Marriage is life’s
greatest paradox.
It is everything we know it to be. And nothing we could have possibly imagined.
Imagine for a moment…
Walking into a glassblowing studio.
The air is thick with heat, the glow of the furnace almost otherworldly. On the table sits a rod with a lump of raw glass, brittle, jagged, and unremarkable. In its current state, it will cut your hands if you press too hard. It cannot hold water. It has no form.
The artist pushes the lump into the furnace. At first, it resists. It holds its rigid shape. Then, as the fire penetrates, it begins to soften, glowing orange at the edges, until it becomes pliable. In that moment, it is alive. It can be shaped into anything, a vase, a vessel, a window, even art that catches light like flame.
But here’s the paradox.
That same fire that softens the glass is also what can destroy it. If the glass is heated too quickly, it shatters. If it’s cooled too fast, it cracks. If the artist loses focus for even a few moments, the piece collapses into nothing. The crucible of glassblowing requires presence, patience, and skill. The fire is not the enemy.
The fire is the only thing that can unlock the beauty hidden in the raw material.
The Paradox of Love:
Why the Right Thing is So Damn Hard Inide Marriage
“Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is a daily act of discovery.” “Your partner is not a problem to solve, but a mystery to keep unfolding.” “The most enduring intimacy doesn’t come from knowing everything about each other — it comes from never stopping the search.” “It’s not about asking how are you, but who are you.”
— The Gottmans, The Love Prescription
I read all the books. Over 30 of them in six months. The Gottmans. Perel. Lerner. Nagoski. Hendrix. Kerner. Every day, a new wrinkle. Fair Play redefined emotional labor. The Sex-Starved Marriage and 80/80 Marriage reframed fairness, generosity, and sexual imbalance. Come As You Are explained stress, context, and responsive desire. Mating in Captivity asked why safety kills sex. The Love Prescription and Seven Principles gave micro-habits for connection. Passionate Marriage and Differentiation of Self introduced the fire of self-confrontation. Dance of Intimacy, Us, New Rules of Marriage, Wired for Love, and Hold Me Tight mapped the emotional terrain — trauma, attunement, accountability, attachment. Touched Out, This Is Supposed to Be Fun, and Foreverland gave voice to motherhood, resentment, and the mess of long-term love. So, Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, She Comes First, Why Good Sex Matters, and Loving with the Brain in Mind connected neuroscience, pleasure, and identity. And In Over Our Heads reminded me that we’re often doing marriage with tools we were never developmentally taught.
It wasn’t one book that changed me — it was the layering. The patterns beneath the theories. The dots that started connecting when I stopped looking for the right model and started listening for the deeper truth beneath them all. I started discovering all of these hidden paradoxes inherent in marriage.
“It is not just anger and fighting that we learn to fear; we avoid asking precise questions and making clear statements when we unconsciously suspect that doing so would expose our differences,
make the other person feel uncomfortable, and leave us standing alone.”
— Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy
Here’s the paradox that shocked me:
We know what makes a great marriage. The research is clear. The best practices work.
The happiest couples turn toward each other’s bids for connection 80% of the time (Gottmans)
They fight better — maintaining a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative engagement during conflict (Gottmans).
They try more things sexually — and it matters.
In fact, when Kristen Mark and I (Ian Kerner, She Comes First; So Tell me About the Last Time you Had Sex) conducted a follow-up study on sexual adventurousness with over 3,000 participants, most reported that exploring new sexual behaviors increased both their own satisfaction and their partner’s. Couples who were more adventurous were more likely to be sexually satisfied. And the more adventurous acts they shared, the higher their overall relationship satisfaction.
So if all of this is true…If the best practices are clear — and they actually work — then why do so many marriages still fall apart?
So why do 40% of first marriages end in divorce? 50% of second? 60% of third?
And even more pressing:
Why do so many couples stay… but shrink?
Not just divorcing. Disengaging. Quiet quitting. Loving someone deeply… but feeling completely alone.
The studies. The stories. The surveys. The sessions.
And the lived experiences.
They all point to one undeniable truth:
Most marriages aren’t breaking.
They’re slowly fading, under the
weight of unspoken tension and unmet needs.
Passionate Marriage compelled almost nine thousand people to participate in an ongoing survey on PassionateMarriage.com.
Seventy-one percent reported having sex no more than once or twice a month, and more than half had sex only once or twice a year. Only 29 percent had sex at least once or twice a week, which everyone thinks is the norm.
Forty-two percent went as long as three to six months without having sex, and many of them went a year or longer.
One out of two people (50 percent!) said their sex was friendly but predictable and uninspired, lacking creativity and spontaneity. Another 17 percent went further, saying their sex was passionless, mechanical, and nonerotic. On top of this, an additional 15 percent were celibate.
Only 18 percent said their sex was steamy.
The vast majority of people said their sex had little intimacy and emotional connection. Many reported that it mostly consisted of trading orgasms (34 percent) and/or hiding their true sexual selves (25 percent).
Net-net: More than 8 out of 10 couples are struggling or have quietly given up on passion, intimacy, and desire inside their marriage.
And yet…
While it all feels bleak, in truth, there’s freedom here. Freedom to explore.
To discovery. To get curious.
-The Sex Starved Marriage
“It took my husband sixteen years before he finally communicated the hurt and rejection in a way that I understood and I “got it.”
Before that, it was just the same old argument: he wanted more, I wanted less. He didn’t seem to care that we had been arguing all day or I hadn’t had two hours sleep with a sick kid or whatever. I could really take any problem and make it a reason to not want sex.
Granted, I had some very good reasons a lot of the time, but I also know sometimes I probably was punishing my husband for all the wrongs I felt he inflicted on me. I really didn’t see sex as his way of expressing love for me.
A lot of times I felt it didn’t matter who was in the bed next to him; he just wanted some! Well, when I finally “got it,” I did a complete 180, and actually really enjoyed it. I found my own sexuality again.
My only regret is that I wish he had been able to talk to me in a way I could have listened to a long time ago. It could have prevented years of heartache.
What the heck happened in that room? In that moment? In that conversation? How did that couple arrive there?
Here’s the most critical question of all: Is it possible that that conversation could have happened any sooner than it did, or was the crucible of marriage necessary to open new possibilities in their marriage?
Let’s start at the start.
Phase I: The Forming
aka The Honeymoon Phase
At the start of a long-term relationship, we come together like raw glass — full of potential, rough around the edges, carrying both the fractures of our past and the promise of something new.
Attraction, admiration, even the anxious energy of wanting to be chosen, pull us toward one another.
We bend, we compromise, we assimilate. There’s slack in the system — enough time, novelty, and energy to absorb the differences.
We borrow each other’s habits, adopt each other’s rhythms, and blur the edges into a comforting “us.” In each other’s presence, we feel whole in a way we never did alone.
It feels natural. Even easy. Their validation becomes our oxygen. Their affection, our anchor. Their attention, our mirror. And in those early seasons, it can feel like the foundation will hold forever.
But just as glass cannot stay molten forever, the glow of slack and novelty does not remain untouched. Over time, the edges we once softened begin to show again. The same fire that fused us together will keep working on us.
And that is not a problem — it is the invitation. The story of every marriage truly begins here.
Emotional Fusion Begins Early
Early in our relationship, a combination of attraction, admiration, and anxiety brought us together. They enable the necessary accommodations for us to seek marriage and a joint life together!
Accommodation Factors: Early on in the relationship, attraction, admiration, and anxiety all play to our favor. You are attracted to and admire your partner, and you seek their validation as well as their approval, which soothes your anxieties.
All of these factors usually lead to relatively easy accommodation of your partner. What marital triggers create problems, you’re able to repair/resolve more early based on the accommodation factors.
However, as a by-product, each accommodation creates emotional fusion, which results in a dependency on other validated intimacy, a reflected sense of self, and each partner regulating their anxiety through the relationship.
Now is as good a time as any to introduce the concept of differentiation.
None other is more paramount to this process.
Differnation is the process of becoming a stronger, wholer, and more authentic version of yourself.
It’s the process of becoming “unleashed/untheathered” from your past, your family, both current and the one in which you were brought up, your parents, your tour partner, your limitations, your perceived societal expectations of yourself, your fears, and the fears of everyone around you. It is the process of moving from the experiences that define you as a person to those that make you the person you are today.
Differentiation is a deep concept with many angles and layers, but ultimately, it is the ability to soothe your own anxiety and to resist being infected with other people’s anxieties.
It’s the process of moving from “Other-validation” to “self-validation,” which allows you to move into self-validated intimacy, which in turn enables stronger differentiation and a passionate marriage.
It is a hard, slow process. Often, little differences within families can happen over the course of generations in a family (whoa!).
And yet, every marriage will face this natural and inevitable process. “Marriage naturally stimulates differentiation.”
Differentiation is a deep concept with many angles and layers, but ultimately, it is the ability to soothe your own anxiety and to resist being infected with other people’s anxieties. Differentiation is the ability to hold onto yourself while staying deeply connected to your partner, family and the world at large. This, as I have come to discover, is the Rosetta Stone of remarkable marriages and a remarkable life.
There are several key considerations for your personal level of differentiation, or your ability to self-soothe and manage your own anxieties.
1.) Your starting point is your parents’ level of differentiation.
The degree to which your parents were able to self-soothe and manage their anxieties sets the baseline for your adult life. This is not your finish line. The die is not cast. It is simply the anchor you begin from, the place to grow beyond.
2.) You marry at the same level of differentiation.
You and your partner begin on similar ground. From there, the work is to rise together.
3.) Without differentiation, you carry the weight of the world into your marriage.
When you lack a strong sense of self, you absorb the fears and anxieties of your parents, your children, your friends, even society itself. You can find yourself fighting battles that aren’t yours—echoes of those who came before you and shadows of those you’ve never known.
4.) The differentiation process unfolds at different speeds.
Each partner will confront themselves in different ways, at different times, and at different speeds. The process is rarely in sync, and that’s part of the work.
5.) Your children inherit your anchor.
The level of differentiation you achieve becomes the foundation they begin from. Your progress becomes their starting point.
Ok, let’s keep going…
Phase II: The Straining
aka Life Gets Real
Marriage, like life, is not static.
It moves through seasons—sometimes with the sudden force of a storm, other times with the slow drift of a tide. Newlyweds become parents. One child becomes two. Toddlers grow into teenagers. Quiet mornings give way to chaotic evenings. Some shifts feel cataclysmic, like the arrival of the first child. Others are so gradual we barely notice, like the slow return to full nights of sleep.
With every season, something changes. Schedules change. Bodies change. Hormones change. Health and priorities change. Novelty gives way to familiarity. Each shift, whether subtle or seismic, reshapes the dynamic of a marriage—our time, our energy, our connection, even the way we see one another.
But here’s the problem: most of us are unprepared for these shifts. New roles and rhythms sneak up on us. Career changes, parenthood, and the natural aging of our bodies arrive without ceremony, and we rarely pause to name or process them.
Instead, we wake up inside new realities still carrying old expectations. We try to live today with the assumptions of yesterday. That mismatch quietly breeds tension. Disconnection. Resentment. What once felt effortless now requires intentionality.
And it’s not just our lives that are reshaped by these changes. Our marriages are. How we handle—or fail to handle—the transitions determines whether our partnership stretches with strength or frays under strain.
Accommodation Becomes More Difficult
XXX
Basically, the lower our level of differentiation, the more prone we are to engage in highly dependent relationships, where we find ourselves struggling with a chronic urge either to fuse or escape. Remember, the most important feature of differentiation is the ability to maintain a sense of self while in relation to others. As we now look at how humans handle anxiety, you’ll see the power behind emotional fusion and why maintaining your own “shape” is so difficult.
Poorly differentiated people have difficulty handling anxiety. As a result, they deal with it through their relationships because emotional fusion can temporarily reduce anxiety and restore a sense of identity and purpose. That’s why poorly differentiated people often dive into fusion when they’re highly anxious. Consequently, they become increasingly dependent on their relationship and their partner—or avoid emotional contact altogether.
This pattern can only spiral downward. Anything that threatens your relationship creates even greater anxiety because it also threatens your capacity to cope with other challenges. If you are threatened by any tension in your relationship, then you will get anxious whenever your partner does, and you will have difficulty comforting yourself. As you go through repeated episodes of anxiety, you find yourself spending ever more energy trying to reduce the anxiety.
The result is that you feel compelled to reduce each other’s anxieties and avoid triggering new ones. In other words, you end up trying to control both your relationship and your partner in order to get control of yourself. Ways of interacting become inflexible. You feel bored and dissatisfied even when you feel obligated to perpetuate the status quo.
The Paradoxes & Patterns, Stressors, and Coping Mechanisms of Marriage
These are the naturally occurring anxiety triggers that start and restart the differentiation process in marriage.
The Marital Paradoxes & Patterns
These create the tension. They are little known and seldom named.
Paradox of Growing Importance
As your partner becomes more central to your identity (kids, labor, money, sense of self), risk and vulnerability rise. Fear of loss suppresses desire and experimentation, creating sexual boredom and a lack of sexual desire, which in turn creates more need for differentiation.
Shift in Anxiety Priorities
Emotional bandwidth diverts from the relationship to kids, career, self-worth, and society, leaving intimacy undernourished.
Shift in Validation Needs
Intimacy stops serving as a driver to soothe anxiety through partner affirmation. Anexity can stimulate intimacy, but never long-term desire.
Zero-Sum, Validation Trap
If my partner is right, I must be wrong. If I honor what my partner wants, I must violate myself to do so. And that’s intolerable. Couples often fall into black and white, zero-sum thinking instead of engaging in mutual discovery and win-win creative problem solving.
The Paradox of Risk
Intimacy thrives only when partners risk vulnerability, yet vulnerability is what we’re wired to avoid, because it threatens the very things we most fear losing: our partner and our sense of self, which has become emotionally fused.
The Growth vs. Safety Polarity
We want our partner to make us feel completely safe, but also to push us to grow. Desire needs both security and stretch.
Unconscious Competition
Couples quietly compete for who gives more, suffers more, or works harder. Keeping score corrodes intimacy even when it begins as a longing for fairness.
Shame/Power Paradox of Low Desire
Physical and emotional withholding from the lower-desire partner creates both personal inadequacy and relational power. The Lower desire partner wants to please their partner, but they are disincentivized in the marriage dynamic to relinquish their leverage over intimacy. This is often handed down through generations.
Paradox of ‘Put Together’
We hope our partner is both steady and a little broken so that we can feel safe, superior, or needed. This creates ambivalence about supporting our partner if they attempt to improve themselves or the marriage, as it will then necessitate and catalyze personal growth and differentiation.
The Ego Threat of Differentiation
Real intimacy destabilizes us because it forces us to confront our limits, fears, and unmet potential. Differentiation feels dangerous because it threatens the ego, even as it deepens connection.
The Marital
Stressors
These accelerate the tension. They are more well-known and sometimes named; however, some are at the conscious and some at the subconscious level of thinking. Often these are named as the problem. They are not the problem.
Shift in Anxiety Priorities
Emotional bandwidth diverts from the relationship to kids, career, self-worth, and society, leaving intimacy undernourished.
Attachment Theory Regression
Anxiety reactivates old, often unhelpful relational scripts. The way you were loved (or not loved) shows back up in your marriage.
Stress from Raising Kids
Exhaustion drains erotic energy and playful intimacy. Parenting becomes logistics, leaving little left for each other.
Pleasure as a Skill, Not a Given
Pleasure atrophies if it isn’t cultivated. Touch, laughter, and sensuality must be practiced outside of sex. Without it, couples forget how to play.
The Play vs. Productivity Trap
Marriage slowly optimizes for efficiency (logistics, tasks, management) at the cost of intimacy. True intimacy requires wasted time, slowness, and presence that looks “non-productive.”
Shame from Body Changes
Self-consciousness replaces confidence, dulling sexual desire and willingness to initiate.
Sexual Inadequacy
I never fully knew, nor do I now, what will please me or how to provide pleasure to my partner.
Husband Rejection & Resentment
The combination of unmet needs, emotional labor, and parenting burdens calcifies into distance, rejection, and quiet resentment.
Societal Spontaneous Desire Script
Culture teaches that “real” desire should appear out of nowhere. When it doesn’t, couples assume something is wrong.
Forfeited Competency
After enough failure or rejection, partners stop seeing intimacy as a domain they can improve. They quit before they start.
The Marital
Coping Mechanisms
These are the ways in which we watched our partners deal with the challenges of marriage.
Engulfment & Self-Silencing
In the face of stress, one partner often puts their own needs aside while the other is overwhelmed. In turn, one partner self-silences. Both patterns deepen disconnection.
Sex-Avoidant Upbringing
Growing up without open, positive conversations about sex makes it nearly impossible to build sex-positive marriages without intentional work.
Generational Echoes
We don’t just marry a person; we marry their family system. Parental patterns and unspoken scripts replay until they are consciously rewritten.
Marriage paradoxes make change hard. The stressors make it harder.
Inadequate and incomplete playbooks inherited often make it feel nearly impossible.
So let’s play this back.
The paradox of growing importance says the more central your partner becomes to your identity, the less willing you are to risk vulnerability.
Why? Because the stakes get too high. Losing them feels like losing yourself.
The paradox of “put together” suggests that we secretly desire our partner to be both whole and slightly imperfect, allowing us to feel secure and superior while also feeling needed.
Now put those together. If your partner notices the marriage is fraying and dares to improve it, your first instinct is to resist. Because real improvement means destabilizing the status quo. It forces you to confront the very things you’d rather keep buried: inherited playbooks, old wounds, shame, unmet potential. And if it works—if intimacy deepens—you’re now even more reliant on them for your sense of worth.
Which means the fear of loss spikes even higher. Loss aversion takes over. And so you dig in.
And all of this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
You’re navigating it under the crushing weight of real accelerators: kids, exhaustion, shame, stress, shifting roles, changing bodies.
No wonder most marriage books fall short. They zoom in on one slice—sex, desire, communication—and miss the bigger web of paradoxes.
No wonder our friends don’t know how to help. They can’t name what they don’t see. And so they try to support us unquivocally, but only in turn reinforcing our worldviews, making it paradoxically harder for them and their partner to navigate their marriage crucible.
No wonder our parents handed us coping mechanisms like engulfing, self-silencing, over-functioning, under-functioning, sex-avoidance, and brittle communication patterns. They were just improvising against their own cultural backdrop of rigid gender roles and survival scripts.
No wonder we make excuses like we’re tired and don’t have time. We can’t name how we’re feeling or why we’re feeling this way.
This is the water we’re all swimming in.
What’s Worse: Anxiety is contagious.
Fusion ties people together like a single emotional network that allows anxiety to flow readily from one member to the next. In poorly differentiated families, when one person gets anxious, everyone gets anxious. In common parlance, “When Dad (or Mom) is unhappy, everyone’s unhappy.” Poorly differentiated people—and families—can appear to function well—as long as their anxiety stays within a range they can handle. When stressed beyond their limits, people and families become symptomatic.
Let’s explore some couples living this reality.
From Carol and Warren….
…Once solidly engaged in sex—or a relationship—Carol’s fears of rejection quieted down, and so did her motivation to have sex. Her focus shifted to another core issue waiting in the wings: feeling like she had to serve others in order to be loved. In Carol’s case—and many others I’ve seen—her quest for a reflected sense of self played havoc with her sexual desire. It got her into sex, and once satisfied, it also pulled her out. (This is, in part, why I said earlier that dependence on acceptance and validation from your partner has a tremendous negative impact on sexual desire.) It illustrates how anxiety can “facilitate” sexual motivation in some circumstances, but it has nothing to do with desire for your partner, or for sex, either.
In the midst of this melange of factors affecting Carol during sex, the struggle of differentiation was occurring: Carol was developing a solid sense of herself. Anxiety initially propelled her into sex, and then her resentment and attempt not to sell out to her fears took over. Carol’s mysterious but consistent loss of desire was her way of daring to say “No!” to her partner (in this case, Warren)—no to giving in order to get, no to exploitation and isolation, no to past abuse.
What Carol thought of as her “problem” was really the healthy part of herself attempting to stand up and hold onto herself.
Carol didn’t realize that her “problem” was really a developmental task everybody faces. She saw it only as damage from her past that needed to be repaired. She never suspected she was in the process of “resolving the past in the present.”
[If this seems extremely complex, it is—that’s what I’ve been trying to show you about sexual desire.]
I asked Carol what she felt when she wanted someone to touch her. She couldn’t have answered more clearly. She changed the topic to “Why would someone want to touch me?” She had difficulty hearing, let alone heeding, her own voice because she lived her life according to how she thought other people saw her.
Sarah Wheeler
New York Magazine
…A year before, we’d been gifted a rare night away and splurged on a hotel suite with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Like most long-standing couples with young children, we knew what we were supposed to use this time for: rekindling the magic, making romance — sex, in other words. But, also like most long-standing couples with young children, we had found ourselves in an erotic rut that had already marred past getaways with the stain of unmet expectations.
Instead of “doing it,” we sat across from each other on the expensive love seat and read our lists of “accelerators” and “decelerators” out loud. If you are a liberal intellectual woman nearing menopause, you’re probably already familiar with this parlance — they’re other words for turn-ons and turn-offs, respectively — popularized by Emily Nagoski in her best-selling, empire-spawning book, Come As You Are. This book, and the accompanying workbook full of reflections and exercises, had become our latest Hail Mary. At this point, my husband and I had been together for almost 20 years. Gone were the days of my accelerators being “waking up” and “seeing you in a shirt.” We were parents to two children; we had survived years of deep COVID-pandemic isolation, stepping on each other’s toes in our home offices, and our mutual regression to soft pants. We had long since slid into the nebulous category of “sexless marriage” — at least by some definitions. Even when we managed a monthly bang, it was not, it seemed, good enough.
My list of decelerators was long, my accelerators brief (”Mexico,” for example); my husband’s, the opposite. He still wanted me, seemingly all of the time. My wantings were few and far between, one or two days a month when my hormones commanded me to fuck anything I could find — but only if we were both showered, well rested, on top of all of our work, and magically freed from young interlopers. This incompatibility, I knew, meant trouble for a relationship. Something was clearly wrong with me. I was fussy. I was frigid. I was failing as a wife, and also, by some strange logic of my own, a mother. So, like a good girl, I got to work.
We put a lock on our bedroom door to keep out the kids. We scheduled weekly sex like it was an all-hands meeting. We explored pleasure à la the 1970s — blindfolds and feathers and lots of massage oil. We signed up for an online Esther Perel course, and followed her orders to go out dancing or truly savor some high-quality chocolate to attune to our erotic selves and bring them back to our unerotic bedroom.
None of it worked. And worse, I began faking enthusiasm. The more I tried to cultivate my desire and present it to him like a science-fair project, the less I felt it.
Here’s the impossible labyrinth of ‘other-validation’ that is attempting to be navigated here.
⸻
1. Martial Paradoxes and Patterns
Paradox of Growing Importance: Her husband becomes central through kids, pandemic, shared labor. Instead of fueling desire, that centrality raises anxiety. Safety suppresses experimentation.
Shift in Anxiety Priorities: Her bandwidth is spent on kids, work, and exhaustion. Sex slides to the margins.
Growth vs. Safety Polarity: She wants him steady and reliable, but also to spark novelty. Desire needs both security and stretch, but their marriage leans only on safety.
Validation Trap: His constant desire feels like pressure. Her lack of desire feels like failure. If she gives in, she betrays herself. If she withholds, she fails him. Either way, someone loses.
Risk Paradox: True intimacy would require her to stop faking, but that level of vulnerability feels unbearable. Better to perform than risk being “broken.”
Shame/Power Loop: Low desire makes her feel inadequate and gives her leverage. He feels rejected; she feels guilty. The cycle sustains itself.
⸻
2. Stressors
These are the accelerants. They look like the problem, but they’re not.
Shift in Anxiety Priorities: Her bandwidth is spent on kids, work, exhaustion. Sex slides to the margins.
Parenting Exhaustion: Pandemic life, kids, shared offices. Play disappears, logistics take over.
Pleasure as a Skill: They try feathers, oils, Esther Perel courses. But the deeper skill — being present in her body — atrophies.
Body Shame + Aging: Nearing menopause, hormones shift. Desire feels further out of reach.
Cultural Scripts: She assumes “real” desire should just show up. When it doesn’t, she blames herself.
⸻
3. Coping Mechanisms
These are the inherited patterns that kick in when stressors collide with paradoxes.
Attachment Regression: Childhood script of being the “good girl” shows back up — she works harder, tries to fix herself.
Engulfment & Self-Silencing: He pursues, she retreats. She fakes enthusiasm to keep the peace. Both disconnect.
Generational Echoes: Her mother’s pragmatism, her own childhood journals — reminders of old scripts that still shape her.
Sex-Avoidant Upbringing: Silence around sex leaves her without tools to reframe intimacy, defaulting to shame and effort.
Marriage as Driving a Car You Never Learned to Drive
The accelerator/brake model that many couples are using is too simple. The truth is more complex — a paradox-driven transmission, shaped by stress and shame, steered by coping patterns forged long before you ever met. Once you see that, you stop blaming the driver and start learning the actual mechanics of how marriages move.
Here’s the real truth
Marriage often feels like trying to drive a car where the rules are unclear and the controls don’t quite make sense. Some days you’re slamming the accelerator, other days you’re jamming the brakes, sometimes you’re hitting both at once.
The radio is blasting, the kids are screaming in the backseat, and you’re trying to hold the wheel steady while navigating traffic and late for school drop off, all while reading the manual your parents gave you for a DIFFERENT make and model of car that was designed and built 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, your partner is in the passenger seat with their own driving manual for a different make and model design 20 years ago, one they inherited from their parents, their upbringing, or past relationships. The problem is, their manual is incomplete, sometimes flat-out wrong, and totally different from yours. And they are backseat driving, trying to tell you how to operate the car.
So here you are, trying to keep the car from stalling, crashing, or spinning out, while arguing over which set of directions to follow. Nobody taught you that the car itself — the marriage — has quirks, paradoxes, and hidden wiring you can’t see until it starts breaking down.
This is a little more like it.
Here’s the code of marriage most people miss:
1. The Paradoxes & Patterns (the car’s hidden design)
Marriage isn’t built like a straight road with one accelerator and one brake. It’s built on paradoxes. We long for closeness, yet desire thrives on distance. We crave safety, yet passion requires risk. We want stability, yet novelty keeps things alive. We expect fairness, yet intimacy deepens only when we give without keeping score. These patterns aren’t bugs; they’re features of the design. If you don’t know them, you’ll fight the car instead of learning to drive it.
2. The Accelerators & Brakes (what pushes and stalls the system)
Stress from kids, shame from body changes, exhaustion, societal scripts about desire, and the sheer noise of modern life all slam the brakes on intimacy. Play, generosity, curiosity, and novelty are the accelerators. Most couples alternate between flooring it and slamming the brakes, or worse, pressing both at once. That’s why it feels jerky, unpredictable, even hopeless.
3. The Coping Mechanisms (how each partner grips the wheel)
When the ride gets rough and the car starts to jerk, we fall back on the manual we have in our hands and our taught driving lessons, no matter how good or bad. At this rate, it’s something: self-silencing or engulfing, anxious attachment or withdrawal, over-functioning or under-functioning. These coping strategies may keep the car moving for a while, but they grind down the engine. They’re survival skills, not navigation skills.
And here’s the tragedy: most couples assume the problem is the driver or the passenger. But more often than not, the real issue is that no one ever taught them how the car itself was designed to work.
Wow.
Those fights we have around our marital patterns, paradoxes, stressors, and coping mechanisms...
...what if the fights we have are not just a problem, but therein lies the answers. Like contractors during labor, what if through those challenges and struggles lie the very answers, the anxieties we most need to free ourselves from in order to have a remarkable marriage?
I read a great quote that divorcing someone because you're out of love is like selling your card because you're out of gas.
That made sense at first, but understanding the crucible process makes you realize…
Divorce or marital quiet quitting usually isn’t about running out of gas. Most couples still have fuel, affection, history, and even love.
It’s that they get exhausted trying to figure out how to drive a machine that no one ever taught them how to operate.
The kids are screaming in the backseat. Your partner is backseat-driving with their own faulty manual. You’re stomping on the accelerator and brake at the same time. Eventually, you stop asking, “How do we drive this together?” and start thinking, “Maybe I just need a new car.”
That’s the tragedy. People don’t quit or trade in marriages because they’re out of fuel. They trade them in because they never learned how the engine works, and the noise, the pressure, the confusion just feels unbearable.
You are not borken. Your marriage isn’t broken. This is how the system was designed.
We were just never taught it. And so we assume, incorrectly so, that we’re broken.
We all must choose.
The Two-Choice dilemma of marriage.
We have the fantasy that we have the choice between being anxious or not. Unfortunately, we don’t. Our choice is between one anxiety or another. Do something scary—or face problems from not doing it. Make an error by commission—or omission. Face the anxiety that things will change—or stay the same. Do (sexual) things you’ve never done—or forfeit that taste of life. Face the anxiety of growing up—or the terror of facing life as a perpetual child. Confront the fear of differentiation or the dread of marital living death.
Many people have asked me, in one way or another, “How do you get people to do such daunting things? Why would people want to put themselves through the anxiety of risking rejection and exposing their innermost selves—especially when their marriage isn’t very good? How do you motivate people to be so brave?”
Often I answer with a question: “Do you think the Pilgrims came to the New World because they were so brave—or because they couldn’t stand things where they were?”
If you check your dictionary, you’ll find the phrase “two-choice dilemma” is redundant—technically, a dilemma is a situation necessitating a choice between two or more unpleasant alternatives. However, many people think of a dilemma according to the dictionary’s secondary definition: a perplexing or awkward situation. In my clinical work I use the term “two-choice dilemma” to highlight that (a) we often try to remain in our perplexing, awkward, and painful situations to keep everything in check, (b) a choice is often required to solve our situation, (c) we usually want two choices but we only get one, and (d) we try to avoid choosing (by remaining in difficult situations) to avoid losses inherent in giving up one option for another (i.e., a solution).
The greatest thing you can do for yourself, your partner, your family,
your children and generations in your family to come
is to differentiate.
Putting Differentation Simply:
Many people think of marriage like a three-legged race. You tie yourselves together, for life, stride for stride, and try not to trip.
Now imagine trying to run a marathon like that. It’s clumsy, exhausting, and unsustainable. No wonder so many couples stumble or drop out after 20 miles. That’s emotional fusion. That’s other-validated intimacy, your balance depends on theirs, your progress tied to their pace.
But marriage isn’t meant to be a three-legged race. It’s a jointly-run marathon. Separately, but together. Each of you has your own stride, your own physique, your own willpower. You train together. You encourage each other. You celebrate the moments when your partner hits a wall and finds a way through. And at the finish line, you don’t just get the deep satisfaction of running your own race well, you get the joy of knowing you helped your best friend run their best race, too.
That’s differentiation. That’s self-validated intimacy. The paradox is that true closeness comes not from tying ourselves up in each other, but from running side-by-side, free and whole, yet deeply connected.
The Most Passionation Marriages all have exactly one thing in Common:
Each partner must individually make their own leap of faith
from other-validated intimacy to self-validated.
Each partner must individually choose to confront him/herself in order to successfully differentiate and live a remarkable life.
The Process of Differentiation Begins the Moment You Decide to Pull Over — Even only for a Moment.
There comes a point — often after the fire of the crucible has peaked — when something inside you starts to shift.
Not soften yet. But slow. Pause. Catch its breath.
It’s not a grand realization. It’s rhythm. Like contractions. Tighten. Release. Tighten again.
A knowing in the body. A whisper in the chest: This isn’t working the way we thought it would.
You don’t hear it in words. You feel it.
In the way your voice drops. The jaw unclenches. A breath returns.
Mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-silence — something in you says: “Wait. What are we doing?”
The trip started strong. The engine roared. The road was wide open.
But somewhere along the way, the map blurred. The ride got loud. The wheel turned into a tug-of-war.
Now the car is veering. The gas is low. The dashboard is blinking.
And finally — one of you, or maybe just you — hears the rhythm beneath the chaos.
And pulls over.
You ease your foot off the gas. Or even put the car in park.
Exhale. And everything begins to change.
And then, for the first time in a long time, you make a different kind of choice.
You stop trying to drive like everything’s fine. You stop pretending the manual you inherited still works for this make and model. You stop waiting for your partner to quiet down in the backseat. You begin to differentiate.
Here’s what that feels like:
1. You move your partner to your mental backseat.
Not forever. Just long enough to quiet their voice so you can finally hear your own.
You let them focus on their own anxieties and revisit their own manual, which is also likely outdated, inherited, and incomplete.
But for now, stop letting their fear, frustration, or discomfort shape your driving.
2. You turn down the noise.
You hand the kids a snack. You play a movie. You give everyone — including yourself — something to settle their nervous system. You lower the volume on everyone else’s needs, just for now. Because clarity doesn’t live in chaos.
3. You set aside the old manual.
You thank it for getting you this far. You keep the pages that still hold truth. But you stop pretending it was written for this stretch of road. And slowly, tentatively, honestly — you begin to write your own.
4. You Invite the Engineer into the Passenger Seat
You’ve been drowning in noise — the radio (stressors), the kids (life), the backseat commentary (emotional fusion).
It’s been loud for so long, you haven’t heard your own voice in a while.
And when you do hear it, it’s probably critical.
Because the ride hasn’t been smooth. The car’s been swerving. You’re the one behind the wheel.
So the conclusion feels obvious: It must be me. I must be the problem.
But that’s not the full picture. It’s just the only one you’ve had.
So now — you move aside the critic. You pause the dreamer.
And you invite in the engineer —
The one who’s steady. Curious. Willing to learn.
Willing to understand how this car actually runs.
Not how it should run.
How it functions under pressure. Under weight. Under stress.
Now, you listen. You trace the wiring. You study the systems.
You start noticing the feedback loops — the tension points — the patterns.
You become a student. Of your marriage. Of this season. Of yourself.
5. And you give yourself time.
You realize you’re not late. You’re not behind. You are exactly where the process was always leading you.
It couldn’t have happened sooner. It wouldn’t have happened differently — not with anyone else.
So you give yourself time.
Time to relearn the feel of the wheel.
Time to drive without performance.
Time to stop gripping the wheel like someone else is watching.
Time to become the kind of driver — the kind of partner — you were never taught to be, but are now ready to become.
This is the beginning of differentiation.
While the fights are often loud and dramatic, this process often is not.
You stop driving from anxiety. You start navigating from presence. You stop waiting for your partner to change first.
You start owning your side of the car.
You realize:
The road isn’t broken.
The marriage isn’t doomed.
You just needed to pull over. And remember that you can choose a new way forward — One where both of you learn to drive again.
What Does Confronting Yourself Actually Look Like?
While the word is strong, almost adversarial, the process can take any form you want, from quiet reflection to kicking your own ass.
The one thing it doesn’t have to be is reactive. It does not need to be a crisis, although often it may take that form.
1. You Get Curious
At first, it feels like friction.
Something small sets you off — a tone, a touch, a silence — and instead of lashing out or shutting down, something in you whispers:
Wait. What’s going on in me?
Not them. Me. That’s the first real move.
You start to track your own patterns like weather:
The sudden storms. The hidden fronts. The way certain winds always seem to knock you sideways.
You don’t interrogate. You inquire.
You shift from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What’s trying to be known in me?”
This is the first spark of confrontation — Not as a fight. But as a gentle turning toward.
2. Curiosity Creates Clarity and Confidence
The more you observe, the more you see.
Not just reactions — but roots. Old stories. Old fears. Coping strategies you didn’t know were still driving.
You realize: It’s not that you’re broken. It’s that you’ve been trying to protect something.
And from that insight — clarity begins to rise. And from that clarity — confidence follows.
Not bravado. Not certainty. But a quiet inner steadiness.
I can stay with myself, even here. Even now. You begin to trust your own inner signals.
You stop outsourcing your worth to how well the marriage is going.
You realize that self-trust is not selfish — it’s stabilizing.
3. It Changes How You Communicate
Everything shifts. Not just the words you say. But the way you say them.
And the way you don’t say anything at all. Because communication is not just verbal.
It’s felt. It’s the full sensory field.
It’s in the way you soften your body before a hard conversation.
It’s in the coffee mug you refill without being asked.
It’s in the space you leave when your partner isn’t ready to talk.
It’s in the “I love you” spoken without defense or demand.
You start to send new signals. Signals of presence. Signals of honesty. Signals of non-frantic love.
And your partner may feel it before they understand it.
Because something in you is different.
Not perfect. Not polished. But anchored. This is what confronting yourself looks like:
Not fixing. Not blaming.
Just becoming more deeply fluent in your own humanity —
and inviting your partner into that fluency, one grounded signal at a time.
Reaching Your Softening Point
Aka Experiencing Your Grinch Moment
In glass blowing, there is a softening point at around 1200 - 2000 degrees. Up until then, the fire feels unbearable. Anxiety spikes, coping patterns flare, silence and engulfment lock the system. You want out. Every instinct says, turn down the heat, flee the fire, protect yourself.
But then comes the softening. The moment when the rigid glass finally begins to yield. Not breaking, not shattering — but becoming pliable.
That’s the Grinch moment. When you realize the fire isn’t punishment, it’s transformation. When the need to control, to extract, to demand reciprocity melts away. When you discover that your wholeness isn’t held hostage by your partner’s validation, but by your own willingness to stand in the heat and stay present.
The Grinch has stolen everything. He’s stripped Whoville bare—presents, stockings, feasts, even the last can of Who-hash. In his mind, he’s finally “won.” He’s ended Christmas.
But then, from the top of Mount Crumpit, bags of stolen gifts piled high, he pauses. Down in the valley, the Whos begin to stir. He braces for wails, for anger, for despair.
Instead—he hears singing. Soft at first, then rising. No gifts. No feast. No trappings of celebration. Just voices, joined together.
And that’s when it happens.
The Grinch realizes Christmas was never about the presents. It was about presence. About connection. About something deeper that cannot be stolen.
In that instant, something shifts inside him. His face softens. His heart, famously “two sizes too small,” begins to grow. He’s undone—not by guilt, not by punishment, but by presence. By love that needs no conditions.
That’s the Grinch moment. It’s the softening point. The fire doesn’t break him. It reshapes him. And suddenly, he’s free—no longer hoarding, no longer protecting, no longer stealing. He gives. He joins. He becomes part of the very song he tried to silence.
This is what happens in the crucible of marriage when one partner differentiates. The grip of anxiety, resentment, and fear loosens. You see clearly: intimacy isn’t about extracting or controlling. It’s about presence.
From here, everything changes. The marriage can be shaped. Intimacy can be reimagined. And freedom — real freedom — becomes possible.
“Marriage was not designed to make you happy.
It is designed to make you grow up.”
David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage
Post-Softening Point: What Happens Next
Once you reach your Grinch moment, a few things shift almost immediately.
Clarity of Desire: You begin to see more clearly what you actually want — and you gain the courage to move toward it without shame or apology.
Clarity of Voice: You speak with greater confidence, compassion, and connection. You no longer fumble in resentment or silence; you can name your needs without fear.
Freedom to Experiment: You run better experiments. You try new ways of loving, connecting, and initiating. And the outcomes, whether they succeed or fail, no longer define your worth. Rejection isn’t a personal indictment. It’s simply data.
Expanded Empathy: Having experienced your own release, you naturally long to help your partner reach theirs. Both selflessly — because you love them — and selfishly — because their freedom will deepen your shared life.
New Paradoxes of Strength: Together but separate. Dependent yet free. Close but not fused. This is the paradoxical power of differentiation: you can finally hold both intimacy and individuality without fear.
The Risk of Lingering in the Crucible
The crucible is essential. It’s the heat of conflict, disappointment, and anxiety that softens us, making us pliable enough to grow and differentiate. Without the fire, nothing changes.
But here’s the paradox: stay in the crucible too long, and the very same fire that can transform a marriage can also destroy it.
When glass is left in the furnace too long without being worked, one of two things happens:
It collapses under its own weight. Molten glass becomes too soft, too runny, and loses its shape. Instead of being formed into something beautiful, it slumps into a puddle on the floor of the furnace.
It burns out or devitrifies. The surface of the glass starts to crystallize, turning cloudy and brittle. Once this happens, the piece can’t be saved — it will never regain clarity or strength.
That’s the crucible parallel. If a marriage stays in the fire of anxiety and gridlock too long without movement — without shaping, experimenting, differentiating — the relationship collapses into resignation or burns out into bitterness. That’s when people “quit” (divorce, withdraw, or numb out).
The timing matters. The fire is essential to softening the glass — but the longer you linger in it without working the material, the more fragile, unstable, and likely to break it becomes.
Glassblowers know this well. If molten glass sits in the furnace without being worked, one of two things happens. It collapses under its own weight, losing all form. Or it begins to devitrify, becoming cloudy and brittle until it can no longer be saved.
Marriage is no different. When couples stay stuck in emotional gridlock without shaping, experimenting, or moving forward, the relationship collapses into resignation or hardens into bitterness. That’s when people “quit” — through divorce, withdrawal, or emotional shutdown.
The fire is not the enemy. The danger is in lingering too long without movement. Growth requires timing. Courage. Action. You must work the glass while it is hot.