Why Staying Together Isn’t Always the Goal
Rethinking Love, Marriage & Endings
I grew up, like many of us, believing that I would find The One and then contentedly settle into a lifetime of “making it work.”
I watched an interview with Michelle Obama years ago who said, “young people give up on marriage too easily.” “For ten years,” she said, “I couldn’t STAND my husband.” I imagine it both shocked and allowed audience members to breathe a sign of relief that can only come from being seen. We love Michelle Obama’s ability to be authentically her. We love her wise tidings for us to tolerate distress, to level set our expectations, to challenge the narrative that we meet our person and suddenly it all magically falls into place without the need for hard work and compromise.
As a couples therapist, I appreciate her viewpoint and, I have something to add to that perspective.
I grew up knowing, deep in my bones, that time is not promised. I was confronted daily with the concept that, one day, it can all be taken away from you. I watched three out of four of my primary caregivers go from healthy and capable one day to sick and compromised the next. For 20 years, from 9 to 29, I witnessed them die slowly and, instead of swiftly and peacefully transitioning with integrity, they told me the stories of their despair. I listened to their many regrets, having too much time to reflect on if theirs was a life worth living.
The summation of their regrets were largely that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they spent too much time making themselves smaller, playing it safe, being controlled by fear, and talking themselves out of saying or doing The Thing (whatever The Thing was for each of them).
Contrary to Michelle Obama’s legitimate critique of the millennial generation, I grew up learning how to become too good at distress tolerance, so much so that I learned how to quiet my own gut feelings telling me something in my marriage was amiss. Part of the reason why I work with millennials specifically is because we are a generation of children who were told things like: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” and “Do this — because I said so.” So many of our parents didn’t get their emotional needs met from their parents - so how could we expect them to have the tools to emotionally tend to us?
If anything, some of us are so good at distress tolerance that we don’t even know we’re distressed in the first place, having learned instead to, “get over it.” Many of us learned that sadness, anger, and fear are feelings to be ashamed of, to distract ourselves from, not feelings to let breathe, to take up space and tend to.
I also watched my parents tell themselves that they should stay together “for us,” (the children) despite having a palpable disdain for one another. Ironically, separating and striving to live fuller happier lives might have actually been far more for us.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: after surviving a pandemic, financial crisis, 9/11, erosion of democracy, late-stage capitalism and the terrifying implications of global warming on the survival of our species - maybe I don’t want to spend a precious decade learning to tolerate the feeling of “not standing my husband.” Maybe instead I want to spend that decade using my emotional and mental capacity to love boldly and pour back into myself. Maybe we’ve been sold a false narrative that life has to be hard for it to be a life worth living. Maybe instead we can acknowledge that life, for all of us, is already hard. We don’t have to make it harder to be virtuous. Maybe we all deserve some form of ease, within inevitable struggles, whatever that happens to look like for each of us. What would it take to overcome the fear of the unknown and let myself do less, even if it meant being alone?
I hear from people all the time who tell me that if they didn’t have kids, they wouldn’t be together. I cant help but wince when I hear this because I am the product of a marriage that put that same unconscious pressure on me. This pressure taught me to suppress my needs, that my mere existence was The Thing keeping the family together and, if that was the case, then doing life correctly would eventually require me to put my adult needs on the back burner for the purpose of “keeping things together.”
I felt the weight of that burden for years, working in therapy to counteract the implications of that weight. My own ambivalence around having kids was mainly because I could not, in good conscience, do that to my own child and repeat that generational trauma. In fact, my entire body fought against it. If I was going to have kids, I was going to be damn well sure to be whole and well enough to expect nothing of them other than their own pursuit of happiness.
I also wince when I hear the persistent cultural narrative that touts longevity of a marriage or partnership as the ultimate accomplishment. Why do we automatically celebrate all folks who have been married for 40 years? Why aren’t we curious about people’s experience of those 40 years instead, as if longevity is automatically something to celebrate? Isn’t being your full authentic self while in partnership with another (or not) The Thing to strive towards? Why is the persistent narrative that a single woman is something to pity as if the single most important thing in this life isn’t the relationship you build with yourself? What kind of humans would we raise if our culture celebrated the bravery of choosing yourself alongside fulfilling partnerships and shifting partnerships that evolve into ones that honor where you are both at in your life?
Why don’t we celebrate relationships that end peacefully and amicably before two people contort themselves into being shells of their former selves to “make it work”? Theres a reason why I never promise a goal of “staying together” in couples therapy. In some cases, ending respectfully and gracefully is what is right for one or multiple parties. Only you and your partner get to decide what’s right.
What happens when you love someone so deeply that you can no longer, in good conscience, keep expecting them to be someone they’re not? What happens when you build enough self love to realize that love doesn’t, shouldn’t, can no longer require you to mold yourself into a person who stays over a person who simply is? What would it take to let that true love, one that includes releasing each other, lead the way?
Our culture has a problem with endings. I’ve experienced this as I did the slow, painful and beautiful process of ending my 13 year partnership. We so badly want to make someone the bad guy. We want there to be a salacious story or a clickbait reason. We are a culture that feasts on brevity, that eschews nuance. We so badly want to paint with a broad brush and villainize someone or something. We want out with the old and in with the new. We want to move on, to close one chapter so we can start a new one. I imagine this is because change is hard, we need to be able to explain change to gain control over it. We prefer one neat and compelling reason over the more realistic and complex truth that often exists.
I see a discomfort with endings all the time when people are terminating in therapy or navigating endings in their personal life. We simply don’t have good practice at healthy endings. Instead, we block, we burn bridges, we cancel, we ghost, we unmatch, we slam doors, we lean out, we get passive aggressive, we breadcrumb, we self sabotage, we talk shit, we quiet quit, we downsize, we push away, we avoid, we shut down.
Part of my therapy practice has been about helping people have healthy endings. One that doesn’t necessarily require the need to burn it all down, after you’ve become so resentful, angry, depressed that the only possible recourse is to set it ablaze. Consider the days, months and years that you ignored your own boundaries until it became so untenable that the only way out was to light the match. What if we chose to end things before it was dire? Before there was scorched earth? What could we gain? What could we preserve?
My husband and I may be some of the only people to go to couples therapy after we decided to dissolve it. We wanted to confront the hard conversations together with kindness and honesty, to gaze at each other in grief and sadness, to honor what we’ve built, what we are dismantling and what we will begin to create anew together and separately. We chose to hug and hold through it, to get mad and sad at each other, to reflect, to apologize, to take space, to come back together, to get what we need from others, to learn how to get what we need from ourselves, to watch a new season of Below Deck together, to drink the rest of our wedding wine, to cook, to go out to eat, to throw out our things, to tag team parenting our dog, to meet one another’s new partners, to make a list of the things we still want from one another. Our marriage is and will always be a successful because it was and is both true, real, and filled with tenderness and intentionality throughout every stage. And, perhaps I will look back at this, shuddering at how wrong I did it. Time will tell.
I’ve found there are few models in popular culture to use as reference points. Do I want to consciously uncouple ala Gwyneth? Is a shared dog generalizable to the intentionality reserved for exes who still co parent human children? Do I want to pull strength from FDR and Eleanor…validating marriage as a deep companionship that doesn’t involve what the romantic comedies promised us? This is the part when my therapist reminds me that in the queer community, chosen family that includes exes has always been valid because so many folks feel more seen and held by those they created relationships with than those they were raised by.
What happens when your ex is still one of your most trusted family members? When they are still the one who can bear witness to your loudest sobs and most tender parts? When only they know just how you like your knees to be massaged? Is that enough to still get invited to your life’s events? Who do you have to be to them to still be invited to theirs? What is closeness for closeness sake and what is distance for distance sake?
As strange as it sounds, in my most confused moments, when the road ahead has one big question mark levitating above the ground, I remember this framework I picked up in a management book a decade ago. Is this person on the right bus? Or are they just in the wrong seat? I imagine my ex switching seats but staying on my bus. By letting the resentments and disappointments fade away, perhaps he may even come to the front row now. A mantra I repeated silently as the year of separating went on was: we decide.
I have no answers, only more questions. I’ve found myself often exasperating the people around me whose many questions I could not answer. If I was in therapy with them I might say something I repeat often, like a meditation for myself and my clients: “Learn to love the questions themselves,” said Rilke.
What if we didn’t have to do it the way we were raised to believe it had to be? What if instead, we listened to our own bodies on how to make our life, our one wild and precious life, a life worth living?
