The show doesn’t just tell you that something was off—it shows you the cause and effect. He said this. They felt that. Here’s why. It’s exaggerated, of course. It’s a sitcom. But underneath the humor, there’s a kind of clarity that’s hard to find in real life.

Lying awake in the dark, I realized I wasn’t thinking about dating or marriage so much as adaptation. About what happens when a species wakes up in an environment it didn’t evolve for and begins improvising in real time.