If you want to understand the fragile beauty of human psychology, don’t look at brain scans or meditation retreats.

Look at the Milan, Italy subway, where a man dressed as Batman recently doubled the rate at which commuters offered their seat to a pregnant woman.

It is one of the most charming, rigorous, and quietly revolutionary demonstrations of the Batman Effect—a phenomenon where unexpected events disrupt commuter autopilot and trigger prosocial behavior.

Let’s go deeper, because the effect is not just funny or heartwarming.

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t’s a rare, real-world glimpse into how the human brain manages attention, how novelty triggers present-moment awareness, and how social contagion spreads prosocial cues through a crowd without anyone realizing what’s happening.

This is not comic-book morality. This is neuroscience, urban psychology, and the exquisitely delicate machinery of human perception—disguised in a cape.

There comes a point in every long-term relationship when you discover you are no longer the sole proprietor of your emotional life.

You wake up fine—perhaps even optimistic, which is already suspicious.
The coffee is decent. Nothing hurts. You think: Maybe today will behave itself.

And then your partner walks in.

Not yelling.
Not upset.

Just… placing their keys on the counter in a way your nervous system interprets as a prelude to war.

Suddenly, you are stressed too.

This is not pathology.
This is not poor boundaries.
This is not “being too attuned.”

This is something far more democratic and far less voluntary: bio-behavioral synchrony—the process by which two nervous systems begin sharing emotional data like a couple on a family phone plan.

It’s the reason couples can have entire conversations without speaking.

It’s also why one person’s anxiety can detonate the whole household.

Before you ever get to the Utah mountains where Brian Wittke died, you have to understand a quieter geography: the map of his nervous system.

He was a commercial airline pilot, a father of three, and by all accounts a conscientious professional.

He also lived inside an industry where admitting to depression feels, for many pilots, like handing over your wings.

According to his mother, he worried that seeking treatment would cost him his license and his livelihood, a fear echoed by dozens of pilots interviewed in recent reporting on aviation and mental health.

On June 14, 2022, he disappeared. His mother texted and watched his location data vanish, then reappear—too late. By the time his phone told the truth about where he was, he had died by suicide in the Utah mountains.

A trauma-informed lens does not ask, “Why did he do this?” as if it were an isolated, inscrutable decision. It asks:

• What chronic pressures was he carrying?

• What did his body and brain have to absorb to keep flying?

• And what did the system do—or fail to do—with that load?

Because trauma isn’t just what happens to you. It’s also what happens inside you when you are trapped between competing threats: lose your career or lose your mind.

Pilots are not just stressed.

They occupy a textbook high-risk environment for cumulative trauma, moral injury, and chronic hyperarousal. But the way aviation handles mental health often adds trauma instead of relieving it.

Let’s unpack that.

There are quiet moments in modern life when you realize the technology has outrun the species.

Not by a little.
By miles.

It’s the moment you see someone talking lovingly to a phone screen.
Or when you realize your smartwatch understands your stress better than your spouse.
Or when you catch yourself feeling grateful for a notification.

But the real turning point arrived when people began forming attachments to folks they do not actually know — and their nervous systems failed to object.

The body, ever eager, simply said:
“Oh, attention! Oh, possibility! Oh, someone who might care!”
And from there, it was off to the races.

Welcome to the new sexual attachment system: parasocial intimacy — the kind that feels mutual, behaves reciprocal, and isn’t either.

This is not a glitch in human evolution.
It’s the predictable outcome of a world that monetizes attention and calls it connection.

There is a phrase that belongs in the Museum of Things Therapists No Longer Believe: Relax. It’s just porn.

That line worked when porn was a static product—when erotic content was one-directional, not designed to talk back, and incapable of forming a simulation of intimacy.

But OnlyFans is not porn.

OnlyFans is a relational technology—a system that simulates attachment, personal attention, erotic attunement, and emotional responsiveness. It is designed to feel like connection because connection is the product.

The research—still emerging, but powerful—confirms this.

Studies now argue that OnlyFans is not simply “NSFW content delivered via subscription” but a new ecosystem of digital intimacy, parasocial attachment, sexual learning, identity experimentation, and emotional labor (Hamilton et al., 2023; Lippmann et al., 2023; Tynan & Linehan, 2024).

And because it is relational, not merely sexual, its blast radius is relational as well: marriages, partners, children, and the emotional architecture of the household.

This is not moral panic.
This is a public health conversation, twenty minutes before the smoke alarm goes off.

Sunday, May 24, 2026. Gentle readers, there are dates that mean nothing and dates that behave more like thresholds. Pentecost falls into the second category.

You don’t need to believe anything theological to appreciate the symbolism: according to an old story, it was the day people who had been talking past each other somehow started making sense again.

Frankly, that’s as close to a marriage miracle as anything I’ve seen in clinical work.

So yes—The Monastic Marriage Series launches on May 24, 2026.

And no, you don’t need to light candles or mumble in ancient languages.

You just have to acknowledge that most of us are trying to maintain modern relationships with nervous systems that should’ve been retired three upgrades ago.

Everything is too loud, too fast, too insistent. You’ve already misinterpreted your partner three times by breakfast.

Most couples aren’t short on love.
They’re short on interior quiet—the kind that lets meaning arrive undistorted.

On Pentecost, Sunday, May 24, 2026. I’m opening a private, paywalled 10-part series that drags the most durable contemplative practices into the overstimulated American marriage.

There are two kinds of endings in love: the cinematic kind Hollywood keeps selling us, and the kind most people actually live through.

The cinematic version is full of betrayal, shouting, and a dramatic exit involving a slammed door.

The real version—what a recent StudyFinds article recently nodded to—is the quiet collapse that happens so gradually you barely notice it until the intimacy has dissolved like a neglected cup of tea.

Quiet divorcing isn’t a trend. It’s an emerging American archetype.

And its defining feature is absence—of conflict, of conversation, of warmth, of repair.

Most people don’t experience a marriage ending so much as a marriage drifting. By the time someone finally says, “I can’t keep doing this,” the relationship has been ending silently for years.

A man walks into his house at 9:47 p.m. looking like someone who has outrun the day.

His tie is off, but his posture hasn’t received the memo; his nervous system is still rooted in the last meeting.

His wife is standing near the dishwasher rehearsing the question she’s been saving for hours. He does not see her. He sees a plate left in the sink.

The plate, for him, is not domestic negligence. It is a problem to solve, a variable to control, a piece of the world that can be brought back into order.

He believes he is helping.

She feels, in that moment, completely unseen.

If you work with executive couples long enough, you learn this: the modern CEO is not a personality so much as a physiology, a system shaped by deadlines, decisions, and a kind of chronic vigilance that the body cannot simply hang in the foyer like a coat.

We like to imagine leadership as a psychological profile—charisma, confidence, perhaps a touch of ego—but the academic literature shows something far less romantic and much more consequential: CEOs carry structural strain home the way coal miners once carried dust in their lungs. The residue permeates everything.

What follows is not a critique of leaders; it is an explanation of the environmental mismatch between high-stakes work and intimate partnership—a mismatch quietly eroding marriages from the inside out.

This is the story of how power quietly complicates love.

If you want to understand why relationships feel harder now than they did twenty years ago, don’t look at “communication styles.”

Don’t look at attachment trends. Don’t even look at the divorce rate.

Look at stimulus load.

We are living in an era where the average couple is exposed to more emotional provocation before breakfast than medieval villagers encountered in an entire week.

Notifications, micro-disappointments, algorithmic outrage, delayed texts, vague posts, and the general hum of low-grade dread that comes of attempting adulthood in America.

The real miracle is not that couples fight; it’s that anyone manages to stay coherent around another human being for more than eight minutes.

Which is why monastic skills—those quiet, unfashionable, low-tech emotional practices—have begun reappearing in therapy rooms, relationship research, and even in the private fantasies of people who claim not to have a spiritual bone in their bodies.

These skills aren’t about holiness. They are about differentiating your intimacy in a hostile culture.

They’re about preserving your nervous systems long enough for closeness to exist.

Let’s walk through the big ones.

By the time a couple lands in my office, they’ve usually tried everything short of monasticism.

They’ve read the books, watched the reels, argued their arguments, and attempted at least one half-baked communication technique picked up from an influencer who films breakup content in activewear.

None of it sticks under stress.

Which is why I sometimes reach for older sources of wisdom—sources untouched by capitalism, pop psychology, or the idea that inner peace is something you “hack.”

Hesychasm is one of those sources.
A fourth-century Christian contemplative tradition forged in dust, silence, and the kind of attentional depth we now associate with endangered species.

The irony, of course, is that Hesychasts weren’t trying to become sages. They were just trying to suffer less. They wanted to see clearly, feel honestly, and avoid making themselves miserable through misperception—a project modern couples might consider adopting, given how often marriages collapse not from malice but from the velocity of unexamined reactions.

Historians are once again warning us about collapse. They tend to do this whenever the world begins to look a bit exhausted—which, lately, is most of the time.

Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, helpfully dissected in The Atlantic, explains why civilizations eventually fall apart.

It’s never sudden. It’s almost never dramatic.

It’s the slow accumulation of unfairness and silence until ordinary people lose the will to keep the whole thing running.

Anyone who has ever grown up in a family will recognize the pattern instantly.

Families collapse for the same reasons empires do:
too much burden on too few,
too much pretending,
and too little honest conversation.

Historians examine ruins.
Family therapists examine holidays.
Either way, the truth lies underneath the rubble.

Every marriage is a sensory marriage, though very few partners have language for that reality.

Couples come into therapy reporting “communication issues,” as if clearer sentences alone could soothe a nervous system that’s been running a silent emergency operations center for two decades.

Beneath the arguments, under the finely memorized rituals of blame and rebuttal, something earlier and quieter is always in the room.

Two bodies.
Two sensory systems.
Trying to share one life.

If couples understood even a little of how much the nervous system governs their relationship, half their recurring misery would dissolve into recognition.

And this is doubly true for neurodivergent couples.