WHY GOOD MARRIAGES FALL APART

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Here is something most married couples never say out loud: at some point, nearly every one of them wondered whether they made the right choice.

Not during the easy years — during the hard ones. During the stretch where nothing dramatic happened but everything felt distant. During the argument that surfaced the same wound for the fifteenth time. During the Tuesday evening when you sat in the same room and felt completely alone.

That moment — that quiet, unsettling doubt — does not mean your marriage is broken. In many cases, it means it is real. And what you do with that moment matters more than almost anything else in a marriage.

This article is not a list of tips. It is not "five love languages" repackaged or a cheerful reminder to "communicate more." It is an honest, research-grounded, deeply human exploration of what marriage actually is, why so many good ones deteriorate without either partner fully understanding how, and what the couples who genuinely thrive do differently — not occasionally, but consistently.

Whether you are engaged, newly married, decades in, struggling, or simply curious — what follows is worth reading slowly.

Part One: What We Get Wrong About Marriage From the Beginning

The Myth of the Perfect Partner

Somewhere between romantic comedies and Instagram weddings, we absorbed a dangerous idea: that a great marriage is something that happens to you when you find the right person. That love, if it is real, should be mostly effortless. That conflict means incompatibility.

None of this is true. And believing it quietly destroys more marriages than infidelity does.

Dr. John Gottman, who has spent over four decades studying couples in his 'Love Lab' at the University of Washington, found something remarkable: the couples who stay together long-term are not the ones who fight less. They are the ones who fight better. They are not more compatible by personality. They are more committed to navigating their incompatibilities.

"Every marriage is a cross-cultural experience. Two people from different families, different experiences, different nervous systems — trying to build one shared life. The question is never whether conflict will arise. It is whether you can repair it."

— Dr. John Gottman, marriage researcher

The myth of the perfect partner leads people to evaluate their marriage against an impossible standard. When real life arrives — when you see each other tired, scared, petty, or boring — it feels like evidence that something is wrong. Often it is evidence that something is real.

The 'Falling Out of Love' Fallacy

'We fell out of love' is one of the most common explanations for divorce. It sounds like something that simply happened — passive, inevitable, like falling off a cliff in the dark.

What actually happens is more mundane and more preventable: couples stop doing the things that created love in the first place. They stop being curious about each other. They stop expressing appreciation. They stop initiating — conversation, affection, adventure. The warmth does not disappear. It starves.

❯ Love in a long marriage is not a feeling you have. It is a practice you maintain. The feeling follows the practice, not the other way around.

Helen Fisher, the biological anthropologist who has studied the brain chemistry of romantic love, describes three distinct systems: lust, attraction, and attachment. Early relationships run primarily on the first two — dopamine-fueled, intense, effortless. Long marriages run on the third, which is quieter, steadier, and requires deliberate cultivation.

The couples who report the highest long-term satisfaction are not those who preserved that early-stage intensity indefinitely. They are those who successfully transitioned into deep attachment — and kept injecting moments of novelty and genuine connection along the way.