The Long Work of Love: Reflections on Marriage and Becoming Real Together
- Mar 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 19
The Long Work of Love — Essay #2
Reflections on marriage, survival, and the slow courage of becoming real together.
Why I'm Sharing... I Hope It's Meaningful for You
This series is about long partnership—the kind that stretches across decades and carries both grief and goodness inside it.
From the outside, long marriages can look simple. If two people stay together long enough, the assumption is often that love must have been steady the whole time. But most couples know that isn’t how it works.
Love in a long partnership changes shape over time. It passes through seasons of joy, responsibility, exhaustion, grief, and renewal. Sometimes the most important turning points don’t happen during the hardest years, but later—when life finally slows down enough for two people to look at each other again and ask what kind of relationship they want now.
This series is not an attempt to present a perfect marriage or a formula for making one work. It is simply an honest reflection on what happens when two people survive long enough together to begin discovering what it means to become fully alive again inside the relationship they built. And, about the miracle it is when both people say, "yes," with more awareness than the first time.
If you are in a long marriage and feel something inside you beginning to wake up—something that can no longer live only inside the patterns that once helped you survive—you are not alone.
This conversation is for you.
A Young Marriage Full of Hope
December 19, 1993 — Denver, Colorado
This is a photograph from our wedding day that I still love.
Snow was falling that night. The kind of quiet snowfall that makes everything feel a little magical. Jerry is standing beside me in a black tuxedo, holding my bouquet. I’m aglow in both the magic of the wedding and the anticipation of the life ahead.
We are both smiling widely—young, hopeful, and stepping into a life we believed would unfold exactly the way it was supposed to.
From the outside, it looks like the perfect beginning.
A beautiful couple.
A winter wedding.
Two people clearly happy to be starting their life together.
And in many ways, that moment was real.
We were happy. We were hopeful. We believed deeply in what we were doing. But what that photograph cannot show is the interior world I was carrying with me that day.
The Hidden Interior World Inside a Marriage
Just a few short years earlier, a pregnancy scare at seventeen had shaken something loose in me that I didn’t yet understand. My early experiences of sexuality had already been confusing and painful in ways I didn’t yet have language for.
By the time Jerry and I met, I had quietly decided that the safest way forward was to shut down my sense of desire almost entirely.
Excitement felt dangerous.
Feeling too much felt risky.
So instead of following chemistry or attraction, I followed what felt right. And Jerry, in every visible way, was right.
He was kind.
Steady.
Thoughtful.
Adorable.
He came from a good family. He was working hard and had a future that promised stability. My oldest brother had introduced us, which in the world I came from carried its own kind of weight.
Everything about the match made sense.
And because I had spent years learning to override my own uncertainty, I did what I had always done.
I moved forward.
The smiles in that photograph are real. The joy of that day was real. But underneath the surface, there was also a young woman making enormous life decisions without yet feeling fully at home inside herself.
At the time, I didn’t know how to recognize that difference. I only knew how to keep going. And that instinct—to keep going—would shape the early years of our marriage more than anything else.
When Marriage Becomes About Survival
Life accelerated quickly after we were married. Jerry entered the demanding world of medical training, where the pace of life leaves very little room for reflection. Responsibility arrives quickly, often before you feel fully prepared to carry it.
At the same time, I was working as an RN case manager while learning how to navigate the bewildering terrain of early motherhood. And almost immediately, grief entered the story.
The loss of our first pregnancy came early in our marriage, before we had any framework for understanding that kind of heartbreak.
Then came the birth of our daughter Madalyne, followed closely by baby Kelson just fourteen months later.
Joy and exhaustion arrived together.
But grief was never far away.
Just two weeks before Madalyne was born, my younger brother Michael suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was only twenty years old.
When something like that happens in a family, it changes the emotional atmosphere of everything.
Nothing ends cleanly. There is no simple “before and after.” The person you love is still alive, but the life you shared with them has shifted in ways that require constant adjustment.
For years afterward, I traveled regularly to see Michael and my family in Denver. Those trips often included an infant—and later a toddler and a baby—because my heart simply could not stay away.
At the time, I didn’t think of it as extraordinary.
It was simply what love required.
Partnership, Responsibility, and the Systems of Marriage
But the pace of those years was relentless. Medical training meant long hours and constant pressure. Early parenthood meant sleepless nights and endless responsibility. Financial strain sat quietly in the background of almost every decision we made.
There was very little margin. So Jerry and I became extremely good at functioning.
We divided responsibilities.
We carried our share of the load.
We made decisions quickly and kept moving.
In many ways, we became excellent partners. But partnerships built around function can gradually become systems of efficiency rather than spaces of intimacy.
When two people are working that hard just to keep life moving forward, relational exploration tends to fall to the bottom of the list.
Not because love disappears.
But because survival requires attention.
You learn to postpone certain questions.
How are we really doing?
What do we need from each other?
Are we fully present here?
Those questions rarely surface when babies are crying, exams are looming, and the groceries are going on the credit card.
Instead, you rely on something quieter.
Commitment.
The quiet knowledge that this person is on your side, even if neither of you has the energy to talk about what that means.
The Questions That Eventually Surface in a Marriage
For many couples, those years become a kind of proving ground. You learn not merely whether the other person will stay, but how they stay.
You learn whether they will keep showing up when the work is hard and the rewards are far away.
And in that sense, the survival years can forge something incredibly strong. But strength built through endurance alone has its limits.
Eventually, the human heart begins to notice what has been postponed.
The longing for conversation that isn’t logistical.
The desire to be seen in ways that go beyond competence.
The quiet hope that the relationship might one day hold more than the responsibilities it has carried.
For a long time, those questions stayed beneath the surface for us.
We were raising children.
We were building careers.
We were doing the things responsible adults do.
And in many ways, our life looked successful from the outside. But somewhere deep inside me, something was beginning to stir.
Not dissatisfaction.
Not resentment.
Something subtler.
A growing dis-ease.
A sense that the structure which had carried us through so much life might not be large enough to hold the next chapter of who I was becoming.
I didn’t yet know how to say it. I only knew that something inside me was waking up.
When Survival Stops Being Enough in Marriage
Sometimes I still look at that wedding photograph.
The snow falling quietly around us.
The white dress.
Jerry holding the bouquet beside me.
Two young people smiling widely as they step into a future they cannot yet imagine.
From the outside, it looks like the perfect beginning. And in many ways, it was.
What I see now, though, is not just the beauty of that moment. I see how young we were. How certain we were that doing the right things would naturally lead to the right kind of life.
What that photograph cannot show is how much of ourselves we had not yet discovered. How many parts of our own hearts were still hidden—even from us.
At the time, we believed marriage meant building a life together. What we didn’t yet know was that it would also mean learning how to become fully ourselves.
And that work would take much longer than either of us expected.
The Turning Point That Changes Everything
For many couples, the systems built during the survival years remain in place long after the original pressures have eased.
They keep the household running.
They maintain stability.
They prevent unnecessary conflict.
But they also quietly shape what the relationship allows. Eventually something begins to press against those boundaries. Not dramatically enough to blow up the whole thing.
Just enough to raise a question that can no longer be ignored:
Is this all our marriage is meant to be?
Is it enough for me?
When that question finally surfaced in our relationship, it changed the direction of everything that followed. Because once survival stops being enough, a couple must decide whether they will protect the system that kept them safe—or begin the far more vulnerable work of becoming fully alive together.
And that is where the next part of this story begins.
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My friend - I didn’t know!!