Psychology suggests that marriages that are technically working - the bills paid, the holidays kept, the affection small but consistent - can produce a specific kind of loneliness most people are never told to expect, because the difference between a marriage that functions and a marriage that nourishes is something the culture has agreed not to teach you to notice - Silicon Canals

Psychology suggests that marriages that are technically working - the bills paid, the holidays kept, the affection small but consistent - can produce a specific kind of loneliness most people are never told to expect, because the difference between a marriage that functions and a marriage that nourishes is something the culture has agreed not to teach you to notice - Silicon Canals

Briefly

"The marriage is, by every external measure, working. The bills are getting paid. The children, if there are children, are well cared for. The holidays are kept. The anniversaries are remembered, even if quietly. There is, between the two people, a small consistent baseline of affection. Not passionate. Not effusive. Consistent. They kiss when one of them leaves the house. They say goodnight before turning off the light. They are, by any reasonable accounting, a married couple in a working marriage."

"And one of them, or both of them, is profoundly lonely inside it. This kind of loneliness has a particular shape that distinguishes it from the loneliness of bad marriages. Bad marriages produce a different, more legible kind of suffering. There is conflict. There is anger. There is, at the very least, the clear sense that something is wrong. The bad marriage tells you what the problem is. The marriage I am describing here does not."

"The marriage I am describing here looks, from any angle the culture trains a person to look from, fine. The fineness is the problem. The cultural script for marriage operates on a particular set of binary categories. The marriage is either good or bad. The marriage is either working or not working. The marriage is either one you should stay in or one you should leave. The script does not have a category for the marriage that is, by every measurable feature, working, but that has, somewhere along the way, stopped doing the thing marriages are supposed to do for the people inside them."

"The thing they are supposed to do, in the deeper account, is nourish. They are supposed to be the room in which a person is most fully known, most reliably met, most able to bring the unedited version of themselves and have it received with attention. The bills and the holidays and the small consistent affection are the"