When the Structure No Longer Fits in Marriage
- The Broken & Beautiful
- Mar 23
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 19
The Long Work of Love — Essay #3
Reflections on marriage, survival, and the slow courage of becoming real together.
Something Inside You Wakes Up
There comes a point in a long marriage when something inside you no longer fits the life you’ve built.
In the photo above, I notice how our eyes had dulled. We were carrying on, being good citizens, even headed out on our first mission trip, but I can't help but notice the difference in our faces. We were no longer two youngsters heading out on a wild adventure. We had become survivalists.
Not because the life is wrong. Not because the love isn’t real. But because something in us had begun to wake up.
That awakening doesn’t arrive as clarity. It arrives as discomfort. Annoyance. Irritation. Frustration.
The Life That Once Worked
For a long time, I didn’t question the life Jerry and I had built.
I knew my role: be steady, be supportive, be good. And maybe most importantly—don’t disrupt what’s working.
I didn’t spend my time apologizing for my opinions. I simply stopped bringing them forward.
They were still there. I felt frustration, irritation, anger. But I learned how to keep those things contained—tucked safely inside where they wouldn’t create conflict or destabilize the life we were working so hard to maintain.
At the time, it felt like maturity. It felt like love. It felt like choosing the relationship over myself. It felt like "less of me and more of Jesus." And for many years, that choice worked. We built something strong—a marriage, a family, a life that, from the outside, looked stable and good. But building a life is not the same thing as inhabiting it fully.
If you’ve ever watched a house being built, you know how the early stages feel. There’s energy, movement, visible progress.
The frame goes up quickly. Walls take shape. You can begin to see what it will become. But once the structure is in place, the work changes.
The internal systems take time—wiring, plumbing, insulation.
From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening. But inside, everything is being configured.
That was our life.
From the outside, it looked complete. But inside, something was still unfinished.
The Separation You Can’t Ignore
At first, I didn’t recognize what I was feeling. It showed up as sadness—a kind of sadness that didn’t have a clear beginning or end. I would spend hours crying and not fully understand why.
For a long time, I believed it was all connected to Michael’s accident. And that grief was real. It was ongoing. It shaped me in ways I am still discovering. But over time, I began to realize that something else was happening underneath it. I was becoming aware of a separation inside myself that I could no longer ignore.
I had spent so many years organizing my life around what was needed, what was right, what was required—that I had lost access to something essential. Not completely, but enough that I could feel the distance. And once you feel that kind of separation, it becomes harder and harder to live comfortably inside it.
The structure we had built—the life that had carried us through so much—no longer felt like it could hold who I was becoming.
I didn’t yet have language for it. I didn’t know how to explain it. But I knew something had to change.
What You Ask For Changes Everything
And eventually, I did the one thing I had not done before. I asked for more from him. More connection. More presence. More honesty. I asked him to meet me in a place we had never really gone before.
And it did not land the way I expected. I expected him to respond in his usual way - supportive, congenial, and warm. Instead, I experienced his anger—sharp, immediate, disorienting. At the time, it frightened me. It wasn't loud anger. It was quiet, defensive, and resolute. It was a part of him that I'd not seen yet. What I saw in his eyes gave me, in a split second, a deeper understanding of why I had locked away my own anger. I felt threatened by his sudden and confusing show of his.
And, believe it or not, my respect for him grew in that moment even as we hit an impossible relational space where things as they had been, rather silently, ceased to exist. The true thing; the real thing, driving us, had just been exposed.
Looking back now, I understand it differently.
My request didn’t come from a place of blame. It came from a place I was just beginning to find in myself. But even so, it disrupted something real.
For years, the way we had lived together had worked. It had held us through everything life had asked of us.
And suddenly, I was asking for something different.
To him, it felt like everything he had given—everything he had provided, everything he had done right—was no longer enough. He was angry. I was needing and wanting to change the rules. My need and desire for more of him threatened his sense of self. His need and desire for the rules to stay the same; for less of me, threatened mine.
And there we were, at an impasse—impossible, painful, disorienting. There was no clear way forward. And no obvious place to turn because I didn’t trust others easily.
That, too, had been part of the structure I was living inside: self-containment, self-management, figuring things out alone. Those patterns had carried me for a long time. But they were no longer enough. Because this kind of moment—the kind where two people are no longer just managing life, but confronting themselves—cannot be resolved through effort. It also can't be resolved alone.
It requires something deeper and much, much riskier.
It requires truth expressed over and over again... over time. How much time? As long as it takes.
Not the kind of truth that proves a point, but the kind that allows two people to remain present even when what’s being revealed is uncomfortable.
Even when it challenges what has worked. Even when it asks both people to change in ways they did not anticipate.
This is the moment many couples avoid, and for darn good reason. I have worked with many men and women whose relationships broke at this point. Lines were drawn. Sometimes violence erupted. Sometimes interrupting the calm waters of survival finds a person in extremely dangerous situations. Jerry and I are fortunate to have enough ego strength to walk away from the most intense moments and allow ourselves to reset, to find our center, to listen to our friend, Jesus, and to come back more open and ready to learn something new about one another.
But this doesn't happen by accident. It takes two people miraculously willing to fight hard for the other person. It takes the second greatest commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself. And, in Biblical language, it's actually the love of self part of that exhortation which becomes either the stumbling stone or the cornerstone on which a new way forward can be built because, biblically, spouses are called to a high standard of love. We become one. Not in personality; not literally the same person, but a new family. A new group. One that we, together with God, had built and was now at risk, not by forces from the outside, but from truth within.
It asks you to loosen your grip on the roles that have defined you, to question the structures that have kept you safe.
There is no formula for this part. No clear set of steps.
Only a single choice, one step at a time.
To stay—not in the old way, but in a way that is honest enough to allow something new to emerge.
The Steady Courage of Staying Present in Marriage
There is a difference between staying in a relationship and staying present within it.
Many couples remain committed to each other for years. Fewer learn how to become real together. Because openness requires something that survival does not. It requires the willingness to be seen—not as the person you have been, but as the person you are becoming. Not in an angelic light or a bastion of viking-like prowess, but two humans. Broken and beautiful.
And that kind of seeing changes everything. Not all at once, but enough that the relationship can no longer return to what it was. What follows is not a quick repair.
It is a slow reorientation. A learning process. A series of small, often invisible choices that begin to reshape the way two people relate to each other.
And over time, if both are willing, something begins to take form that is stronger than survival.
Not because it avoids difficulty, but because it has learned how to remain alive within it.
I don't share any of this story as a model for you to emulate, but as a woman, face down in the dirt of gratitude because it should have ended so much uglier.
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My mind is spinning as I ask myself to wake up! I’m reorienting to “staying present” in my relationship with my husband. Sometimes I want to go back to the way it was then I remember it was not real. I was pretending.
Thank you for this article.