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.

There is a woman awake at 2:11 a.m., sitting on the edge of her bed, scrolling through r/relationship_advice.

Her partner hasn’t texted back.
Her body feels electric with dread.
She turns to strangers—strangers she will never meet—because she cannot bear the weight of her own fear in silence.

This is not weakness.
This is honesty.

Every night, millions of people open Reddit not because they enjoy chaos but because they need a place where their emotional truth is allowed to exist.

That alone makes Reddit one of the most remarkable emotional archives of our time.

High-achieving couples are often startled when they discover that marriage, of all things, is difficult. These are people accustomed to competence.

They have spent their adult lives managing crises, budgets, deadlines, and the various emotional needs of colleagues who never quite mastered adulthood.

They assumed marriage would be the one place where their skill sets would finally pay off.

Unfortunately, the data says otherwise.

Studies of dual-career families have shown for decades that ambitious couples are more vulnerable to conflict not because they love each other less, but because their lives generate more structural strain than the average household (Conger, Conger, & Martin, 2010).

In other words: it’s not you, it’s the architecture of success at the highest level

There is no graceful way to say this, so I’ll just rip the Band-Aid off:
the newest evidence-based intervention for aging brains is peanuts.

Not supplements with Greek letters.
Not longevity powders that cost as much as a dinner in Tribeca.
Not even blueberries, the Beyoncé of the produce aisle.

No—the scientific spotlight now shines on unsalted, skin-on roasted peanuts, a snack so pedestrian it could run for local office.

According to a surprisingly rigorous 16-week trial in Clinical Nutrition, these humble legumes—yes, legumes, the great pretenders of the nut world—improve brain blood flow and verbal memory in older adults.

I

f you feel personally insulted by this information, that is the appropriate reaction.

Smart women rarely burn out for the reasons people assume.
They don’t collapse because they’re overwhelmed.
Or because they “took on too much.”
Or because they “care too deeply.”

Smart women burn out because for a very long time, they’ve been doing two jobs in every relationship they’re in:
the job they signed up for, and the job they absorbed quietly because no one else was willing or able to do it.

Most smart women don’t even realize they’re overfunctioning.
They think they’re coping.
They think they’re being competent.
They think they’re “just handling things.”

Meanwhile, their nervous systems are keeping the receipts.

What follows is not a pep talk.
It’s not a manifesto.

It’s a scientifically grounded explanation of why smart women overfunction and why their bodies eventually revolt.

Some smart couples don’t implode. They erode.

They don’t hurl plates or storm out the front door. They draft position papers.

They index their grievances. They quote the relevant literature.

Then they slide quietly into marital loneliness while congratulating themselves on how impressively civilized they’ve been.

This is the paradox of the bright, articulate, emotionally over-educated marriage:
the couple can describe their relationship in exquisite detail while completely failing to live inside it.

It’s like watching two brilliant meteorologists discuss barometric pressure while ignoring the tornado forming over their heads.