The Crisis of Modern Marriage Is Not Communication—It’s Consecration
Friday, April 24, 2026. This is for Marly and Ben.
Why the Deepest Part of Love Was Never Psychological Alone
The crisis in many modern marriages is not primarily a failure of communication.
It is a failure of consecration.
There. We might as well begin with the impolite thought.
Contemporary relationship culture prefers problems that can be solved with a worksheet.
Communication protocol. Repair script. Attachment reframe. Shared Google calendar.
Useful things. Bless them.
But I have come to suspect that many couples do not suffer because they have lost techniques. They suffer because reverence has quietly drained from the bond.
Technique can organize intimacy. It cannot sanctify it.
There is a difference. And human beings, sooner or later, begin to feel it.
For years I have thought some of what couples call disconnection is not merely emotional estrangement.
It is sacred regard gone dim.
Only recently has culture begun, haltingly and in odd costumes, to catch up.
We Have Over-Psychologized Marriage
We now speak about marriage in a vocabulary so therapeutically advanced it occasionally sounds like two graduate seminars trying to flirt.
We process. We regulate. We identify bids. We rupture and repair.
Useful, in large part.
Because one begins to notice something peculiar. The more expertly some couples can discuss relational process, the more spiritually thin the marriage can feel.
Everything works. But nothing glows.
That is not always a communication problem. It may be a meaning problem.
Modern marriage became overburdened with self-actualization. It must be best friendship, erotic sanctuary, trauma repair lab, co-parenting alliance, and personal growth engine. No wonder it looks so tired.
A sacred frame does something different. It shifts emphasis from self-expression toward stewardship.
And oddly enough, that can feel like a profound relief.
The Sacred and the Profane Did Not Vanish Because We Got Couples Therapy
Long before Instagram therapists discovered nervous systems, Émile Durkheim proposed that social life rests on a distinction between what is sacred and what is ordinary.
Things held sacred are set apart. Protected. Handled carefully.
That may sound abstract. It is not.
I sometimes think marriages weaken when they migrate entirely into the profane world of logistics, utility, and negotiation.
Who forgot groceries. Who unloaded the dishwasher incorrectly. Who used the wrong tone while discussing mulch.
Mulch has ended more afternoons than adultery.
Once a relationship becomes only administrative, admiration often begins to die. And where admiration dies, indifference rehearses.
Admiration Is Not a Feeling
Admiration is not spontaneous luck. It is a discipline.
Perhaps even a sacred discipline.
To admire a long-term partner is to refuse overfamiliarity’s flattening effect. To keep seeing depth where sheer habit tries to produce boredom.
Research from John Gottman points toward the protective value of fondness and admiration. But I would push farther.
Admiration is sacred regard operationalized.
It is how reverence becomes behavior.
And marriages often do not collapse because love vanished. They collapse because admiration eroded under the acid rain of criticism, interpretive trespassing, and casual diminishment.
Indifference is often reverence withdrawn.
What Researchers Mean by Sanctification
Here the social science gets unexpectedly beautiful.
Psychologists Annette Mahoney and Kenneth Pargament developed the concept of sanctification of marriage—perceiving the bond as imbued with transcendent significance.
Not merely important. Sacred.
And yes, this has been studied.
Higher sanctification has been associated, in various studies, with:
stronger commitment.
greater willingness to sacrifice.
more collaborative conflict processes.
greater resilience under stress.
lower tolerance for degrading behaviors.
The mechanism may not be religion itself. It may be reverence.
Life partners behave differently toward what they hold sacred.
Life partners whisper in cathedrals.
Love Needs Awe, Not Only Safety
Attachment theory gave us something indispensable. Safety.
But safety may not exhaust love.
Love also appears to need awe. I’ve been discussing the importance of awe on this blog for awhile now.
Psychologist Dacher Keltner’s work on awe suggests experiences of wonder can foster humility, prosociality, and felt connectedness.
That ought to interest anyone who works with couples.
Sometimes it is shared silence watching dawn after a hard season. Sometimes it is grief borne together. Sometimes it is laughing so hard over burned lasagna the fight dissolves.
That too can feel numinous.
And desire often grows where awe survives.
Eros Was Once Treated as Sacred Knowledge
This is where modern discourse often becomes strangely flat.
Sex gets discussed as technique, novelty, communication.
Important.
But historically eros was also associated with mystery. With restraint. With symbolic depth.
I sometimes wonder whether part of long-term erotic deadening comes not from insufficient novelty but from depletion of reverence.
Nothing remains protected from banality.
One cannot continually instrumentalize eros and expect symbolic fire.
The sacred is not the enemy of erotic life. It may be one condition of its survival.
Ritual Is the Architecture of Sacred Love
Sacredness without form evaporates.
This is where ritual enters.
Barbara Fiese’s work on family rituals, and broader research on synchrony and coordinated action, suggest repeated forms can deepen cohesion and trust.
In plain English: Shared practices help hold love when feelings wobble.
That should not be surprising.
Possible liturgies of ordinary marriage:
Morning coffee before devices.
A weekly technology Sabbath.
Ritual apologies after rupture.
Shared gratitude before sleep.
Walking after conflict until physiology settles.
Seasonal renewal of vows or intentions.
These may look small. They are not.
Ritual stores meaning. Structure matters.
What Benedict Might Teach Married People
Now for my favorite heresy.
That monks may know things marriage experts forgot.
Consider Benedictine disciplines:
Stability. — remain when impulse romanticizes escape.
Humility. — not humiliation, but accurate scale.
Confession.— antidote to defensiveness.
Hospitality.— treat the beloved as guest, not possession.
Rules and Boundaries of life.— shared forms that protect what mood cannot.
You could build a marriage model from this.
I may.
The point is not nostalgia for monasteries. The point is disciplined forms sometimes protect what spontaneity alone cannot.
That is true in prayer. It may also be true in love.
Romantic Indifference as Deconsecration
I have written before that relationships often end less in conflict than in attention migration.
I would now say it more sharply.
Romantic indifference is often deconsecration.
Not dramatic betrayal.
Slow profanation.
Interruptions. Dismissals. Withheld admiration. Treating a singular person as ordinary furniture.
And what is sacred must not be handled as ordinary.
That is not theology. That is relational ethics.
Why the Sacred Seems to Be Returning
I think American culture is belatedly recognizing something older.
Life partners are exhausted by optimization. Exhausted by irony. Exhausted by life conducted entirely at a procedural altitude.
And so words begin returning. Ritual. Covenant. Reverence. Sacred.
Not because everyone got religious. But rather because disenchantment is so tiring.
The sacred often returns when technique reaches its limits.
We may be there already.
Final Thoughts
For years we treated marriage as negotiation between autonomous selves.
Then wondered why something so carefully managed could feel spiritually thin.
I have come to believe some of what couples call disconnection is grief for a missing sacredness they do not quite know how to name.
And if culture now seems to be inching back toward reverence, I do not take that as fashion.
Because long before people spoke of the sacred returning to marriage, some of us suspected it had never really left.
We had simply forgotten how to see it.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Mahoney, A., Pargament, K. I., Jewell, T., Swank, A., Scott, E., Emery, E., & Rye, M. (1999). Marriage and the spiritual realm: The role of sanctification in marital functioning. Journal of Family Psychology, 13(3), 321–338.
Mahoney, A. (2010). Religion in families, 1999–2009: A relational spirituality framework. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(4), 805–827.
Pargament, K. I., & Mahoney, A. (2005). Sacred matters: Sanctification as a vital topic for the psychology of religion. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 15(3), 179–198.
Fiese, B. H., & Tomcho, T. J. (2001). Finding meaning in family rituals. Journal of Family Psychology, 15(4), 703–716.