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Greg Sullivan
March 03, 2026
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“It’s not perfect.”
Many parents are taught or conditioned to fear their children’s teenage years. It’s the season of life when your sweet angel turns into a moody rebel with an attitude problem, or so say the parents who came before us and lived to tell the tale.
Mom Jacqueline Skirvin was no different. For years, she had taken pride in having a close, loving, healthy relationship with her daughter, Preslea. But other parents in her orbit kept warning her that would all change. “Just wait,” they would say.
In a recent Instagram post, Skirvin shared the hard-fought results of all that waiting. She revealed five things that truly surprised her when those teenage years finally came.
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Sometimes the restaurant choices really do say it all.
She wasn’t hard to please. She ate almost everything, loved most cuisines, and was perfectly comfortable sitting across from someone who ordered a drink with dinner. She had exactly two requests for a second date: somewhere that served food she could eat, and somewhere that wasn’t a bar. That’s it.
He picked two bars.
The story, shared in late January 2026 by Reddit user u/EquivalentOk6093, has been circulating widely because so many people recognize exactly what happened here. The 28-year-old woman had met a 38-year-old man through a dating app. Their first date went well enough, over coffee, and when they started planning a follow-up dinner, he offered to handle the reservations. She told him what he needed to know: she avoided red meat for health reasons, and she was a recovering alcoholic with nearly two years of sobriety. She wouldn’t be drinking. She was clear that she didn’t mind if he ordered something, but alcohol wasn’t on the table for her.
Even the smallest effort can create waves of change. ❤️
“I was gonna tell you something…”
Torchy Swinson, a self-described great-grandmother of seven, has figured out a formula for imparting wisdom in both a heartfelt and hilarious way. In fact, her effortless ability to chat with her social media audience has garnered her over one million followers on TikTok alone.
Her hook is this: she begins each clip with the line, “I was gonna tell you something,” which sounds like the elderly loved ones so many of us personally know. The idea is that, perhaps, she thought of something to say, forgot it, and then remembered again. This is followed by her thoughts on life or just a story about her day.
In one viral video (with over 1.7 million views and nearly 63,000 likes), she simply talks about something she learned in school. Her Southern accent in full force, she says, “I was gonna tell you something. Y’all I’m so glad that I learned about parallelograms instead of taxes when I went to school. Cuz it comes in so handy, this parallelogram season.” She then adorably rolls her eyes and shakes her head.
Psychologists say certain “curiosity styles” could be linked to mental health issues.
Have you ever gone down an Internet rabbit hole? You start researching one thing, then two hours later, find yourself reading about something entirely different? For example, you could have begun with quantum physics only to somehow find yourself engrossed in an e-book about medieval falconry.
Philosopher Perry Zurn and neuroscientist Dani S. Bassett found that people have different approaches to information seeking. Their research shows that these patterns aren’t random, but represent distinct styles of curiosity. This is how we build knowledge, connect ideas, and experience the world.
After analyzing the browsing habits of nearly 500,000 Wikipedia users across 50 countries, Zurn and Bassett identified three archetypal curiosity styles: the Hunter, the Busybody, and the Dancer.