We have good friends who are headed for divorce, because one of them expressed that desire and couldn't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so to speak. Now his life is unraveling and his family is falling apart.

My wife and I talk about this all the time. In unshackling ourselves from oppressive cultural expectations, we removed the mechanism that guided people into lives that were more or less fulfilling, most of the time, for most people.

I hadn't heard about the empathy research, but it certainly tracks. I often think about the related issue of intolerance. When we valued family, we not only tolerated but loved people who were very different from us. Now people just excommunicate relatives they disagree with.

And I'm not just sitting up on my cloud of judgement handing down lessons to all the sinners. I also take the route of avoiding family members who I don't really like, but I at least know that in a better society we'd figure out how to be closer.