The beginning of the end for me and my fiancé happened over brunch in Bentonville, Arkansas. The restaurant, five minutes from the too-big house we’d recently moved into, sat beside a small airfield where hobby pilots landed their Cessnas and Walmart executives glided in on private jets. It had been four months since we’d traded our apartment in Washington, D.C., for a three-bedroom home, ballooning utility bills, and a lawn we didn’t know how to take care of.

My fiancé, let’s call him J., had been part of an online life- coaching program for two years. I watched it unfold in slow motion: the free PDF, the Instagram posts, the $1,000-per-month subscription. The first time I watched one of the coach’s videos, something cold coiled in my gut. His tone was calm, hypnotic. But nothing he sa

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