We celebrate endurance in marriage—but rarely ask what’s actually holding it together.
We applaud couples who’ve been married 50 years. We send cards. We throw parties. We call it success. But what if some of those marriages aren’t love stories—they’re endurance tests modeled on Survivor?
I should know. I stayed. Through sickness. Through chemo. Through the pity. All because I thought that’s what was expected of me. The good girl.
Good Girls Stay
When I got divorced at age 40, it surprised me. Not because I didn’t know. I was the one who initiated it. But it surprised the younger version of me who thought only “other” people get divorced.
I married the nice, dependable guy. My biggest complaint was that the score of the Ohio State football game dictated the mood in my home about eight times a year. Not bad as complaints go. I saw us making it. In sickness and in health.
Until there was sickness.
Four years into our marriage, what we thought was lower back pain due to an out-of-state move turned out to be stage 4 testicular cancer.
According to experts, the only solution was what I referred to lovingly as “nuclear” chemo, the kind where they can’t administer it in a doctor’s office. It’s so toxic, you’re in a hospital for four days every three weeks for six rounds.
Date nights take on a different tone when one of you is radioactive.
My husband celebrated his 30th birthday in the hospital with a chorus of nurses’ voices wishing him well. As they were singing “Happy Birthday,” I wondered if they thought it would be his last.
Caregivers know that supporting the physical and emotional needs of a patient is difficult, even when you’re not emotionally invested. But when you’re cleaning up vomit and other bodily fluids while nursing your own heartache of what was, you change.
I grieved. My life was falling further away from what I envisioned when we said, “I do.”
What Was Holding It Together
Turns out the “in sickness” part wasn’t the hardest thing we faced. It was the weight of expectations.
Years later, when we ended things amicably, I confessed to him that while I thought about getting divorced earlier, I didn’t want to be the girl who left the guy with cancer. Comically, he admitted he didn’t want to be the guy who left the girl who took care of him through it all.
Much of what we do or don’t do in our marriages is dictated (at least for those of us who can’t pass up a gold star from strangers) by what other people think. Caregiving creates a kind of emotional glue that can look like love—and sometimes is—but can also be obligation, identity, or a desire for better Facebook posts.
At the time, I was only the second person on my mother’s side to get divorced. It was a four-letter word my family said in hushed tones as if speaking it aloud would cause it to land on their doorstep.
You stayed together.
You adjusted.
You learned to hide the baked goods in the trunk to avoid the calorie comments.
I knew my marriage was broken before he got sick, before we had kids, before we moved away from the state where he was born. But divorce didn’t fit with my idea of a “perfect” life or who I was. I wasn’t codependent on my spouse, but I was codependent on what his presence signified and the social obligations it carried.
Now that I’m older, I’ve moved past expectations. I’ve reached the age where the wedding gifts are fewer and the anniversary tributes are louder.
And I’m seeing relationships in a different light.
Are couples together because they choose to be or because social expectations dictate they stick it out? Or are some of them simply codependent, unable to imagine a life alone? Is the idea of divorce like seeking the type of surgery that separates conjoined twins where one might not make it because the main organs belong to the other?
When Staying Becomes the Only Story
A woman I met recently told me about her husband who has ALS. It’s progressed to the point where she can no longer care for him, but she’s having difficulty imagining who she is because “married caregiver” is the only title she’s had for years.
We discussed help for her or a living situation that could better assist him. “I couldn’t,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
That conversation has been circling like a buzzard over everything I thought I believed. I know her struggle. I lived it—briefly. Caregiving eats at your emotions. It turns your daily sprints into grueling triathlons with no win at the end. I hoped my husband would beat the disease. Hers will not.
She doesn’t want help. She simply wants to be released in the same way that Meat Loaf sang “So now I’m praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive” in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
We’re not confused about what love looks like when it’s alive. It has warmth. When you see it, you ache with possibilities. When you’re in it, it feels effervescent.
But there’s another kind of staying that gets mistaken for devotion—staying that’s fueled by fear, identity, optics, guilt, habit, or a silent belief that leaving would make you the villain.
We celebrate endurance because it’s easy to measure. Years. Decades. Anniversaries. It looks good on a greeting card. But agency is quieter. It doesn’t come with a cake topper or a shower.
We applaud 50 years together while we’re suspicious of freedom. Sometimes what we’re clinging to isn’t the person—it’s the version of ourselves we are beside them.
It’s easy to fall in love with ourselves when we’re doing the right thing for someone else. There’s always applause for that.
What’s harder is making peace with the choices no greeting card celebrates.
I’m still working on that.
