I know. It is a provocative title.
I chose it deliberately, not to be clever, but because it points to something married partners experience and yet rarely have language or permission to say out loud. There is very little social space where this truth can be spoken safely. It feels like dynamite. People sense that if it explodes, it could hurt everyone involved.
And yet this is a universal, almost banal truth. Once it is named and normalized, it often brings relief. People exhale. The tension drops. Things loosen in the body.
But most people never get this catharsis. Instead, this truth sits heavily in the pit of the stomach. Or shows up as back pain, gastrointestinal stress, migraines, or recurrent lethargy.
We become adept at minimizing in public and suffering in private. We smile at parties. We post vacation photos. We tell ourselves and others, “It’s fine. Every marriage has issues.” Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the pain intensifies. You can feel your life force slowly eroding, as it often does when core truths are being actively avoided.
When repetitive emotional pain is minimized, it does not disappear. It goes underground. And underground pain tends to find unhelpful exits. There is a reason infidelity, addiction, and compulsive secrecy so often follow long periods of emotional aloneness in marriage. These behaviors are not brain disorders. They are desperate attempts to regulate pain that has nowhere else to go.
The Developmental Truth That Has No Name
Here is the uncomfortable reality that sits beneath so much marital suffering.
By definition, the understanding of love we carry into marriage is a less mature version of what marriage will eventually require. This is not a personal defect of character. It is a universal, though serious, developmental challenge. Or more accurately, a set of challenges. Picture the tortuous transition from elementary to middle school, multiplied by one hundred.
We enter marriage with the best version of love we currently know how to offer and receive. That version may be sincere, devoted, and deeply felt. But it is shaped by earlier stages of life, fewer competing demands, and far less accumulated strain. Then life proceeds.
The demands multiply. Children. Aging parents. Money pressure. Work stress. Health concerns. Loss. Disappointment. Unmet expectations. The emerging grief of time passing. The dawning realization that both you and your partner are imperfect and limited. Not to mention the resurgence of unhealed wounds that may have been festering for decades.
Marriage does not protect us from these pressures. It absorbs them. And the form of love that once felt sufficient is often no longer sturdy enough to hold what life is now asking of us.
This is where so many couples’ reactivity cycles begin to escalate. On the basis of a very real felt sense of pain and overwhelm, partners move into different combinations of protective strategies that include fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning.
The pain and conflict intensify. We assume something has gone terribly wrong. That the love has failed. Or that maybe it was never there to begin with and we married the wrong person. That this level of strain must mean we should leave.
In reality, what is happening is a knock at the door saying, it is time to grow out of the immature kind of love you are familiar with and grow into a whole new kind of love you do not yet know exists.
Translation: roll up your sleeves. You have work to do.
Death and New Birth
So yes, marriage is where a certain version of love goes to die.
The more idealized, youthful, frictionless, rescuing form of love we often arrive with cannot survive the realities of long-term partnership. That death is painful, unavoidable, and deeply disorienting.
And it is normal.
When couples receive adequate support to understand and stay present through that death, something else can be born. A love that is less performative and more honest. Less intoxicating and more nourishing. Less driven by fantasy and more anchored in reality. Less cotton candy, more kale. Less innocence, more experience.
A more mature kind of love. One that can hold tension, tolerate difference, and remain engaged without fleeing.
This rebirth does not happen through willpower or insight alone. It happens through lived experience, one day at a time, over time. Through facing pain together. Through mourning what was. Through learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to create safety, repair, and new forms of intimacy.
Marriages that survive the death of immature love and the painful birth of a more mature way of loving are not the ones without pain. They are the ones where pain, confusion, and uncertainty are welcomed and dealt with seriously, patiently, and skillfully.
This involves stepping waaaaayyy outside the comfort zone. Regularly. For a significant period of time. In fact, stepping outside one’s familiar self is a foundational part of the work. This is where a subtle, almost imperceptible adventure enters the fabric of daily life.
And at some point, you find yourself saying,
“Holy shit. I get to love, be loved by, and live with this person.”
