In 2019, I was at the nine-year mark of my marriage.
We had two amazing kids, ages six and three, and I had a very busy psychotherapy practice in Manhattan.
I felt on top of the world.
You can imagine how shocked I was when my wife came to me and said,
“The marriage is not working.”
Defensiveness is Toxic
I am eternally grateful that I did not spiral into defensiveness, anger, and withdrawal the way I had been known to do on and off throughout the marriage, which was part of what led us to that crisis.
Instead, somehow I sensed this was an inflection point.
I took many deep breaths and got to work.
I returned to individual therapy.
We entered couples therapy.
I leaned on wise friends and deeper forms of support.
I also revisited material I already knew well, the work of John Gottman, Terry Real, and Sue Johnson, voices many consider among the wisest guides to intimate relationships.
Slowly, things in the marriage began to change.
As of April 2026, we will celebrate sixteen years of marriage, and it has become an increasingly rich and satisfying ride.
Do You Love Your Spouse?
If you had asked me in 2018,
“Do you love your wife?”
I would have said, Absolutely.
But through the crisis of 2019, I came to learn the profound difference between love as sentiment and love as practice.
Love as a sentiment, a feeling, a declaration, is very real.
It matters.
But it is very different from love as a way of being inside the ordinary, moment-to-moment reality of a shared life.
I loved my wife and our family fiercely.
Yet I often disappeared into work, ambition, and the intoxication of ego.
And us strivers often spend way too much time in self-centered worry and angst.
Present in name.
Absent in spirit.
Workaholic striving is idealized in this culture.
But inside, it is yet another way of abusing and depriving oneself, which deprives loved ones in the process.
It is a turning away from the mutual nourishment of real relationships.
To prioritize nourishing connection is an essential part of taking good care of oneself, and therefore one of the deepest expressions of love.
My wife was not responding to what existed inside my head and heart about love.
She was responding to the reality she was living inside of, day in and day out.
And her radical candor became a wake-up call I would only dismiss if I let my self-destructive impulses take over.
Don’t Trust Your Initial Reactivity
In truth, my first inner reactions were not noble.
I felt defensive, ashamed, exposed, angry.
I heard criticism rather than honest and constructive truth.
But I was also dimly aware that those reactions were older than my marriage.
They came from deep places shaped by injuries and abandonments in my earliest attachment relationships.
For many of us, those early bonds were so painful or confusing that leading with vulnerability went out the window.
Closeness did not feel safe.
So we learned to armor up, to numb feelings, to protect ourselves at all costs.
These strategies once helped us survive.
But in adult love, they block the very connection we and our partners most long for.
That is why getting help was so crucial for me.
And thankfully, when someone is truly ready and willing to do the deeper work, meaningful change usually follows.
Discovering Love as Practice
The psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm helped many people rediscover love as a practice rather than a feeling.
He wrote,
“Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.’”
And even more simply,
“Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”
Love, in this mature sense, is not merely a feeling that happens to us.
It is something we do.
Something we prioritize in our attitudes and behaviors.
Something the other person can actually feel.
This realization was both humbling and liberating.
Because it meant the problem was not a lack of love.
It was a lack of skill, intention, and presence in how love was being lived.
And as many people only discover in response to relationship crises, these skills can be learned.
Presence can be practiced.
Lives can change.
And that is very good news.
