There is a peculiar modern fantasy that desire should function like Bluetooth.

Automatic pairing. Seamless syncing. Effortless continuity across decades, mortgages, children, orthopedic pillows, tax filings, streaming passwords, and one increasingly alarming shared grocery list.

You meet someone.
You fall in love.
You merge lives.
You begin arguing about oat milk inventory with the emotional intensity once reserved for maritime border disputes.

And somehow erotic fascination is expected to remain permanently self-renewing.

This theory has not aged well.

Many long-term relationships are not collapsing from a lack of love. They are collapsing from attentional erosion.

Desire weakens when two nervous systems become overmanaged, overstimulated, overscheduled, and perpetually cognitively interrupted.

The modern couple is not merely tired.

The modern couple is mentally occupied.

One of the more important findings in a new study is that the vulnerability was not simply tied to diagnosis itself but to sensory reactivity.

That distinction matters enormously.

Because the modern world has a nasty habit of moralizing physiology.

If someone becomes overwhelmed easily, we tend to describe them as “too sensitive,” “dramatic,” “socially awkward,” “emotionally reactive,” or my personal favorite, “a lot.”

Entire human nervous systems get reduced to adjectives normally used for weather conditions or soup.

But sensory overload is not weakness. It is bandwidth.

Modern relationships increasingly collapse not because two life partners stop loving each other, but because they stop inhabiting the same reality.

One partner changes internally.
The other remains organized around an older version of the relationship.
Eventually both partners begin describing each other as strangers.

Not always dramatically.

Quietly.

A subtle psychological drift begins to emerge:

• different interpretations.

• different emotional vocabularies.

• different symbolic worlds.

• different understandings of what life now means.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, couples who used classic psychedelics together reported significantly stronger relationship functioning afterward, including greater emotional intimacy, increased collaboration, heightened perspective-taking, and a stronger sense of mutual understanding.

The modern couple increasingly attempts intimacy the way Americans now attempt everything else: distracted, overstimulated, mildly performative, and while looking at a screen.

Which brings us, inevitably, to a peer-reviewed study on sex in moving vehicles. 

Not parked cars. That was another civilization entirely.

That was the era of milkshakes, cigarette jackets, and teenagers pretending a drive-in theater existed primarily for cinema appreciation.

America once approached automotive romance with at least the ceremonial dignity of a Sinatra song.

Now we are discussing oral sex at highway speed while someone checks notifications and tries not to sideswipe a Subaru.

Progress is complicated.

A recent study published in The Journal of Sex Research found that nearly one-third of surveyed college students reported engaging in sexual activity while riding in or driving a moving vehicle. 

And beneath the comic absurdity sits a surprisingly important psychological truth:

This is not really a study about sex in cars.

It is a study about the collapse of sustained attention in modern intimacy.

That is the real subject hiding underneath the steering wheel.

One of the hardest things for couples to understand is that distressed relationships eventually stop reacting accurately to current events.

The argument may appear to be about dishes, text messages, vacation plans, lateness, tone of voice, or whether someone forgot to buy coffee filters for the third consecutive week like a man quietly surrendering to history.

But the actual conflict is usually larger than the immediate interaction.

Over time, relationships accumulate emotional prediction.

Partners begin reacting not only to what is happening now, but to what their nervous systems have learned to expect.

That process sits at the center of both John Gottman’s concept of sentiment override and Emotionally Focused Therapy’s idea of corrective emotional experiences.

And a recent study on Relational Turbulence Theory offers a remarkably clear window into how this works in ordinary life.

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.

There is a certain modern confidence—especially among educated Westerners—that religion survives mainly because human beings have not thought hard enough yet.

The theory goes something like this: faith belongs to intuition, emotion, and cognitive shortcuts. Rational analysis, meanwhile, belongs to science, skepticism, and logic.

Therefore, if you activate analytical thinking strongly enough, religious belief should weaken.

It is an elegant theory. Clean. Efficient.

The intellectual equivalent of Mid-century furniture.

It is also increasingly difficult to prove.

A new study published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality found that increasing analytical thinking did not reduce religious belief in any meaningful way.

The findings challenge one of the more popular assumptions in the cognitive science of religion:

that logic naturally overrides faith.

And honestly, ordinary human experience has been quietly arguing this point for years.

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.

Modern Americans have become extremely committed to wellness while simultaneously developing nervous systems that behave like raccoons trapped inside HVAC systems.

This is difficult to ignore.

We now monitor sleep with military precision while sleeping terribly.

We purchase meditation apps to manage the stress created by checking meditation apps.

We discuss cortisol the way medieval peasants discussed demonic possession.

Entire conversations now occur in a dialect composed almost entirely of the phrases “regulate your nervous system,” “hold space,” and “dopamine depletion.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in Massachusetts or Ohio or rural Sicily, an elderly woman is quietly saying the rosary before sunrise and apparently producing a more stable physiological stress response than half the professional class.

This is the sort of thing modern culture dislikes on sight.

A recent study discussed by science writer Eric Dolan on private religious practices and stress physiology found that folks engaging in private religious practices experienced smaller spikes in systolic blood pressure during acute stress tasks. 

Not metaphorically calmer.

Actually calmer.

Their nervous systems simply did not escalate as dramatically under pressure.

And immediately you can feel the modern mind trying to negotiate with the implication.

There are certain historical figures who remain safely in the past.

And then there are figures who continue wandering forward through history like unresolved psychological material.

Hildegard of Bingen belongs firmly in the second category.

Every few years modern culture rediscovers her with fresh astonishment:

the medieval abbess who seemed to understand ecological imbalance, nervous-system exhaustion, institutional corruption, spiritual numbness, attentional fragmentation, and the peculiar emptiness that emerges when a civilization becomes materially sophisticated but psychologically disordered.

Which is unsettling.

Because Hildegard was writing in the twelfth century.

Long before smartphones.
Long before mass media.
Long before industrial capitalism.
Long before social platforms engineered explicitly to fracture human attention into profitable shards.

And yet her writing often feels less like medieval mysticism than cultural diagnosis.

Partly because Hildegard understood something modern civilization keeps trying very hard not to understand:

Human beings can become spiritually exhausted while remaining highly functional.

In fact, advanced civilizations may become especially vulnerable to this condition.

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.

Most people think they know exactly what they would do after infidelity.

This is adorable.

Americans speak about cheating with the confidence of people discussing a house fire they are certain will only happen to someone else.

“I would leave immediately.”

Of course you would. During emergencies you would also remain calm, administer CPR flawlessly, and somehow locate your passport in under three minutes.

Human beings possess an almost spiritual faith in their future emotional competence.

Then somebody discovers a hidden text thread and suddenly a person who once ignored three consecutive oil changes notices their spouse stopped using heart emojis on March 11th at 9:14 p.m.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched brilliant adults—physicians, executives, attorneys, professors—become psychologically unrecognizable after betrayal.

Folks who once managed investment portfolios begin discussing Instagram story views with the intensity of forensic accountants examining cartel money transfers.

Because infidelity is rarely experienced as a clean moral event.

It is experienced as destabilization.