important to keep a consistent schedule. While sleeping in on weekends can help recoup sleep loss, it also unfortunately increases social jet lag. Slowly shifting your bedtime on weekends earlier by around 10-15 minutes can more closely align free- and work-day rhythms.

It’s also critical to work with your biological rhythms, not against them. Try to structure your workday strategically: hold off on cognitively demanding tasks until late morning or early afternoon, when your circadian rhythm (and thus your alertness) is at its peak, and reserve early mornings for simpler tasks.

Lastly, emerging findings suggest that saunas may play a beneficial role in sleep health. Something to consider on cold, snowy days.

February may feel long, but it’s also the turning point; the slow return of light is already underway.

For those who naturally run on later schedules, remember that your chronotype is not a character flaw. Late chronotypes are more common for us northerners, shaped by our genetics and the environment around us. The goal shouldn’t be to force ourselves into someone else’s rhythm, but to find ways to live in better alignment with our own biology and the world we inhabit.

Erica Kilius does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. February is hard on ‘night owls’ in northern climates, but there are ways to cope – https://theconversation.com/february-is-hard-on-night-owls-in-northern-climates-but-there-are-ways-to-cope-275047

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Timothy Martin, Postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University

The 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil once said that compassion was an impossibility. She said it is “a more astounding miracle than walking on water.” The word she used for meeting the needs of the sufferer is not love or charity, but justice. Today, there is plenty of research that points to a decline in compassion.

Dealing with suffering, however, is part of the human experience, and as the American feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum argued compassion is “an essential bridge to justice.”

As an education researcher who examines activist efforts to educate the public, I think what we’re witnessing is not so-called “compassion fatigue” but the loss of a sense of a shared world.

When it comes to how housed citizens respond to their unhoused neighbours, I have noticed an increasing trend of describing this strained relationship as compassion fatigue. Compassion is a specific word, with a specific history, and I argue it’s the wrong word here.

The concept of compassion in ancient Greece was synonymous with pity. In those days, pity was tied to one’s capacity to expose oneself to suffering — to suffer with.

Turning away from one another

The rising narcissism in contemporary society is fuelled in part by our online lives, where algorithms insulate us from those who don’t think the same way. German philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this phenomenon when she wrote about our “human condition” of introducing ourselves into public, appearing alongside those we did not choose, but with whom we share the world.

Judith Butler, an American queer philosopher, called this necessary experience of strained cohabitation “up againstness.” This concept of the world, or the public realm, could help us find the term we are looking for.

Compassion fatigue, applied to the housing crisis, consistently centres the experience of those with housing. In this rendering, compassion would assume that these neighbours have reached out to their unhoused neighbours due to the obvious suffering of life without adequate shelter.

Nussbaum, inspired by Aristotle, offered three parameters that we might use to determine whether someone is acting out of compassion. First, compassion understands the seriousness of the suffering; it is not trivial, nor is it made up. Second, compassion does not assume the sufferer is culpable; the person is not at fault for their situation.

The third parameter is what Nussbaum calls “similar possibilities.” To put it plainly, this is the belief that it could be you.

Meanwhile, countless city councillors, media outlets and even Ontario’s premier assert that unhoused citizens merely need to try harder.

Citizens are not only “tired” of seeing homelessness, they are actively suing organizations working on the front lines of this crisis. In the case of cities like Barrie, local government has tried to find ways to criminalize helping unhoused neighbours. This does not speak of compassion, it speaks of a pervasive world fatigue. If we refuse to exercise compassion, this is not compassion fatigue; it is atrophy.

What justice demands of us

Arendt emphasized the importance of a solidarity “aroused by suffering.” A love of the world — Amor Mundi — was essential to maintaining spaces and democratic systems shared with others. While she rejected the “sentiment” of compassion guiding political action, perhaps the educational experience of compassion can inform what we deem to be political in the first place.

What most see as homelessness is only a sliver of an iceberg, caused by systemic violence over several decades.

David Madden and Peter Marcuse observe:

“Modern homelessness is a family phenomenon. Families comprise nearly 80 per cent of the population in the New York City shelter system. In the past year in New York alone, 42,000 children were unhoused for at least one night.”

Similarly shocking statistics apply in Canada. Dozens of organizations and countless front-line workers operate in conditions equated with disaster relief efforts. Is the suffering of children trivial? Are they culpable? Could this be me?

A recent front-page story in The Globe and Mail offered an analysis of Ontario municipalities. The article acknowledges the soaring costs of groceries and housing costs have led to a 25 per cent increase in homelessness in Ontario over the last two years.

Despite this, and like so much media coverage lately, the piece veers toward a narrative about “lawlessness,” “vandalism” and “addiction.” The educational force of compassion can help return us to the basic questions of affordability, before we condemn those living at the tip of this swelling iceberg.

I offer here what Nussbaum calls “a just city in words” — they are simply words, an exhortation toward justice but, to complete her phrasing, “without a just city in words…we never will get a just city in reality…”

If Simone Weil was right, then perhaps we are waiting for a miracle.

Timothy Martin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. When it comes to homelessness, what we call ‘compassion fatigue’ is something else entirely – https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-homelessness-what-we-call-compassion-fatigue-is-something-else-entirely-272799

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Levon Pogosian, Professor of Physics, Simon Fraser University

It’s well established that the universe is expanding, but there’s serious disagreement among scientists over how fast it’s happening.

Two of our best ways of measuring the cosmic expansion rate, the Hubble constant, give answers that are stubbornly at odds. This presents a major problem in modern cosmology known as the Hubble tension.

However, we wondered if an idea originally proposed to solve another cosmic mystery — the origin of cosmic magnetic fields — could help us unlock the mystery of the Hubble tension.

Our recently published research explores whether extremely weak magnetic fields left over from the earliest moments after the Big Bang might help us unpack the Hubble tension, while offering a glimpse into physics at energies far beyond anything achievable on Earth.

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Read more:
The universe may be lopsided – new research

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The Hubble constant and tension

Astronomers use the Hubble constant as a measure of how fast the universe is expanding. It is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who first discovered that the universe is expanding.

There are two conceptually different approaches to measuring the Hubble constant. One is indirect, based on predictions of our cosmological model tuned to match the patterns in the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang.

Telescopes such as the Planck Space Telescope have measured tiny fluctuations in this ancient light, predicting a Hubble constant of about 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc). A parsec is a unit of distance used in astronomy equal to about 3.26 light years, or 30.9 trillion kilometres. A megaparsec is one million parsecs.

The second method is more direct, similar to the one used by Hubble in the 1920s when he first demonstrated that the universe is expanding.

It measures how fast distant galaxies are moving away from our home galaxy, the Milky Way, by observing the brightness of supernovae explosions in these far away galaxies.

Type Ia supernovae are known to be “standard candles” because we know that their luminosity is the same wherever they are. That means we can judge the distance to them from how dim they appear to us.

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Read more:
How fast is the Universe really expanding? Multiple views of an exploding star raise new questions

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To determine their intrinsic brightness, astronomers use other standard candles, such as Cepheid stars, in the galaxies nearby. These observations, which use the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, give a higher value of around 73 km/s/Mpc.

This difference between the two measurements is called the Hubble tension. The difference between 67 and 73 may seem small, but it is statistically highly significant. If both methods are correct, then our standard model of cosmology must be missing something important.

Where did cosmic magnetic fields come from?

Magnetic fields are everywhere in the universe. Planets and stars generate their own fields, but gaps in our understanding emerge when we attempt to explain the much larger scale magnetic fields threading galaxies and clusters, and possibly even cosmic voids.

One long-studied possibility is that magnetism first arose in the very early universe, long before the first stars or galaxies formed. These so-called primordial magnetic fields have been studied for decades, and searching for their imprints in the cosmic microwave background and other data offers a way to probe the early universe and the extreme energies that would have generated these fields.

In 2011, two of us (Karsten and Tom) pointed out that primordial magnetic fields would influence recombination — when electrons and protons first combined to form neutral hydrogen — and the universe turned from opaque to transparent. The first light able to travel freely from that moment on is what we now observe as the cosmic microwave background.

If present, primordial magnetic fields would speed up recombination by pushing and pulling on charged particles, making matter slightly clumpy. Where particles are more crowded, they are more likely to meet and form hydrogen.

Shifting the moment when the universe becomes transparent changes the size of the observed patterns in the cosmic microwave background. This effectively alters the cosmic ruler used to measure distances and, in turn, the value of the Hubble constant inferred from the model, helping to ease the Hubble tension. Two of us (Karsten and Levon) demonstrated this effect in 2020 using a simplified model of recombination.

A breakthrough: What we found

In our new paper, we used the first full three-dimensional simulations of the primordial plasma with magnetic fields embedded in it, tracking how hydrogen forms.

We used the hydrogen formation history found through these simulations to compute predictions for how cosmic microwave background should appear if there were primordial magnetic fields, and tested these predictions against observations of the background.

The cosmic microwave background is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in recombination. If primordial magnetic fields altered it in a way that disagreed with observations, the idea could be ruled out. Instead, the data showed that our proposal remains viable.

Across multiple combinations of datasets, we find a consistent, mild preference for primordial magnetic fields, ranging from about 1.5 to three standard deviations. This is not yet a discovery, but a meaningful hint that they exist.

Equally important, the field strengths favoured by the data, about five to 10 pico-Gauss today, are close to what would be needed for galaxy and cluster magnetic fields to originate from primordial seeds alone. A pico-Gauss is a unit used to measure the strength of magnetic fields.

Aside from helping ease the Hubble tension, if primordial magnetic fields are confirmed, they would open a new window into how the universe was when it was only split seconds old, perhaps offering a glimpse into important events such as the Big Bang itself.

Our results show that the proposal survives the most detailed test available today and provides clear targets for future observations. Over the next several years, we will learn whether tiny magnetic fields from the dawn of time helped shape the universe we see today and whether they hold the key to resolving the Hubble tension.

Levon Pogosian receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The work described in this article was enabled in part by support provided by the BC DRI Group and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

Karsten Jedamzik receives funding from the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The work described in this article was in part supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

Tom Abel receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515.

– ref. The Hubble tension: How magnetic fields could help solve one of the universe’s biggest mysteries – https://theconversation.com/the-hubble-tension-how-magnetic-fields-could-help-solve-one-of-the-universes-biggest-mysteries-274003

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Billie Anderson, Lecturer, Disability Studies, King’s University College, Western University

Care work structures much of everyday life, yet it often remains invisible. It’s folded into assumptions about love, responsibility and familial duty rather than recognized as labour.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in caregiving, particularly when it’s performed by mothers. They’re routinely expected to absorb care work quietly, competently and without visible cost, even when that work unfolds under conditions of chronic illness, disability or grief.

Film and television often reinforce this expectation by presenting caregiving as a moral achievement rather than a social obligation. These representations frame maternal endurance as proof of love, virtue and emotional strength.

In recent cinema, motherhood shaped by loss or threat has emerged as a central narrative concern, from Hamnet to The Testament of Ann Lee to Sinners. Each film, in its own way, pushing back against the longstanding cultural fantasy of motherhood as a site of moral purity, endurance and heroism.

Rather than asking audiences to admire maternal sacrifice, these films linger on grief, struggle and ambivalence, exposing how expectations of care and emotional stability are unevenly distributed and disproportionately borne by women.

Care as a source of grief and harm

Mary Bronstein’s 2025 film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You belongs to this broader turn, but it pushes the critique further by stripping caregiving of even the residual comforts that often remain.

The film follows Linda (Rose Byrne, nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Academy Awards) as she navigates the daily, grinding reality of caring for her young child as serious illness reshapes every aspect of their lives, from medical appointments and disrupted routines to the emotional toll of uncertainty and constant vigilance.

The film refuses to frame care as redemptive, and instead shows how care, when imagined as an unlimited personal resource, becomes a source of depletion, grief and harm. Linda’s life revolves around her child’s needs — schedules dictated by medical systems, emotional energy consumed by anticipation and fear and moments of solitude repeatedly interrupted by responsibility — without any suggestion it’s a temporary, chosen or ultimately meaningful situation.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not a story about maternal devotion. It’s a movie about how illness and disability are folded into private family life and how mothers are positioned as the shock absorbers of systems unwilling to provide adequate structural support.

Even when doctors, therapists, institutions and procedures surround her, the film makes clear that the emotional and logistical labour of care ultimately collapses back onto Linda herself.

As in real life, it’s left to the mother to internalize and dismantle shame, to make every consequential decision in the absence of adequate support and then to absorb judgment for each of those decisions. Mothers are asked to account morally for outcomes shaped by systems they cannot control.

‘Privatization of care’

Within disability studies and feminist ethics, care has long been understood as a social and political arrangement shaped by power, gender and access to resources.

Political theorist Joan Tronto argues that care is systematically devalued when it’s treated as private, feminized and morally natural — something women are presumed to provide instinctively — rather than as labour that must be collectively organized, supported and fairly distributed across society.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes this devaluation visible in the way care is repeatedly pushed out of institutions and back onto Linda. In several scenes set within medical environments, professionals deliver information, outline procedures or ask Linda to make decisions, only to disappear once those moments conclude. This leaves her alone to manage the emotional aftermath, the logistical follow-through and the fear those decisions produce.

The systems of care remain present only as brief interventions, while the ongoing labour — monitoring her child’s symptoms, anticipating emergencies, soothing anxiety, reorganizing daily life — is treated as a natural extension of motherhood rather than as work that might require sustained support.

These scenes embody what Tronto describes as the privatization of care: institutions retain authority and expertise, but responsibility is quietly transferred to the individual caregiver, who is expected to absorb the costs without complaint.

Philosopher Eva Kittay extends this critique by focusing on dependency and the economic structures that rely on care while refusing to sustain those who perform it.

Kittay emphasizes that modern social and economic systems depend on vast amounts of unpaid or underpaid care work — much of it performed by women — while offering little material, emotional or social support in return.

Managing alone

In scenes where Linda juggles medical co-ordination alongside the ordinary and extraordinary demands of daily life, the film makes visible how care consumes every register of her attention.

She fields calls from doctors while continuing her own work as a therapist, absorbs the emotional crises of her patients even as she is barely holding herself together and navigates the instability of temporary housing after her roof collapses, forcing the family into a hotel.

Her husband is frequently away for work, leaving her to manage both the logistical and emotional labour of care alone, while the film also insists on the banal realities of parenting: her child is sick but her child is also simply a child, needing comfort, discipline, patience and play.

In one moment she is trying to get her own child to eat enough to remove her feeding tube; in another she is unexpectedly left responsible for a stranger’s baby, her capacity for care assumed and exploited without question. Care here is an uninterrupted state of readiness, a demand that stretches across professional, domestic and emotional life without pause.

Popular culture frequently relies on the figure of the “good” mother: selfless, patient and endlessly resilient. Disability narratives often reinforce this ideal by positioning caregiving as proof of moral worth.

Flipping the narrative

By declining to transform suffering into inspiration, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You challenges the expectation that caregiving should make someone better, stronger or more fulfilled. Care here does not ennoble; it depletes. Crucially, this depletion is not framed as personal failure, but as the predictable outcome of systems that rely on mothers to absorb care work without adequate social, economic or emotional support.

Many films use disability as a narrative device, positioning it as a challenge that generates growth or moral clarity in others.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, by contrast, represents a decisive step toward undoing this familiar storytelling structure. The child’s illness does not exist to transform the mother or to provide emotional payoff for the audience. Disability is neither a lesson nor a catalyst; it is part of the family’s reality, shaping daily life in ways that are mundane, exhausting and deeply consequential.

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Read more:
Women caregivers need more support to manage their responsibilities and well-being

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By resisting sentimentality and refusing easy resolution — and by centring a protagonist who is allowed to be abrasive, overwhelmed, selfish and at times difficult to like — If I Had Legs I’d Kick You offers a rare and necessary portrayal of caregiving under conditions of illness and disability.

The film does not promise healing or redemption. It insists on honesty about grief that lingers, care that depletes and the impossible expectations placed on those who are expected to hold everything together.

Billie Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What ‘If I had Legs I’d Kick You’ tells us about mothering and thankless sacrifice – https://theconversation.com/what-if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-tells-us-about-mothering-and-thankless-sacrifice-274074

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Michael Price, Adjunct professor, Department of Biology, Simon Fraser University

Every year, Pacific salmon return from the ocean to the rivers and streams where they were born. These migrations nourish ecosystems, sustain Indigenous cultures and support fisheries that people across Western Canada rely on. Yet something essential has quietly eroded: Canada’s efforts to count wild salmon.

That loss of basic information matters. It becomes especially important at a time when major industrial decisions affecting salmon watersheds are being made more quickly, and with less ecological information than in the past.

Twenty years ago, Canada adopted its Wild Salmon Policy (WSP), a landmark commitment to conserve the genetic and geographic diversity of wild Pacific salmon. At its core was a simple promise: to regularly assess the health of distinct salmon populations so declines could be detected early, and recovery action taken when needed.

Our recent analysis of publicly reported monitoring data shows that this foundation is weakening. Since the WSP was introduced, the number of spawning populations counted each year has declined by roughly one-third, driven largely by the loss of high-quality surveys.

We now lack sufficient publicly available data on nearly half of Canada’s Pacific salmon populations to assess whether they are healthy or at risk. Among those that can be assessed in British Columbia, around 70 per cent are in decline.

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Habitat loss and over-exploitation are leading to a decline in salmon populations

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Why monitoring matters

Counting salmon isn’t bureaucratic box-checking. Salmon are foundational to coastal ecosystems and communities, and spawner counts are one of the simplest and most reliable ways to assess population health.

These data inform researchers and fisheries managers whether populations are stable, declining or recovering, and they underpin difficult decisions: when fisheries must be closed to prevent further harm, or when sustainable openings can support food security and livelihoods.

Without consistent monitoring, managers are forced to make decisions with limited evidence. Warning signs can be missed, and fisheries or habitat degradation may continue while populations quietly decline.

And the timing couldn’t be worse. The erosion of monitoring is occurring just as pressures on salmon are intensifying.

Climate change is warming rivers, altering ocean food webs, increasing the frequency of floods and droughts and reshaping freshwater habitats across Western Canada. In a changing environment, monitoring is the only way to distinguish natural variability from sustained declines.

At the same time, Canada is moving to accelerate industrial development. Recent federal legislation allows faster approval of projects deemed to be in the “national interest.” This push for speed is occurring while federal capacity to monitor salmon ecosystems weakens.

While expediency may be appealing, it carries real environmental risks unless matched by corresponding investment in mitigation and monitoring. When development accelerates while monitoring declines, decisions are increasingly made without a clear picture of what is being put at risk — or how impacts will be detected and addressed once projects are under way.

Data collection needed

The decline in monitoring is not simply the result of shrinking budgets or unavoidable austerity. Over the past two decades, federal investments in other salmon-related programs — such as enhancement and aquaculture development — have consistently exceeded investments in policy targeting salmon conservation.

In 2021, the federal government committed a historic $647 million to salmon conservation through the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative. Yet the systematic rebuilding of monitoring programs — the basic data collection needed to assess population health — was not made a central funding priority.

The challenge is likely to intensify. Recent federal budgets have committed to significant cuts to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the department responsible for fisheries oversight and environmental monitoring. This would likely further constrain the capacity to rebuild monitoring programs.

In plain terms, Canada has not invested in the collection of information needed to know whether conservation efforts are actually working — or where action is most urgently required.

What rebuilding monitoring would look like

Reversing the decline in salmon monitoring is achievable, and relatively inexpensive compared to the costs of recovery once populations collapse.

First, the monitoring infrastructure and systems that allow governments and communities to track salmon populations must be treated as essential public infrastructure.

Second, coverage matters as much as precision. Monitoring more populations consistently, even with imperfect counts, often provides better insight than highly precise estimates at a few sites. Data gaps are far more damaging than moderate uncertainty.

Third, Indigenous-led and community-based monitoring offers a powerful opportunity to rebuild capacity. Many Indigenous nations have deep knowledge of salmon systems and strong stewardship responsibilities. Supporting monitoring partnerships, while respecting Indigenous data governance, can expand coverage, strengthen legitimacy and provide economic opportunities in local communities.

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Read more:
Learning from Indigenous knowledge holders on the state and future of wild Pacific salmon

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Finally, if governments choose to fast-track major projects, they must strengthen, not weaken, baseline ecological monitoring in affected watersheds. Speed should not come at the expense of understanding.

Canada has a clear framework for conserving wild salmon in the Wild Salmon Policy, but its effectiveness is undermined by low investment in basic monitoring. Without consistent and representative data, it becomes impossible to know what populations are in trouble, whether conservation efforts are working or where action is most urgently needed.

In effect, we are increasingly managing salmon in the dark — with stark consequences for ecosystems, fisheries and communities. Rebuilding broad, representative, monitoring programs is a foundational step that Canada can take to safeguard wild salmon in a time of rapid environmental and industrial change.

If we stop counting salmon, we should not be surprised when they disappear — quietly.

Michael Price is affiliated with SkeenaWild Conservation Trust as the Director of Science, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biology at Simon Fraser University.

Jonathan Moore is the principal investigator of the Salmon Watersheds Lab.

– ref. Canada is losing track of its wild salmon — just when we need that knowledge most – https://theconversation.com/canada-is-losing-track-of-its-wild-salmon-just-when-we-need-that-knowledge-most-273746

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Emily Impett, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto

For people who have been quietly struggling with doubts about their relationship, the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day can feel fraught. As Feb. 14 approaches, questions that were once easy to sidestep often become harder to ignore.

In a study that tracked romantic couples over a year, relationships were about 2.5 times more likely to end during the two weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day than during the fall or spring. When researchers accounted for relationship length, prior relationship history and gender, the odds of a breakup during this window were more than five times higher.

At first glance, this timing may seem strange. Why would couples break up just before a holiday devoted to love, connection and commitment?

Other findings from this study reveal that the increase in breakups appeared only among couples who were already struggling, not among those who were stable or getting stronger.

A psychological turning point

These findings suggest that Valentine’s Day functions less like a wrecking ball and more like a spotlight.

For couples who have been struggling for months, Valentine’s Day can bring those feelings into sharper focus, forcing people to confront questions they may have been postponing: Are we happy? Are we moving forward? Is this relationship something I want to celebrate?

Psychologists refer to moments like Valentine’s Day as temporal landmarks: points that divide time into a psychological before and after. They prompt people to take stock of their lives and make decisions they have been postponing. Romantic relationships are no exception.

Rather than creating doubt, these dates tend to accelerate decisions that were already unfolding, turning private uncertainty into a sense that change is overdue.

The pressure to perform

Not all temporal landmarks carry the same emotional weight, however. Valentine’s Day is an unusually ritualized and commercialized landmark. Consumer research shows that the holiday tends to evoke polarized reactions — people are far more likely to either love or loathe Valentine’s Day than to feel neutral about it.

In the weeks leading up to the holiday, advertising, store displays and social media amplify expectations about what counts as love: gifts, effort, public displays and visible commitment. Taking part in the ritual signals commitment and investment in a shared future; opting out can invite questions or disappointment.

In this sense, Valentine’s Day does not just invite reflection — it demands a performance.

This helps explain why breakups often happen before Valentine’s Day rather than after. Ending a relationship afterward can feel deceptive, especially if gifts were exchanged or plans were made. Many people would rather leave than perform romance they no longer feel, or accept gestures that imply a level of commitment they are unsure they can sustain.

That timing reflects a broader tendency to delay difficult decisions around holidays. Ending a relationship is emotionally uncomfortable at the best of times, and research shows people sometimes delay breakups to spare their partner pain. Holidays can intensify that hesitation.

In a nationally representative survey, 22 per cent of American adults said they ended relationships before Valentine’s Day because they did not want their partner to buy them gifts or spend money when they already knew the relationship was ending.

Uncertainty becomes impossible to ignore

The sense of being torn — wanting to avoid hurting a partner while also feeling unable to keep pretending — reflects a state psychologists call ambivalence.

Ambivalence is not indifference; it is the uncomfortable experience of holding competing motivations and emotions at the same time. Many people feel ambivalent long before a relationship ends, even in relationships that look stable from the outside. Research shows that this kind of internal conflict predicts lower satisfaction and greater instability over time.

Valentine’s Day intensifies ambivalence because it transforms private uncertainty into public signalling. Participating in the holiday sends a message that a relationship is intact and future-oriented. Dinner reservations, office flower deliveries and social media posts all carry symbolic weight.

Social comparison can add fuel to the fire. Valentine’s Day makes other people’s relationships unusually visible, often in idealized form. Couples appear everywhere — online and offline — celebrating love with carefully curated gestures. Decades of relationship research show that commitment is shaped not only by how satisfying a relationship is, but by how it compares to expectations and perceived alternatives.

When Valentine’s Day raises the bar for what love is supposed to look like, a relationship already marked by ambivalence can suddenly feel inadequate by contrast.

Not everyone experiences this pressure in the same way. Research shows that people who are uncomfortable with emotional closeness or public displays of romance often find Valentine’s Day especially stressful, which can amplify dissatisfaction and make withdrawal more likely.

Valentine’s Day rarely ends relationships on its own, of course. But it can make months of uncertainty suddenly very real, turning private doubts into decisions that feel urgent and unavoidable.

Emily Impett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. When Valentine’s Day forces a relationship reckoning – https://theconversation.com/when-valentines-day-forces-a-relationship-reckoning-274898