Most couples assume relationships end through dramatic events.

An affair.
A betrayal.

A catastrophic fight involving tears, packed luggage, and someone saying, “I just need space,” which in modern America can mean anything from “I need to rethink my life” to “I’m sitting in the Target parking lot eating trail mix alone.”

But in my work with couples, I have increasingly seen relationships deteriorate in a quieter, stranger way.

Not through explosion.

Through atmospheric erosion.

A thousand tiny attentional withdrawals.

A slow migration of emotional focus away from the relationship and toward devices, feeds, work identities, parasocial attachments, algorithmic stimulation, and perpetual distraction. Many modern couples are not suffering from acute relational trauma so much as chronic attentional malnutrition.

The internet has entered the marriage like cigarette smoke.

There are few things more modern than watching somebody explain quantum mechanics incorrectly while sitting inside a leased white SUV.

This, more or less, is the internet economy now.

A woman named Skylar—or possibly Ashlynn—speaks directly into the camera while burning ethically sourced sage and explaining that abundance entered her life immediately after she began “aligning with wealth frequency.”

Somewhere in the background sits a ring light glowing with the intensity of a minor religious apparition.

And because we are living through the great collapse of institutional trust, millions of people think:

“You know… she may be onto something.”

A fascinating new set of studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin attempted to examine the psychology of manifestation belief itself. Not whether manifestation “works,” exactly, but what kind of thinking tends to accompany it.

The results are extraordinary in the most American way imaginable.

There was a time when emotional dysfunction had the decency to remain mysterious.

A spouse disappeared emotionally for six months, and nobody announced, “He is displaying dismissive-avoidant deactivation strategies rooted in unmet attachment needs.” They simply said, “Frank has become impossible since buying that boat.”

Cleaner era. Fewer syllables.

Now everyone speaks fluent therapy dialect. Entire relationships unfold in the language of psychological interpretation.

Couples no longer merely fight. They “activate each other’s nervous systems.”

A disagreement about holiday plans becomes “an attachment rupture.”

Someone asks for fifteen minutes alone and suddenly there is discussion of boundaries, emotional labor, co-regulation, trauma responses, and whether the dishwasher represents patriarchal oppression.

The internet has accomplished something extraordinary:
it has turned therapy language into social currency.

And like all currencies, it now functions partly as status.

Couples now fall apart while technically remaining in constant contact.

They text all day.

Share calendars.

Exchange Instagram reels from opposite ends of the same sectional sofa.

React to each other’s messages with tiny digital hieroglyphics while quietly losing access to one another’s interior worlds.

The modern relationship is exhausted.

Not always dramatic. Worse.

Administratively depleted.

Which is how Padre Pio suddenly becomes relevant again.

Not because he performed miracles. Not because of the stigmata.

Not because modern life secretly longs for supernatural spectacle, though it clearly does.

Every few years the culture becomes briefly obsessed with exorcisms, near-death experiences,

Marian apparitions, psychedelics, “energy work,” or billionaires explaining consciousness on podcasts while wearing sneakers that cost more than a dishwasher.

No. Padre Pio matters because he understood something modern culture keeps forgetting:

Human beings deteriorate when reverence collapses.

Not productivity.
Not communication.
Not optimization.

Reverence.

There is something deeply revealing about the sudden popularity of Don Dolindo Ruotolo in the age of algorithmic panic.

Not because modern people have become more spiritual. Let us not become hysterical.

But because modern people have become exhausted.

Exhausted by prediction.

Exhausted by optimization.

Exhausted by carrying twelve imaginary futures around in their nervous systems like overpacked grocery bags cutting off circulation to the fingers.

And into this trembling little civilization wanders an obscure priest from Naples saying:

“Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything.”

Which sounds comforting until you realize he actually meant it.

Not metaphorically.
Not aesthetically.

Not as a decorative quote floating over beige Instagram backgrounds featuring driftwood and cappuccinos.

He meant surrender in the terrifying sense.

The irreversible sense.

The kind that requires relinquishing the fantasy that anxiety itself is a form of control.

That is why Don Dolindo has become catnip for the spiritually overclocked.

There are certain religious stories that modern educated people react to with immediate, involuntary facial expressions.

Not thoughts.

Not arguments.

Facial expressions.

A tightening around the mouth.

A tiny retreat of the eyes.

The expression people make when someone at dinner calmly explains that crystals cured their thyroid condition or that their golden retriever understands Swedish.

The Akita story produces this expression in otherwise civilized people.

Partly because it involves Marian apparitions.

Partly because it involves a statue allegedly weeping blood.

But mostly because the central figure in the story—Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa—does not behave the way modern people expect someone connected to extraordinary religious claims to behave.

She was not charismatic.

Not theatrical.

Not evangelical.

Not interested in fame.

This is psychologically inconvenient.

There is something almost absurdly modern about listening to a podcast about homicide while standing in line for cold brew.

Not because violence is funny.
Because the setting is.

Human beings once gathered around fires to hear cautionary stories about betrayal, disappearance, dangerous strangers, and the hidden nature of evil.

Now we hear them through noise-canceling headphones while buying oat milk and pretending we are “mostly interested in the psychology.”

Which, to be fair, many people genuinely are.

A recent study published in Psychology of Popular Media found that most true crime podcast listeners are motivated less by gore or cruelty than by curiosity, information-seeking, and a desire to understand human behavior. 

A woman in yoga pants is whispering into her phone in the parking lot outside Target.

“I just think he’s emotionally avoidant.”

Twenty years ago she would have just said:

“He never talks.”

That is the shift.

The language of therapy escaped the therapist’s office and entered ordinary life.

Now everyone appears to possess a partial graduate education in Attachment Theory acquired through social media, heartbreak, podcasts, and twelve hours on Reddit at two in the morning.

“He’s avoidant.”
“She’s anxious.”
“That’s disorganized attachment.”
“My nervous system no longer feels safe.”

Attachment Theory is no longer functioning merely as developmental psychology.

It is now:

• dating shorthand.

• identity language.

• moral language.

• status language.

• emotional explanation.

• social sorting.

Couples increasingly understand love psychologically instead of morally.

Many life partners slowly become experts in each other’s attachment injuries, while losing the ability to make each other feel loved.

That is one of the quiet tragedies of modern intimacy.

Modern Americans increasingly use food the way earlier civilizations used liturgy.

Not entirely consciously, of course.

Nobody stands in Whole Foods holding artisanal bone broth whispering, “At last, a coherent metaphysical framework.” People still think they are discussing inflammation.

But underneath the endless conversations about seed oils, raw milk, gut health, fasting windows, sourdough fermentation, protein optimization, ancestral diets, carnivore protocols, liver capsules, glucose spikes, adaptogens, “toxins,” and biblical eating plans, something much larger is unfolding.

Folks are just trying to reconstruct meaning.

A recent piece in The New York Times explored the rise of “biblical eating,” an online movement centered around consuming foods mentioned in scripture — fish, minimally processed foods, raw dairy, homemade breads, locally sourced ingredients, fasting practices, and forms of dietary simplicity presented as spiritually aligned living. 

At first glance, it looks like just another wellness trend.

It is not.

It is a significant cultural signal.

There was a time when folks went to the doctor because something hurt.

Now women sit in bed at 11:43 PM refreshing microbiome dashboards to see whether their Lactobacillus percentages changed after brunch, menstruation, stress, oral sex, kombucha, antibiotics, a magnesium supplement, or what increasingly appears to be the emotional weather system of late capitalism itself.

Civilization has entered an interesting phase.

Lately I’ve noticed something subtle but increasingly unmistakable: the couples I see are beginning to experience their bodies less as places they live and more as systems they manage.

Sleep is scored. Recovery is scored. Fertility is scored. Mood is tracked. Cortisol is inferred.

Attention is fragmented into metrics. The nervous system has become a public relations department.

And , of course, eventually, inevitably, optimization culture arrived at the vagina.

More and more couples and families are experiencing each other primarily through interruption.

Not cruelty.

Not betrayal.

Interruption.

A strange thing has happened to modern intimacy.

Life partners now routinely tell each other:
“I’m listening,”

while simultaneously glancing at a glowing rectangle containing Ukrainian drone footage, celebrity divorce rumors, protein powder advertisements, weather anxiety, a former classmate’s suspiciously photogenic vacation in Mallorca, and a man explaining dopamine fasting from inside what appears to be an aggressively beige podcast bunker.

And somehow this counts as presence.

Somewhere this morning, a woman stood in front of a mirror holding two versions of herself.

One shirt meant comfort.

The other meant fewer interpretations.

She chose accordingly.

Not because she is weak.
Not because she is vain.
Not because she is confused about feminism.

But because women understand something many men still insist on treating as theoretical:

Visibility has consequences.