What We Worship Now: Marriage, Meaning, and the New Economics of Attention
Monday, June 1, 2026. 8:07 am. This is for my 8:30.
A few months ago a client was sitting in an airport watching a young couple wait for a delayed flight.
They looked happy enough.
No visible conflict.
No obvious tension.
No signs of distress.
For nearly forty minutes neither spoke.
The man watched sports highlights.
The woman scrolled through videos.
Occasionally one showed the other something amusing.
A brief smile.
A nod.
Then both disappeared back into their respective worlds.
He said he remembered thinking that previous generations might have called this boredom.
Today it barely registers.
It has become one of the defining images of modern intimacy.
Two partners.
Two screens.
Two realities.
One silence.
The scene stayed with me because it was so ordinary.
Not tragic.
Not dramatic.
Not unusual.
The important cultural shifts rarely announce themselves. They arrive quietly. Then one day you realize everybody has been living inside them for years.
Increasingly, I suspect many modern couples are not having communication problems.
They are having attention problems.
That sounds less romantic.
It may also be more accurate.
Because attention has become one of the most valuable resources in modern life.
Everyone wants it.
Employers want it.
Advertisers want it.
Politicians want it.
Social media platforms want it.
News organizations want it.
Streaming services want it.
Artificial intelligence wants it.
The internet, in general, would very much like your attention.
The curious thing is that marriage runs on exactly the same resource.
Not love.
Not communication.
Not compatibility.
Attention.
Love may be the flower.
Attention is the soil.
Without it, very little grows.
The Feeling of Being Noticed
Most relationship advice focuses on communication.
Communication matters.
But I increasingly wonder whether communication is often downstream from something else.
Attention.
You ask questions about things that interest you.
You remain curious about things that matter to you.
You notice details about things that hold your attention.
The reverse is equally true.
What becomes psychologically invisible eventually becomes difficult to understand.
This may be one reason so many partners describe feeling lonely while technically remaining connected.
The relationship still exists.
The shared calendar still exists.
The routines still exist.
The obligations still exist.
The infrastructure remains intact.
Something else is missing.
Attention.
The feeling of being important enough to occupy another person's mind.
That feeling may be one of the hidden pleasures of love.
Not simply being loved.
Being noticed.
Being remembered.
Being considered.
Being studied.
Being psychologically alive inside another person's consciousness.
A wife tells her husband about a difficult conversation she had that afternoon.
He nods.
He says all the right things.
An hour later she realizes he cannot remember the conversation.
Not because he is cruel.
Not because he does not care.
Because he was only partially there.
Most modern relationships contain large amounts of partial attention.
It has become so common that many couples barely notice it.
Which does not mean it has no effect.
When partners say, "I don't feel connected anymore," I often suspect this is what they mean.
Not:
"You don't love me."
But:
"You don't notice me."
Those are different complaints.
Though they are closer relatives than most people realize.
The Internet Is Designed to Be Interesting
Watch newlyweds.
They become amateur anthropologists of one another.
Every preference matters.
Every story matters.
Every opinion matters.
Every childhood memory matters.
The partner becomes endlessly interesting.
Then familiarity arrives.
The partner becomes known.
Or appears to become known.
Meanwhile the internet never runs out of fascinating strangers.
The next article is interesting.
The next video is interesting.
The next controversy is interesting.
The next podcast is interesting.
The next notification is interesting.
The next stranger is interesting.
The internet is designed to be interesting.
Marriage is designed to become familiar.
This seems important.
One system is built around novelty.
The other is built around continuity.
One system continuously introduces new stimuli.
The other asks us to rediscover significance in what is already familiar.
Those are very different psychological tasks.
The first comes naturally.
The second requires intention.
A husband can tell you the names of five podcast hosts.
A wife can summarize the lives of three influencers.
Both struggle to remember what the other was worried about on Tuesday.
This seems important too.
The Algorithm at the Breakfast Table
Historically marriages had predictable third parties.
Children.
Work.
Money.
Extended family.
Religion.
The modern marriage contains something stranger.
Algorithms.
An algorithm enters the relationship before breakfast.
It shapes mood.
Expectation.
Comparison.
Admiration.
Desire.
Without introducing itself.
Imagine explaining this to a couple in 1965.
Invisible systems would someday spend hours influencing what husbands and wives noticed, feared, valued, envied, and desired.
It would have sounded absurd.
Now it barely registers.
A husband wakes up and consumes one stream of information.
A wife wakes up and consumes another.
Both emerge emotionally altered.
Then they attempt to communicate.
The remarkable thing is not that communication sometimes fails.
The remarkable thing is that it succeeds as often as it does.
Parallel Realities
One of the stranger developments of modern marriage is that couples increasingly inhabit different realities.
Not merely different opinions.
Different realities.
Different podcasts.
Different feeds.
Different experts.
Different explanations.
Different fears.
Different aspirations.
A husband may spend years inside one information ecosystem.
A wife may spend years inside another.
Both become fluent in different languages of meaning.
Both begin organizing their understanding of the world around different assumptions.
They sleep in the same bed while inhabiting different narratives.
This creates a distinctly modern loneliness.
Not the loneliness of being alone.
The loneliness of being unknown.
The feeling that your partner increasingly lives somewhere you cannot quite reach.
Watch a modern couple in an airport.
Twenty years ago they might have spoken.
Ten years ago they might have argued.
Today they often sit together while each disappears into a separate algorithm.
Physically adjacent.
Psychologically elsewhere.
The image is so common that it barely registers.
Yet it may become one of the defining images of modern intimacy.
Two partners.
Two screens.
Two realities.
One silence.
The Strange Hunger
One of the stranger developments of the last decade is that Americans seem to have become simultaneously more informed and more bewildered.
Never have so many had access to so much information about how to live.
There are experts for sleep.
Experts for nutrition.
Experts for parenting.
Experts for happiness.
Experts for relationships.
Experts for spirituality.
Entire industries now exist to explain life.
Yet a peculiar dissatisfaction hums underneath much of modern culture.
You can hear it in conversations about loneliness.
You can hear it in conversations about religion.
You can hear it in conversations about parenting.
You can hear it in conversations about marriage.
The language changes.
The underlying feeling often does not.
Folks frequently sound less as though they are searching for answers than searching for importance.
As though the real question is not:
"How should I live?"
But:
"What deserves my attention?"
That is a different question.
And perhaps a deeper one.
A generation ago many Americans worried about having too few choices.
Today many seem exhausted by having too many.
Too many voices.
Too many explanations.
Too many identities.
Too many narratives.
Too many things demanding attention.
The result is not always freedom.
Sometimes it feels more like drift.
We have become very good at encountering things.
Less good at staying with them.
Religion.
Loneliness.
Parenting.
Marriage.
The renewed fascination with ritual.
The search for community.
The hunger for meaning.
These appear to be separate stories.
Increasingly they look like the same story.
What We Worship Now
The word sacred makes modern people nervous.
It sounds theological.
Ancient.
Slightly embarrassing.
Yet every culture has always possessed sacred objects.
Sacred stories.
Sacred obligations.
Sacred places.
Sacred identities.
The only thing that changes is where attention gets directed.
Because attention is how significance is manufactured.
Whatever receives sustained attention gradually becomes meaningful.
Whatever becomes meaningful gradually becomes valuable.
Whatever becomes valuable eventually becomes sacred.
Most people do not consciously decide what is sacred.
They discover it by observing their attention.
What do you return to repeatedly?
What occupies your thoughts?
What shapes your mood?
What receives your best energy?
Those things are usually closer to the center of your life than the things you merely claim to value.
Attention is not merely something we give.
Attention is also something that shapes us.
The things we repeatedly notice begin organizing our inner lives.
The things we repeatedly return to begin constructing our identity.
Human beings are strangely porous creatures.
We become what we behold.
Spend years immersed in outrage and outrage begins to feel normal.
Spend years immersed in status and status begins to feel important.
Spend years immersed in fear and fear begins to feel reasonable.
Spend years attending to another person's inner life and something else emerges.
Understanding.
Compassion.
Intimacy.
The sacred is not merely what we believe.
It is what repeatedly arrests our attention.
What causes us to stop.
To notice.
To care.
To return.
The longer I look at modern life, the less convinced I become that we are experiencing a crisis of information.
We are drowning in information.
What we appear to be experiencing is a crisis of significance.
A crisis of deciding what deserves sustained regard.
Perhaps even a crisis of contemplation.
Many modern folks are not suffering from a lack of stimulation.
They are suffering from a lack of attention deep enough to become meaningful and salient.
Marriage as a Sacred Practice
A marriage is one of humanity's oldest attempts to make another person significant.
Not perfect.
Significant.
Worth returning to.
Worth studying.
Worth prioritizing.
Worth noticing.
There is something quietly sacred about deciding that one particular human being deserves repeated attention despite the existence of billions of alternatives.
That sentence sounds almost quaint.
Which may be one reason it matters.
The attention economy has introduced a peculiar challenge.
The competition is no longer another person.
It is everything.
Everything is available.
Everything is interesting.
Everything is asking for attention.
The question becomes whether anything can remain important under those conditions.
Or perhaps whether importance itself requires limits.
A marriage survives because two people repeatedly decide that another human being deserves sustained attention in a world that offers endless alternatives.
Which sounds simple until you remember that the rest of the world now fits inside a phone.
The Small Transfers
Relationships rarely change all at once.
Attention leaves in increments.
A glance.
A question not asked.
A story half-heard.
A curiosity postponed.
A moment of distraction.
Then another.
Then another.
Most partners do not notice the transfer while it is happening.
There is no dramatic announcement.
No visible rupture.
A husband begins knowing more about the lives of podcast hosts than the inner life of his wife.
A wife becomes more familiar with the daily routines of strangers online than the private worries of her husband.
Neither intended this.
Neither chose it.
Yet attention has a direction whether we acknowledge it or not.
And over time attention behaves much like water.
It reshapes whatever it repeatedly touches.
This may be one reason so many partners struggle to identify exactly when disconnection began.
Nothing happened.
At least nothing obvious.
There was no betrayal.
No crisis.
No single conversation that changed everything.
There were simply thousands of small transfers.
A little attention here.
A little curiosity there.
A little fascination redirected elsewhere.
Until one day the relationship feels different.
Not broken.
Just less alive.
And nobody can quite remember when the change occurred.
The Quiet Disappearance
Most partners do not want to be adored.
They do not expect constant fascination.
They do not require endless romance.
What many seem to want is something simpler.
Evidence that they still exist in the mind of the person they love.
Evidence that their stories are still being followed.
That their worries are still being tracked.
That their joys are still being noticed.
That they remain psychologically alive inside another person's consciousness.
This may be one reason attention feels so emotionally important.
Attention is how significance is communicated.
Attention is how importance is demonstrated.
Attention is how love becomes visible.
Most partners do not need another communication technique.
They do not need another relationship podcast.
They do not need another framework.
They may simply need to recover the discipline of attention.
To sit still long enough to notice another human being again.
To remember that intimacy begins with observation.
That love begins with noticing.
That what we attend to eventually becomes sacred.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
A Brief Note
This essay is not an argument against technology.
It is an argument for attention.
Technology is simply where the problem becomes visible.
The deeper question is older than smartphones and likely older than civilization itself:
What deserves our sustained regard?
The answer to that question shapes marriages, communities, cultures, and life partners alike.
REFERENCES:
Dwyer, R. J., Kushlev, K., & Dunn, E. W. (2018). Smartphone use undermines enjoyment of face-to-face social interactions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 233–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.10.007
Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work (Rev. ed.). Harmony Books.
Misra, S., Cheng, L., Genevie, J., & Yuan, M. (2016). The iPhone effect: The quality of in-person social interactions in the presence of mobile devices. Environment and Behavior, 48(2), 275–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916514539755
Przybylski, A. K., & Weinstein, N. (2013). Can you connect with me now? How the presence of mobile communication technology influences face-to-face conversation quality. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(3), 237–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512453827
Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2016). My life has become a major distraction from my cell phone: Partner phubbing and relationship satisfaction among romantic partners. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 134–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.058
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.
Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462
Wilmer, H. H., Sherman, L. E., & Chein, J. M. (2017). Smartphones and cognition: A review of research exploring the links between mobile technology habits and cognitive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 605. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00605