First and foremost, this is purely hypothetical. I am not married, I have never been married, and I am posing this question simply out of idle curiosity.
Over my lifetime, I have encountered some couples who were deeply struggling in their marriage, but instead of giving up, resolved to work hard to resolve the marriage and ultimately salvaged what was there. I’ve also known couples who divorced.
Now I know sometimes divorces end because of incompatibility or lifestyle differences, and it has nothing to do with falling out of love. Those aren’t the divorces I’m asking about.
What I’m wondering is if it’s possible to lose the feelings you once had towards someone. If so, how do you tell the difference between losing those feelings and simply needing to work harder on your marriage?
I can honestly say that divorce is the best thing that ever happened to me. I got married to have kids, had them, and the there was no need to continue it any further. We are both good parents and make good money so we can split duties very easily.
There are a number of things that I learned about marriage over time. Marriage isn’t for your benefit or your spouses benefit especially today. It is a societal responsibility. No one is even really supposed to like it long term. It is just something that you are supposed to do to ensure societal and familial stability over generations. That has broken down a lot with new technology and things like women’s rights. Those are a net good thing but you can’t keep marriage the same and change the fundamentals underneath it at the same time.
I see a lot of people who are quite unhappy in their marriages (most of them because they tell me) and yet they continue to do it because it is a huge hassle to get out of, it is expensive, and it introduces uncertainty. I think marriage can work for certain rare couples but I don’t think it should be the norm anymore than all regular churchgoers should be ushered into the priesthood. It is a crushing institution overall.
The problem I see isn’t that there are too many divorces, it is that there are way too few of them. People that could be happy on their own are being crushed by this institution that often is no better than indentured servitude. You have to resort to religious reasons if you think there is any reason for marriage other than just practicality and it should be abandoned as soon as that no longer applies.
The nice thing about feelings is that they are epistemologically certain. If you think you have them, you do have them. If you think you don’t have them, you don’t.
That doesn’t mean people don’t experience denial about these things. But it doesn’t take the form of thinking you still have the feelings. Rather, it takes the form of excuses for why lack of feelings is temporary.
But with love, if it’s gone away, it’s gone. YMMV.
That’s a really subjective question - there is probably a different answer for every couple that is trying to work things out and every couple who is getting divorce.
I think it’s obvious that you can lose the feelings you once had toward a person. Anyone who has been in love and then broken up with someone knows that. What I’m more curious about is how “working on a marriage” works. What does that entail, exactly? I’ve been happily married 11 years now, and it’s never been work. Honest question.
I view marriage as a long-term partnership with a very good friend. We have to do a lot of hard work just to get through raising the kid and fulfilling our day to day responsibilities - but we like each other a lot and at the end of the day it is comforting to hang out together - even for just a short while to get ready to do it all again the next day. We get to have occasional fun together - which I hope will increase in frequency as the kid gets older - and I look forward to spending more time with just the two of us.
With all friendships - there are changes over time and you have to rely on your original dedication to that person and work through the hard times. For me, it’s a simple fact of making my decision and seeing it through - and luckily I chose someone with whom that is not such a hard thing to do. I would imagine scenarios that would make this decision much more difficult and maybe impossible (alcoholism, abuse, gambling) but so far, so good for us.
I think it is definitely different for every couple. Sometimes whatever the problems are, it is worth working through, but sometimes it’s not. If my husband suddenly took up a destructive habit - all bets are off. I would expect and hope the same would be true for him.
It depends on what you ultimately want from marriage. The answer for most people lies somewhere in the middle.
In my opinion if both people don’t work at least a little on a marriage, if the expectation is every moment is rainbows and unicorns and you can’t cope the moment anything not perfect happens, then the marriage breaks up.
If both people work really hard at the marriage and divorce is not an option, and they don’t expect the other person to bring them happiness, the marriage has nearly a 100% chance of success.
In the middle you have people who aren’t prepared for severe crisis (a friend’s marriage broke up when her young son got cancer - her husband couldn’t deal), or where one person works hard, but the other doesn’t work at all at it (which sometimes works, and sometimes results in the hard worker saying “fuck this” after a few or many years, and sometimes results in the less committed to making it work partner skipping off into the sunset with greener pastures).
And Crab’s point is good as well - people do change. Sometimes your partner chooses alcohol over you, and you have to decide if stick it out and working through that (which you can’t do, they have to) is worth it.
I’m sure it is possible for feelings to vanish, but it is more likely that they go into hibernation because of work pressure, kid pressure, money pressure, or a million other things that get in the way. Working on a marriage can mean talking about them, so they don’t fester. It can also mean reserving time for each other. When the kids were little we were able to go and stay in NY for a few days, and that really helped.
And don’t believe people who have gotten divorced about long-term marriage. I like it just as much now 34 years after we got married, and it isn’t society. Neither of us are crushed. It is perfectly possible to have space within a marriage. It helps to have good role models, like both our sets of parents.
I think you were referring to me there. I never said good long-term marriages are impossible, just that they are much more rare than people commonly let on. Based on what I know about you, I have no reason to doubt yours isn’t exactly as you say. That makes one out of about five I have ever had good evidence of personally. There are many more than that I know of that involve great deception based on what one of the people involved tells me yet they put on a good face to the rest of the world. There are others just seem a little off to me but I don’t know enough about to know the full story.
All relationships change, including those of married couples. Even if a couple does maintain some of the original ardour, life itself has put them into situations, time has gone past, and they’ve created a whole new relationship. Hell, it’s new every day, no matter how boring or unchanging it seems. Everything that happens is a part of it. So no, it’s never ‘the same’ as those first few weeks/months/years of adrenaline-fueled starry-eyedness. But if you’re lucky, it’s better.
Regardless, life is change, and a couple either handles it or they don’t. It’s that simple, really. Every day is another choice.
I know plenty of marriages which ended in the death of one spouse, which is as long as you can go for. And a good and successful marriage isn’t happy 100% of the time. I know my share of sad stories also - but failure is not inevitable.
Maybe you just have to be a romantic.
I wouldn’t say feelings necessarily vanish, short of total amnesia or death. But they *do *change over time. What used to be burning love is capable of changing to burning hatred, given a large enough disagreement (or enough small ones, over a long period of time). Or it could transform into a nice comfortable feeling. Or it could possibly turn into a vague dislike for each other, but not enough to be worth divorcing over.
What I *don’t *believe is that it’s possible to retain that “new-relationship smell” beyond the first couple of years with somebody. The 2 long-term relationships I’ve been in both got stale after the honeymoon period, unfortunately.
I’d gone through um, well hard to count but likely in the range of 10 relationships [5 marriage proposals…2 where rings were pulled out to my dismay.] *
In each relationship there was Something Very Wrong, like:
a professor at my university with kids my age who’d had a couple of wives+liked marriage but not with monogamy attached. I was 17. wow.
Guy with ring. drank too much, made it in engr program through talent. cheated on 1st wife. overspent (later on an engr’s salary) to the point of borrowing from his parents (for a friend’s car he totaled while both were drunk) maxed out credit cards
talented very well paid geophysicist. still is. did cocaine every weekend. still does.
male model. 30 yoa. seemed to be panicking as jobs dried up. couldn’t get through college. pressured me to help him w/ his homework. realized he’d never get freshman chemistry but I’d be working the same problems semester after semester. turns out he was also casually dating at the univ, he’d demanded monogamy when I d/n want it. weird.
Petroleum landman who d/n have enough work. or thought he d/n. I couldn’t do anything right, oh, except for earn my paycheck. gave me a ring he’d given his last fiancee, the one who left when he cheated on her. worked out of town a lot, had stories that d/n match his buddies’…so who knows what he was doing? I d/n want to guess or look into guessing.
Geologist who lied about indebtedness. said he did it cause I wouldn’t have done what he wanted (with my money) if I’d have known. Lost amount of earnest money on house, left him. oh, also, he was married (separated but seething) but said he was divorced…“or you wouldn’t have gone out with me.” Proposed marriage to me in front of my father. [written down this all sounds gob smacking. wow.]
Love-of-my-Life Guy: loved everything, except he liked to spend hours in bars. went to bars more than all other social activity put together. got a DWI. prostitute was in the car w/ him. Bye. [but only after crying and ‘trying.’]
Very few (maybe 10%) of friends', relatives', coworkers' marriages seemed to be the sort of relationship I'd like. [atleast 50% of the actual marriage partners expressed happiness, it was just that one of them was keeping the other one from drinking, or overspending, or moving to another city or *something* that wouldn't have been ok to me.]
I figured I'd always be around guys and have relationships but *knew* I'd never marry.
Then I met this blue collar guy. Fell in love with him totally. It WASN'T that ALL THE WRONG THINGS in my previous relationship weren't there (but, hey,they weren't)...It's that what is between us really works. and it's no "work." Bad things have happened; we look at eachother and dig our way out. Although our solutions may not be the same I always see the validity of my husband's ideas.
**Crab Rangoon** said what's in my heart.
*I was in engineering school for 6 years...heavily male programs. serious guys who may have been afraid of being lonely.
We’re one of those cases where I sometimes think we could have walked away and been happy, but we’ve chosen to work through it. This is because our problems are largely the result of external stresses*, and while we’ve had problems with each other, it’s largely in reaction to those and our own stressed-out responses to life. Even when things are at their worst, I care so much about Mr. Mallard that I can only imagine divorce in the heat of passion. Sometimes I don’t feel certain parts of the complete love, but there’s always a solid core of caring.
One of the things that makes it a lot of work is that we come from quite different cultures, even though we share the same native language, and we have quite different outlooks and ways of thinking. This can make things a real challenge when you’re upset, but at the same time the intellectual challenge of understanding someone so different is part of what makes the relationship great when it’s good. All those challenges have forced me to learn and grow where and easier relationship would not have, and both of us appreciate this aspect of life.
If either of us had had a fundamental personality or values change [and I’m not counting medical personality changes like depression, which we have been dealing with], or it turned out that the person I / he had married wasn’t the person he / I thought he was, that would be a different story, and we would divorce.
Gay relationship in general, immigration, medium-term unemployment, clincial depression and anxiety, side effects from medication related to the previous, relative poverty, debt, deaths in the family, substance abuse in the family, well-meaning but generally difficult family, years of transatlantic long-distance relationsip. . . and no doubt stuff I’ve forgotten! I’m pleased to report that things are improving on all fronts.
My marriage counselor focuses on ways for my wife and I to get along. Nothing about how to fall in love with my wife again. Only cohabitation. But I already know how to do that; I’d been faking it for a few years. I’m simply tired of faking it.
Maybe other counselors would have other ways to “work on” a marriage.
I’m simply tired of faking it.