What Hurling, Gaelic Football, and Australian Footy Reveal About Marriage, Masculinity, and Belonging (opens in new tab)

Most modern people underestimate how much of emotional life is organized through ritual. I have become increasingly convinced that relationships rarely collapse all at once. More often, they erode through the slow disappearance of shared emotional worlds. The rituals vanish first. The recurring points of connection disappear. Folks stop gathering around the same symbolic fire. And oddly enough, sports often reveal this more clearly than therapy books do. There are countries that build identit...