The question usually arrives sideways. You are loading the dishwasher, or driving home from a birthday party where you barely spoke to each other, and something in you goes: what is this, actually? What is our marriage? People assume that thought means trouble. In my experience it means the opposite. It means one of you has stopped running on autopilot long enough to look at the thing you are inside of.
I have coached couples through this question for years and I have asked it in my own house more than once. What follows is what I have landed on, including the parts that are less comfortable than the wedding version.
Marriage is not a place you arrive at
A lot of the disappointment I see comes from a single quiet belief: that marriage is a destination. You do the courtship, you do the wedding, you arrive, and from then on the relationship holds itself up while you go handle careers and children and mortgages.
It does not work like that. Marriage is a process, and the two people inside it keep changing. The person you married at 28 is not who is standing in your kitchen at 39, and thank God, because the alternative is that one of you stopped growing. What breaks couples is not the change. It is expecting to be married to a fixed person and then feeling cheated when you are not.
Marriage is also not a solution. It does not fix loneliness, it does not fix money stress, and it does not fix a person who has not dealt with their own material. It is a commitment to work through what comes at you together, which is a very different promise and a much more useful one.
Marriage is not a solution to your life. It is an agreement about who you are going to face your life with.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
Five events that strain almost every marriage
Certain things bring couples to me over and over. None of them are exotic. All of them are ordinary life doing what ordinary life does, and I have been on the receiving end of every one on this list.
Parenting young children
Becoming a parent is the single biggest load transfer a marriage takes. When my twin boys arrived, the sleep debt, the money, the sheer relentlessness of it put friction into my marriage that had never been there. Two competent adults were suddenly bad at everything, including each other. This is the stage where couples quietly convert from partners into a logistics company, and I wrote about the reframe that fixes it in what is a parent marriage.
Losing someone
My father died while my wife was pregnant. Grief does not stay politely in one lane. It changes how you sleep, how patient you are, how much you can give, and it rarely runs on the same timeline for both partners. One of you is ready to be normal again and the other is nowhere close, and each of you reads the other as wrong.
A career shift or a money shock
In 2008 I lost my job and started my own business, which sounds inspiring in a bio and felt like nothing of the sort at the time. Financial stress puts a specific kind of pressure on a marriage because it makes every small decision feel like a referendum on whether you are going to be all right.
Renovating the house
People laugh at this one until they live it. A renovation is months of decisions, overruns, and two people discovering they have completely different tolerances for chaos. My wife and I had to work harder to stay on the same page during ours than during almost anything else that year.
Two cultures under one roof
My upbringing was Iowa. My wife's is Argentine. Most of our sharpest disagreements early on were not about values at all, they were about method, especially around the kids. Whose way of doing a bedtime is correct. Whose family gets which holiday. These differences either split a couple or make it wider, and which one you get depends almost entirely on whether you treat the difference as a threat or as information.
What these events have in common
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They arrive together
New baby, dead parent, job loss, all inside 18 months. Nobody gets these one at a time in a tidy order.
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They are not anybody's fault
Which is exactly why couples start assigning fault. There is nowhere else to put the pressure, so it goes onto the person standing closest.
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They pass, but the pattern stays
The crisis ends. The habits you built during it, the silence, the scorekeeping, the separate corners, do not end with it unless you go get them.
Marriage is a skill, not a problem
Struggle in a marriage does not mean the marriage is failing. It means you have hit a part of it you were never taught to do. Nobody sits you down at 22 and teaches you how to have a disagreement with a person you cannot walk away from. You learned it by watching your parents, which for most of us is a mixed inheritance at best.
Think of it as a piano. A piano does not play itself. Sitting in the room with it does not produce music, and owning a very good one produces nothing at all. Sometimes the two of you are in sync and it sounds like something. Sometimes you are in different keys and the honest move is to stop, tune, and start again rather than play louder.
That is what most of my work is. Not fixing broken people. Teaching two capable adults a set of skills nobody bothered to hand them, starting with the ability to disagree without doing damage. If your arguments have gotten repetitive and mean, how to improve communication in marriage is the practical version of this.
Looks fine, needs nothing
Needs tending, actually alive
Attractive from the doorway and permanently the same
Changes with the season, occasionally looks rough, occasionally stuns you
Requires nothing, which is exactly why it gets ignored
Requires soil, water and pruning, which is why you stay in relationship with it
Cannot die, and cannot bloom either
No guarantee of a perfect bloom, and no comparison when it comes
I come back to that image constantly. When my own marriage started feeling like plastic flowers, sitting on a shelf, admired and untouched, that was the signal to go tend the rose bush. Not to panic. Just to go do the work that a living thing requires.
The drift that becomes an emotional affair
Almost nobody sets out to have one. It starts with a colleague who laughs at your jokes, or a friend from the gym who asks a follow up question your spouse stopped asking around 2019. The intimacy builds outside the marriage precisely because it feels effortless, and effortless is intoxicating when home is all logistics.
The danger is not the other person. It is the redirect. Every honest thought that goes to them is a thought that did not go to your marriage, and the marriage gets thinner while the outside connection gets richer. The two questions worth answering honestly are simple and uncomfortable.
Ask yourself these two
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Am I telling this person things I have stopped telling my spouse?
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Would I be comfortable if my spouse read the entire thread?
If the answer to the first is yes, that is not proof of anything terrible yet. It is a gap, and gaps are fixable while they are still gaps. If you are further along than that, or you suspect your spouse is, the signs worth paying attention to will be more useful than another week of wondering.
What we actually do about it
When couples start with me we get practical fast. I do not open with a tour of your childhood. We start with what the two of you are actually building, because everything else hangs off that answer.
Where we begin
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Get clear on what you are each trying to build, out loud, in the same room
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Name the current strain honestly, including the part you have been managing alone
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Stop the behaviors that undo everything else, starting with contempt
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Run an emotional intelligence assessment when it helps, so you are working from data rather than accusation
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Rebuild connection deliberately once the house is no longer on fire
That fourth step is worth a note. I use the EQi 2.0 assessment with some clients because it gives two people a shared, neutral vocabulary for things they have only ever discussed during a fight. It is not a diagnosis and it does not tell you who is right. It tells you how each of you is wired to handle stress, which is usually the actual argument underneath the argument about the dishwasher.
Talk it through
If the question has been sitting with you and you want to answer it properly rather than at 11pm in your own head, book a free 25 minute call. We will get clear on what the two of you are actually building and whether I am the right person to help you build it. If you want to see the specific problems couples bring me first, the most common ones are here.
Questions couples ask
Is asking what is our marriage a bad sign?
No, and I would argue the opposite. The couples in real trouble are usually the ones who never ask, who run on autopilot until something forces the issue. Asking means one of you has looked up. It is uncomfortable because you do not have a ready answer, but not having one is normal at year 8 with young kids. Getting to a shared answer is most of the work.
Do struggles mean our marriage is failing?
Almost never on their own. Struggles point at a part of marriage neither of you was taught to do, which is most of it, because nobody teaches this. A marriage is a skill set, not a personality test you either pass or fail. The couples who do well are not the ones with fewer problems, they are the ones who learned to handle the same problems differently.
What is the plastic flowers and rose bush thing?
It is how I describe two ways of holding a marriage. Plastic flowers look fine forever, need nothing, and quietly get ignored because they never ask for anything. A rose bush needs soil, water and pruning, occasionally looks rough, and is actually alive. Most couples who feel dead are not broken. They have just been running the plastic version for a few years without noticing.
What is the EQi 2.0 you use with clients?
It is an emotional intelligence assessment. I use it with some couples because it gives two people a neutral shared language for how each of them handles stress, expresses need, and reads the other. It is not a diagnosis and I am a coach, not a licensed clinician. It is a tool for having a more accurate conversation than the one you have been having about the dishwasher.