Is Your Long Marriage Worth Saving?

Photo by Andrew Southam

It’s a hard question to answer, “Is my longtime marriage worth saving” and only you and your partner can answer it. But I can say this, I believe it’s worth the effort.

 Here’s why:

Your longtime partner has seen you at every age.

They remember the woman who danced wildly the night you met. The one who built something from nothing, who showed up for the kids, who took up painting at 53 because she finally had time. When they look at you, they don't just see who you are now. They see all of it, every version, layered underneath. And you see the same when you look at them.

Author and founder of MEA (Modern Elder Academy) Chip Conley calls this "age-fluidity." In his book Learning to Love Midlife he describes it as the ability to move fluidly between the ages and stages of your life rather than being fixed to any one of them. A longtime partner makes that possible in a way no new relationship can. Their gaze holds your whole history. That is not a small thing.

And yet.

One day you wake up and mortality is looking you straight in the face. You hadn't expected this confrontation quite so soon, and then you remember that you are in late midlife. You look over at your partner, blissfully sleeping beside you, and the question arrives before you're ready for it: is this who I want to spend the rest of my life with?

It’s a confronting question for both of you. With people living longer, This can mean 30 or even 40 years left. That’s a lot of time, most of your adult life and it’s worth taking seriously by evaluating how you want these years to look and feel like. That can mean looking at your current values which likely have shifted from when you were younger. What is important to you, do you want a chance to impart wisdom, live someone exotic or relax in the countryside. Can both of your needs co-exist?  

The distance doesn't usually arrive all at once. It builds slowly, in the years spent managing logistics, raising children, building careers, surviving hard seasons. Two people can share a life for decades and gradually lose track of who the other person has become. Reconnecting starts with something simpler than most couples expect: genuine curiosity about the person sitting across from you.

If you can feel that connection again you can then look at what you both want, figure out where you align and where you don’t. If you have areas where you don’t align, that’s okay. I tell couples there is space for autonomy and genuine compromise in a long relationship. Working on creating safe secure base within the relationship allows you to do things independently and feel good about it. In fact, doing the things you most love on your own makes you more interesting to your partner and allows you to share new things with each other. It makes you excited to see each other instead of dreading hearing the same old stories again.

A new relationship with the same person is possible. It just needs a little room to become itself.

If you're somewhere in that uncertain place right now, I'd love to talk. Reach out to tracy@tracysondern.com for a free consultation.

Written by Tracy Sondern, LMFT Couples Counselor. Located in Los Feliz and Online throughout California.