Month: August 2026

Today marks what would have been my parents’ 79th wedding anniversary. Reflecting on their milestone prompted me to consider their life together and examine the troubling trajectory of modern marriage.

My parents demonstrated extraordinary perseverance through hardship. Their commitment to the sacramental covenant they made before God was unwavering. While they were not always ecstatically happy, they shared a steady mutual acceptance and an ability to resolve differences. Their faith served as the bedrock of our home, drawing upon Scripture whenever self-centeredness threatened to prioritize individual desires over the marriage itself. As their children, we honored their anniversaries with deep gratitude, knowing their fidelity provided us with an irreplaceable foundation of security and emotional connection.

The Cultural Shift: Contract vs. Covenant

Recent data from the Pew Research Center and the Institute for Family Studies illustrates how radically modern marriage has diverged from that generation:

• Rising Divorce Rates: Approximately 45% of marriages today end in divorce, with nominal Christians divorcing at similar or slightly higher rates (around 48%). While active, church-attending Christians divorce less frequently (28–30%), these numbers are markedly higher than they were 60 years ago, when the secular divorce rate was roughly 30% and the active Christian rate was near 18%.
• The “Happiness” Fallacy: Modern vows are often functionally treated as conditional: “I will stay with you as long as you make me happy.” When the initial euphoria fades, divorce is frequently rationalized by distorting theology with claims like, “God wouldn’t want me to be unhappy.”
• No-Fault Culture: The advent of no-fault divorce shifted marriage from a binding covenant to a consumer contract easily dissolved over perceived incompatibility. Rather than working through adversity, couples abandon the union with the casual detachment of children leaving a playground.

The Four Developmental Stages of Marriage

Every marriage progresses through distinct psychological and spiritual stages. Without emotional maturity, many couples stall or self-destruct early:

• 1. The Attraction (Honeymoon) Phase: Characterized by infatuation, mutual consumption, and low friction. This phase generally lasts a few years until individual differences inevitably emerge.
• 2. The Conflict and Chaos Phase: Differences trigger intense power struggles. Emotionally immature partners fight to be “right,” treating their spouse as an adversary who owes them personal happiness.
  • Unmet expectations breed resentment, contempt, and emotional detachment.
  • Couples often separate, fall into extramarital affairs to endlessly recycle the honeymoon phase, or settle into a functional “emotional divorce”—living as detached roommates without emotional or sexual intimacy.
• 3. The Emptying Phase: Mature couples choose humility over self-will. They “empty” themselves of the childish demand to win arguments, recognizing that partners view the world differently due to unique backgrounds and families of origin. They learn to speak each other’s distinct love languages and replace entitled demands with vulnerable requests.
• 4. The True Intimacy Phase: Partners surrender the urge to control or reshape one another. Anchored in safety, vulnerability, and mutual respect, they discover a profound, enduring joy that fleeting emotional happiness can never duplicate.

The Generational Impact on Children

Children thrive when anchored in the stability of a covenant marriage. When self-absorbed parents dissolve a family simply because they feel unfulfilled, children suffer profound attachment wounds that frequently manifest in chronic anxiety, depression, behavioral struggles, and difficulty trusting future relationships. Many turn to constant digital stimulation and video games to numb their underlying fears of abandonment.

Conversely, watching parents navigate marital conflict with grace teaches children that real love is a durable, working choice rather than a disposable feeling.

Reclaiming Anniversaries as Sacred Milestones

Anniversaries should never be reduced to superficial, commercial dates. In a covenant-centered home, they are vital historical markers:

• A Multi-Generational Witness: Gathering children and grandparents to celebrate an anniversary honors the lineage of fidelity and reminds children that their family’s foundation is secure.
• A Forum for Candid Learning: It allows parents to openly discuss the hard work of communication and forgiveness, answering children’s questions about how healthy relationships endure.
• Living Out 1 Corinthians 13: Biblical peace is not the absence of differences, but the conscious surrender of ego. A lasting marriage embodies a love that is patient, kind, not self-seeking, and steadfast.

Honoring a long marriage is ultimately a celebration of spiritual maturity, sacrificial love, and the sacred promise that anchors a family across generations.

Throughout human history, society operated on an unbroken chain of generational wisdom. Younger generations observed, listened, and learned by consulting elders who had weathered life’s trials. Morality was the filter through which all new information was vetted: critical thinking wasn’t just about data collection—it was anchored in timeless virtues that separated the essential from the worthless. Data centers that support AI are now the font of truth, the modern electronic Oracles of Delphi, replacing the Word of God and the accumulated wisdom of the ages. 

Today, that natural order has completely flipped.

In an era of hyper-connectivity, raw information has supplanted distilled wisdom. The results are fragmenting our families and eroding our ability to navigate human conflict.

 The Fallacy: Mistaking Information for Wisdom

Information is fast, cheap, and abundant. Wisdom is slow, difficult, and relational.

When young people rely entirely on search engines and social media algorithms for guidance, they consume content stripped of any moral or contextual framework. Because digital platforms prioritize novelty and engagement over truth, volume gets mistaken for value. Kids of this generation are showing more and more signs of Attention Deficit Disorder. They have the following characteristics:

• Lower Frustration Tolerance: Instant access diminishes the capacity for delayed gratification. Sitting with an elder takes time, patience, and presence—virtues that feel like friction in an instant-gratification culture.
• The Arrogance of Modernity: Access to current data often breeds binary thinking: “I have the newest information, so I am enlightened; you are older, so you are obsolete.”

When information alone becomes the metric of intelligence, elders are treated not as resources to be consulted, but as relics to be ignored.

The Rise of “Emotional Cutoff”

When people lack the moral framework and patience required for critical thinking, their capacity for nuanced conflict resolution collapses. The most glaring symptom of this regression is emotional cutoff.

Emotional cutoff is one of the most primitive, childish coping mechanisms available. It mirrors a toddler shouting, “I don’t like what you said, so I’m taking my toys and going home.” Rather than doing the hard emotional work of communicating through disagreement, relationships are simply severed.

Emotional cutoff is not a healthy boundary; it is a defensive reaction masked as strength. It is the best evidence that someone is developmentally arrested, using only the most primitive ways of dealing with differences. While genuine boundaries are designed to manage intimacy and preserve safety, cutoffs are designed to eliminate discomfort entirely. They represent a regression to primitive, all-or-nothing thinking when emotional stamina fails. This is what children do. 

In modern families, this typically plays out in two distinct ways:

Pathology 1: Ideological Moral Superiority & Intellectual Devaluation

This pattern occurs when adult children substitute access to cultural trends and digital data for genuine moral maturity.

• The Binary Trap: Modern culture trains individuals to view disagreements not as differences in perspective, but as existential threats. The dynamic becomes strictly black-and-white: “I am informed, enlightened, and modern; you are traditional, unenlightened, and obsolete.”
• The “Woke vs. Asleep” Fallacy: Younger generations often mistake cultural fluency for critical thinking. Because older generations may not speak the contemporary ideological language, they are reflexively labeled deficient or bigoted. The adult child adopts a position of intellectual and moral elitism that forbids dialogue.
• Childish Conflict Resolution: Rather than sitting in the discomfort of debate, engaging with nuance, or practicing mutual respect, the adult child chooses total relational cancellation. It is the adult equivalent of a child putting their hands over their ears and screaming to avoid hearing something they dislike.
• The Core Deception: The person initiating the cutoff convinces themselves that they are taking a principled stand for truth, when in reality, they are demonstrating an inability to tolerate emotional complexity or defend their ideas with grace.

Pathology 2: Relational Insecurity, Projection, and Marital Collusion

This pattern is driven by internal anxiety and boundary dysfunction within the nuclear couple rather than external differences in belief.

• The Root of Insecurity: It frequently begins when one spouse (often observed in an insecure daughter-in-law, though not exclusively) feels threatened by the natural bond, authority, or life experience of the elder. The elder’s competence, warmth, or influence exposes the younger parent’s underlying fear of inadequacy.
• Psychological Projection: Unable to own their feelings of inferiority, the insecure partner projects malicious motives onto the elder. Benign actions, standard generational differences, or everyday family advice are reframed as “toxic interference,” “manipulation,” or “putting the children at risk.”
• Forced Triangulation and Collusion: The insecure partner demands an ultimatum, forcing their spouse into a loyalty test: “It’s your parents or me.”
• The Enabling Spouse: Out of fear of divorce, financial disruption, or sustained domestic conflict, the adult child caves. They abandon healthy boundaries and align with their partner’s distorted reality. To maintain peace in the marriage, they participate in the complete demonization and exile of their own parents.
• The Core Deception: The couple frames the cutoff as “protecting our children,” when the true motive is protecting an adult ego from confronting its own deep-seated insecurity.

The Unintended Victims: Grandchildren

As stated above, when adult children sever ties with their parents over ego, ideology, or unaddressed insecurity, the grandchildren pay the steepest price.

Grandparents offer children a unique anchor:

• Unconditional affirmation outside the nuclear household.
• A living link to family history and generational resilience.
• A broader network of care that enriches psychological security.

Robbing a child of healthy grandparental involvement to satisfy adult neuroses is a profound form of relational deprivation. It is, in fact, child abuse. 

What Goes Around Comes Around

Parents who use cutoff as a primary tool for managing conflict forget that modeling is the most powerful teacher.

When you teach your children that anyone who disagrees with you is inferior and disposable, you are handing them the very weapon they will one day use against you. The standard set today becomes the precedent tomorrow.

The Path Forward

A culture that discards its elders inevitably produces fragile young people. Rebuilding generational health requires:

• Relational Humility: Acknowledging that data is not character, and speed is not wisdom.
• Mature Conflict Resolution: Refusing to use cutoff as an easy exit from uncomfortable differences.
• Restoring Honor: Recognizing that the elders who survived life’s hardships carry practical wisdom no search engine can duplicate.

The Crisis of the Discarded Elder: Why Modern Culture Has Traded Wisdom for Information

Over my decades as a clinical psychologist, I have sat across the room from thousands of individuals listening to their stories. In recent years, a consistent and heartbreaking theme has emerged among older clients—men and women of my generation. We may well be the last cohort of the post-Christian era, a time when Judeo-Christian values organically permeated cultural DNA and guided human behavior, even among those who did not personally profess faith.

Today, my peers express a profound sense of confusion and grief over the cultural decline in honoring and respecting elders.

Trading Wisdom for Data

This erosion can be traced directly to the rise of social media and digital devices as the primary sources of truth and guidance for younger generations. Where previous generations actively sought the counsel of elders—viewing them as living reservoirs of lived experience—modern culture has systematically traded wisdom for information.

Young people turn to Instagram, YouTube, or AI for instant answers. While these platforms can provide endless data, they cannot provide meaning, moral grounding, or purpose. Yet because younger generations elevate immediate information over tested wisdom, they increasingly view their elders as obsolete. The underlying message delivered to older generations is devastating: “You are too rigid, old-fashioned, and unneeded. I can look up whatever I need on my own.”

This cultural shift has fostered a deep generational narcissism. Looking down at a phone during a conversation sends a clear, demeaning signal: “I am merely tolerating you; what you have to offer does not warrant my time or presence.” There is little more soul-crushing for an elder than feeling relegated to the cultural scrapheap.

The Breakdown of the Sacred Arc of Care

Scripture repeatedly commands us to honor our fathers and mothers. Honor does not mean passive obedience; it means assigning deep, reverent weight to those who sacrificed to raise us.

In my generation, respect and responsibility were foundational. We recognized the debt of gratitude we owed our parents, creating a natural, sacred arc of care:

• First Half of Life: Parents sacrificially invest their time, energy, and resources into raising children.
• Second Half of Life: Adult children reciprocate with attentive presence, honor, and care as their parents age.

Today, this arc has largely broken down. Elders regularly tell me that no one calls to check on them during the week or asks what they need. They feel abandoned unless they are actively providing a material service or financial support.

The Cost of Neglecting Eternal Values

The Book of Proverbs reminds us that true wisdom calls out in the open, but fools despise instruction and chase passing trends. Wisdom is the patient distillation of life experience into timeless principles that prioritize eternal values over fleeting material success.

This dynamic is captured vividly in the film The Bucket List. On one side was a billionaire who built a commercial empire, only to find himself paying an assistant to sit beside him in the hospital as he faced terminal cancer. Beside him lay an ordinary mechanic whose life was rich with relational wealth—surrounded by children who loved him, sat by his bedside, and treasured his counsel.

Because modern culture lives entirely in the instantaneous now, it fails to invest in what truly matters for tomorrow. Connection, peace, and meaningful relationships at the end of life do not happen by accident; they require intentional investment, patient listening, and relational discipline.

It is my enduring hope and prayer that we return to a foundation of genuine respect and mutual responsibility. At the end of life, the algorithms and status updates will fade away, leaving only the depth of our love and the quality of the relationships we chose to cultivate.