Within healthy communities the need for meaningful human interaction is spread out among the community and not placed solely on your spouse. Therefore, I sugges

Within healthy communities the need for meaningful human interaction is spread out among the community and not placed solely on your spouse. Therefore, I suggest a large driver of marital loneliness arises because marriage is not capable, on its own, of solving loneliness. Loneliness roughly means a lack of meaningful relationships. Communities offer the opportunities for various levels of connection from close friends to casual acquaintances while connecting all the individuals to each other (i.e. you have your close friends but everyone also knows each other). Furthermore, healthy communities create a dynamic environment where new relationships form spontaneously as the individuals grow and change (e.g. the former acquaintance marries your sister and now you become close friends, you have a kid and get to know the other parents in the community better, etc). In this way, communities and marriage form a symbiotic relationship. Stable marriages become the bedrock of a community, as family provide the most stable structure for the community. However, strong communities also provide a dynamism and support that reduce the burden on marriage to provide a fulfilling life to those within it. However, meaningful communities have been almost entirely eroded by the acids of modern life: increased mobility (communities, like all relationships, require time), car reliant infrastructure, declining religious participation, and economies built on individual consumption all make it harder to build, find, and belong to communities. And with the decline of communities, the sense of belonging and meaning that once was spread out over a largely stable group now falls to a single individual - your spouse. In fact, one could argue that the increase in marital breakdown observed during the 20th century is itself a second-order effect of the breakdown of communities in that same time frame. Even the liberalization of the divorce laws could, arguably, be framed as a response to a trend already in motion rather than kickstarting it from out of nowhere.