My roommates have a text thread that includes all three of us. They chat on it all day long, and it's driving me absolutely insane. We all live together and work at home, so I don't see the need to keep texting nonstop. I turned off notifications for the group text, but that doesn't mean the convo has stopped, and I'm annoyed seeing it lit up every time I look at my phone. (What's with this ridiculous need to communicate one's every thought?) I want to tell them they need to reel it in and to leave me out of it, but I also don't want to be rude.

--Stop, Already!

Shakespeare was Shakespeare in large part because there were no smartphones in Elizabethan England: "Now is the winter of our...triple poo emoji?"

I confess that I personally see cellphones as tiny instruments of death for writerfocus and leave mine on Do Not Disturb, an underappreciated wonder of the technological world. I try not to go all Judge Judy on those who live differently, but let's be honest: To be human is to get lots of exercise leaping to uncharitable conclusions about other humans.

Take a woman who called in to a radio show when I was being interviewed about my advice on cellphone manners. She compared people staring into their cellphones to the pod people from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and called it "antisocial" to be texting in public.

Like this woman, we often assume we know what's best for other people, especially when whatever that is presents a lovely frame for our own moral and intellectual superiority. But as I wrote in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," unless you're such an obliviously wandering phone zombie that it "causes me to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid running you down, it really isn't up to me to dictate whether you text your days away or spend them reading Good Books Approved by the Reviewing Staff of The New Yorker."

Also, texting in public isn't "antisocial." It's socializing with somebody who isn't in our immediate environment. And being social, whether in person or with someone miles away via a tiny wireless "window" in our palm, is something we crave.

That's probably because humans evolved to be a cooperative species, living in groups and working together. In this context, cooperation means sometimes putting aside our self-interest to act in the interest of others. Friendship and the emotional bonds that result suggest that our friends' interests have become in our self-interest, and this, in turn, suggests our friends can rely on us when the chips are down.

Human cooperation is a psychological adaptation, an evolved solution to recurring problems that impinged on survival and reproduction. Cooperation is basically, "United we stand; divided we fall" (and maybe get eaten by something with sharp fangs). Psychiatrist and evolutionary researcher Randolph Nesse explains that our emotions act as our survival and mating support staff, pushing us to behave in evolutionarily optimal ways. Feelgood emotions like joy, excitement, and love motivate us to keep doing what we're doing so we can keep those feelings coming. Feelbad emotions like depression and fear, and loneliness when we feel isolated, drive us to change what we're doing so we can stop feeling so crappy.

Accordingly, psychologist John Cacioppo, who researched loneliness, explains, "People may think of feeling lonely as a sad condition," but it's "not just sad but also dangerous." It's associated with substantial mental and physical health costs, including impaired reasoning and self-control, fragmented sleep, diminished immunity to disease, and increased risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. In contrast, "Satisfying social relations with others is the one demonstrable factor that systematically differentiates very happy people from unhappy people," Cacioppo explains. In other words, social connection feels good because it's a sort of insurance policy for our emotional and physical well-being that we evolved to maintain.

Chances are you haven't felt comfortable about making the (totally reasonable!) request to not be included in the roommate textathons because of your less-than-charitable feelings about the existence of these conversations (like that the roomies are "ridiculous," etc.). Maybe through your understanding the evolutionary benefits of social engagement and what they might get out of this emotionally, you can see your roommates in a kinder light and request accordingly: "I'd rather talk to you guys face-to-face..." As poet John Donne wrote, ask not for whom the group text tolls; ask that it stop tolling for you -- unless it's deeply urgent: "Your room is on fire. Where do we keep the fire extinguisher?" or if somebody just got photos of a mongoose dressed as Batman.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

My wonderful stepmom died last year, and my dad was debilitated by grief. I got him to go to a support group, which really seemed to help. He's been dating a woman he met there, and they've gotten serious. My brother says my dad wants to marry this woman. He's happy for our dad, but I'm disgusted. It's just wrong that he's with another woman so soon. My dad loved my stepmother and was a great husband, but he's now looking like a fraud because he's moved on so quickly.

--Distraught Daughter

It's not like your dad wore dark glasses to the funeral so he could cruise the pretty ladies in attendance without getting caught.

There are many misconceptions about how a person's "supposed" to feel after their loved one dies, and we tend to go all grief police on someone we think isn't grieving enough or for long enough.

I suspect these harsh views are a byproduct of one of the possible functions of grief. Evolutionary psychologist Bo Winegard and his colleagues point out that grief stops us from getting on with our lives after a loved one dies. This is costly, impinging on our survival, or at least keeping us from mating and passing on our genes. But because of this, grief can be a sort of tear-drenched, listless, gloom-shrouded character witness.

Sure, we could tell people we've got great character. But that's just blah, blah, blah, with nothing to back it up. However, because grief is costly -- emotionally, physically, and in forcing us to put our lives on pause -- it's seen as a more reliable signal than claims we make about ourselves. The Winegard team believes grief likely functions as a form of social advertising: evidence the grieving person is a "loyal, trustworthy," committed partner who forms deep attachments.

This might be why so many people eventually went so vicious on comedian Patton Oswalt. His wife died suddenly, and he was devastated, and he got a flood of sympathy from his fans. Eighteen months later, he remarried, and the public turned on him -- with ugly tweets like: "80,000 died from the flu last year and fat man Patton never mentioned it. Faker than his 'grief' for his dead ex wife."

My journalist friend, Leslie Gray Streeter, 49, gets really angry about these attacks on a surviving spouse: "It's always shocking how strangers would rather you be embalmed in their memory than happy." She writes "you" because she, unfortunately, has experience in this area, chronicled in "Black Widow," her "sad-funny" memoir about suddenly losing her husband five years into their marriage. She tweets about the social media-shaming of Oswalt, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and other widowed celebs: "It's not your business when celebrities you don't know remarry after being widowed. No it's not. I'm serious. Stop it. Not your business. ... Leave people alone."

This is advice we should apply beyond the celebrisphere. Research by psychologist Camille Wortman debunks many common myths about how grief "should" work: for example, the incorrect expectations "that depression is inevitable following loss; that distress is necessary, and failure to experience it is indicative of pathology." And then there's the myth you might be clinging to: the notion that real love leads to grief that is endlessly debilitating.

It is -- for a very small percentage of people. But grief researcher George Bonanno suspects we're prone to believe unending grief is the norm in part because much of what's written about grief is by grief therapists. They are "apt to see only those bereaved people" who are unable to recover without professional help. However, Bonanno explains, for most grieving people, resilience -- the ability to recover (and sometimes to recover relatively quickly) and get on with life -- is the norm. Bonanno urges us not to assume that this means they had "either superficial or conflicted relationships with the persons they lost."

Bonanno explains that bereaved people who find peace seem to put their loss into some sort of perspective. He gives the example of a woman who married her high school sweetheart and had two children and a full life with him. Her world shattered when her husband died abruptly, but she "found meaning and vigor and even joy in the idea she was going to make it."

Consider whether the message you want to send to your dad is, "Hey! Your life was supposed to stop when my stepmom's did," effectively punishing him for healthy coping. Wortman writes: "The major coping task faced by the bereaved is to reconcile themselves to a situation that cannot be changed and find a way to carry on with their own lives." As Patton Oswalt explained about why he remarried 18 months after losing his wife: "It just felt like worlds were connecting and everything was okay again."

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I started seeing a guy right before quarantine. In fact, we've broken quarantine a lot to be together at his place. I really like him, but I'm worried because our entire relationship has taken place indoors (watching movies, playing video games, sex). We have no experience together in real life, and maybe I don't know the real him. What if we go to dinner and he's rude to the wait staff? How can I figure out what kind of person he is when we can't go to places where we engage with other people?

--Worried

You see who people are when they're tested. That's why fiction is filled with knights going off on a decades-long perilous quest for the Holy Grail as opposed to briefly looking behind the couch for the Apple TV remote.

However, you don't have to wait till restaurants reopen to get a sense of whether this dude's a good guy or some Mr. Complainypants McMantoddler. And frankly, restaurant encounters are a pretty low bar for revealing character. Most people trying to make a good impression (and especially sociopathic douchesicles) know to contain themselves, genteelly waving their server over rather than yelling across the restaurant, "Yo, waitslave!"

Because we live in Modernville, our lives are physically easier than at any other time in human history. We go to the gym to get the physical workout we previously would've gotten milking the cows and plowing the fields. Hard times that come from both physically and emotionally difficult situations are the gym where character is made and shows itself, where you see whether a person is fragile or "antifragile." "Antifragile" is a term by risk researcher and former derivatives trader Nassim Taleb to describe how stress and conflict are sources of improvement for living things, strengthening them and making them more able to cope with difficult and unpredictable situations.

In other words, the quarantine can be a good thing for character investigation. In lieu of dinner dates, you can schedule challenging one-on-one activities that show you what he's made of. Camping and hiking are two sure character exposers. Or, if you prefer your challenges less wilderness-oriented, you could work together to assemble IKEA furniture. Consider yourself on the path to happily ever after if you don't end up with three mysterious pieces of hardware left and/or murder-suicide each other with an Allen wrench.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I seem to need more excitement than most people. After eight months together, my boyfriend and I have fallen into a routine. Simply scheduling regular date nights seems unlikely to improve things. I'm 35, not 5, and I realize an ongoing relationship won't be as exciting as when it was new, but I'm worried my boredom is a sign I don't really love him. (And I'm pretty sure I do.)

--Worried Woman

Unfortunately, love is not a cure for boredom, so there's a point in a relationship when it's tempting to trade a lifetime with Prince Charming for three hours with Prince Random Stranger.

With love and stability comes predictability, the slow, bleak death of excitement. This is a bummer for anyone in a relationship, but especially hard if you "need more excitement than most people." That suggests you are a high scorer in a personality trait psychologist Marvin Zuckerman termed "sensation seeking." It plays out in a jonesing for novel, varied, and intense experiences "and the willingness to take risks for the sake of such experience" (such as risking a relationship for some strange).

Recognizing that you have this craving could help you meet it in less romantically destructive ways. You might feed the beast on your own by taking up adrenaline-amping activities like hang gliding or zip lining, or if those are a little out of geographic or budgetary range, jogging through dark alleys in bad parts of town.

To bring more novelty and surprise to your relationship, trade weekly date nights for weekly mystery date nights. Take turns planning them, and keep what you're planning a secret from the other (save for any necessary information about wardrobe, etc.). Because novelty and surprise are the baby mamas of excitement, even an unexpected date eating hot dogs together on a bench while watching the sun set over a pretty body of water is likely to check the boxes.

But don't stop at suggesting mystery date nights. Tell your boyfriend why: because you have quite the appetite for excitement. He can't provide what he hasn't been told you need, and this breeds resentment. You grow resentful over your unmet needs, and then he grows resentful over your resentment. And because it's called "making love," not "confirming hate," any excitement you two had about sex (with each other) follows general excitement out the door, and "that thing" you do in bed becomes listening through the walls to the neighbors actually having sex.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I'm meeting my girlfriend's parents for the first time (for dinner at their house), and I'm absolutely terrified. Is there a way to win them over? Should I just compliment the hell out of their daughter? She's the first woman I've seriously thought about marrying, so I really want her parents to like me.

--The Boyfriend

Your "blowing smoke" in, um, a sun-free direction -- like by "complimenting the hell out of" your girlfriend to her parents - is likely to be about as well-received as trying to shove a whole hookah lounge up there.

Luckily, there's a guide for how to win over the girlfriend's parents, and it's an anthropology textbook: specifically, the section on what biological anthropologist Robert Trivers terms "parent-offspring conflict." Parents want the best for their kids, but their definition of "best" and their kids' definition tend to part company -- along the lines of parents' genetic self-interest. Any investment by a parent in one of their kids (increasing that kid's chances to survive and mate) diminishes the parent's ability to invest in their other kids or in their own mating efforts to have future offspring to pass on their genes.

Accordingly, if a woman's looking for a man for herself, research by evolutionary social psychologist Shelli L. Dubbs suggests she's likely to favor "traits that suggest genetic quality," like being physically attractive. However, if the woman's assessing a man for her daughter, she (along with her husband) will likely prioritize "characteristics that suggest high parental investment." In short, parents are wondering about the guy dating their daughter: "Hey, buster, you gonna stick around and pay the mortgage, or will we have to cover it because your paycheck keeps getting tangled up in strippers' G-strings?"

Even if you don't have the greatest job now, potential matters. If you're hardworking and have solid plans for the future, and if there's a natural point in conversation to reflect that, go for it. In general, let the things you say tell them you're a stable dude who cares about their daughter and values the person she is. That said, avoid laying it on too thick, because talk is cheap and the harder you seem to be working to be liked, the less likeable you'll be. Ultimately, go with F. Scott Fitzgerald's maxim, "Action is character." Be kind, be considerate, be loving, and don't light your farts on fire.

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

My boyfriend broke up with me recently. He wants to be friends, and I don't want to reject his friendship, but it's really painful when we hang out. How do I deal with the attraction I still have for him and the frustration and pain that he doesn't want more?

--Brokenhearted Gay Boy

It's hard to accept that it's over when your partner's breakup M.O. is essentially, "All good things must come to a middle."

Unfortunately, the emotional bond you have with this guy won't conveniently disintegrate into a small pile of ash. Psychiatrist John Bowlby explains that when somebody dies (or your relationship with them does), you need to "reorganize" your "inner life accordingly" so when you require comfort, attention, or support, you no longer automatically turn toward your former partner to get it.

That's why one of the healthier models for recovering from a painful breakup comes out of Oxford. No, not their psych department -- the dictionary, under the definition for "dumping": to "put down or abandon (something) hurriedly in order to make an escape." In contrast, contact with one's former partner after a breakup tends to slow a person's emotional recovery, reactivating or amplifying the "sadness, anger, or pining that had slowly dissipated since the initial separation," according to research by clinical psychologists David Sbarra and Robert Emery. In fact, though when we miss a person, we long to be around them, Sbarra and Emery find that seeing or even just talking with the ex you're trying to get over is likely to lead to "significantly more love and sadness, not less."

Your ex is doing what's good for him alone, perhaps because he's a horrible person or perhaps because you haven't told him how much you're hurting or how painful it is to be around him. Tell him what you need, whether it's no contact for a period of time (like three months or six months) or whether the no-contact period that works for you is "forever."

Don't hold back on doing what's best for your day-to-day healing and in the longterm. That's your job as a person -- not hanging out at your ex's place and letting him use you for everything but sex: "Bro, do me a favor and get on all fours, but keep your back straight so the drinks won't spill. It's just for a few days, until my new coffee table comes."

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.

I've been married for two years to a woman whose sister is extremely manipulative. She finds reasons to touch me inappropriately -- for example, "Your hair is so pretty. I have to pet it." She puts an arm around my shoulders or comes toward me and puts both hands around my neck. This past weekend, I was seated on the couch, and she came up behind me, grabbed me, kissed me as far down my neck as she could, and swiftly left. All of this creeps me out, but because she always does this when other relatives are around, and I'm new to the family, I don't feel I can snap at her or push her away. My wife alternates between being intimidated by her sister and feeling she has to protect her, and she refuses to say anything to her. She now seems to blame me for being offended! Do I keep trying to get through to my wife? Demand my sister-in-law explain her actions? Talk to her husband? Threaten to go to the police?

--Repulsed

Family gatherings should not be indistinguishable from foreplay.

It sounds like you're being visited by the Dark Triad, which, sadly, is not an after-school club for young Batman and his friends. It's a set of three separate but overlapping malevolent personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, which make for social and personal relationships that would more accurately be called "manipulationships."

Narcissism is reflected by egotism, a lack of empathy, and "grandiosity" (essentially a superiority complex -- certainty of one's greatness compared with the rest of us human worms slithering around).

Machiavellianism was named for the 16th-century Italian philosopher/political advisor Niccolo Machiavelli, who was basically "the tyrant whisperer" -- if you take his book, "The Prince," seriously (and not, as some have suggested, as a work of satire). It pretty much advises, "Hey, Royals, do what you need to do, no matter how rotten, to stay in power!" The personality trait named for him is characterized by manipulativeness, callousness, self-interest, and what Dark Triad researcher Monica Koehn describes as "a ruthless lack of morality."

Finally, there's psychopathy, which shows itself in antisocial behavior, selfishness, impulsivity, and a lack of remorse. And not surprisingly, there's a fourth trait some researchers have suggested adding to the Triad: "everyday sadism," reflected in getting pleasure out of harming others.

Dark Triad traits lead to an aggressive, exploitative way of interacting with others, like that of your toxic, sexually abusive sister-in-law. Koehn observes, "All three traits are associated with the propensity to engage in repeated sexual advances also known as 'sexual harassment' and may have played a role in some of the noteworthy, alleged cases of sexual harassment discussed in the media."

Your sister-in-law is a skilled psychological puppetmaster who weaponizes others' emotions to get away with controlling and abusing them. In this case, your wife's fears of displeasing her sister, and her companion desire to protect her, as well as your unsteadiness about your place in the family allow your sister-in-law to turn any family gathering into the Wild Touchyfeely West.

Unfortunately, personality doesn't come in a cartridge we can pull out and replace with another like in a gaming console. Chances are the only way to change Peppermint SocioPatty's behavior is to change your own -- while being mindful of what sneaky, reality-distorting saboteurs Dark Triad types can be.

In short, you need to change your boundaries from silent to spoken -- but without ever going the slightest bit angry or ugly. Also vitally important is talking only about your feelings and avoiding anything that sounds even the tiniest bit accusatory. (Go angry, ugly, and/or accusatory and she will run with it -- transforming herself into the poor, persecuted waif-in-law abused by the scary, unstable, brute brother-in-law.)

The next time she touches you, tell her this: "Just a little thing: I don't feel comfortable being touched in caressing ways by anyone who is not my wife." In saying it this way -- talking about your feelings -- you are not accusing her of anything; you're simply voicing an observation about the inner you.

If she starts to squawk, if she tries to bait you into anger, or if she just tries to engage in a discussion, don't bite. It's not up for discussion (and you will lose to her every time, anyway). Calmly repeat your feelings line and walk away. You'll show that you make a poor choice of victim, and family gatherings should stop doubling as a sexual grazing ground for the free-range sociopath-in-law. "Hospitality" is supposed to mean making your guests feel at home, not letting them feel you up at home. (Welcome to "Brady Bunch: SVU"!)

For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.