I’m not married nor am I in a relationship. I want to know when it’s time for me to be with a partner and get married, why might it not go on? From your experience, was love not enough to keep a marriage going? Can you be two loving and caring people but you just don’t resume your relationship and end it amicably? What happens? Why does it not go on if it was based on something strong?
7 comments
MOTHER IN LAW
Either party can fall out of love and decide to stop fighting for the relationship. I never thought I would end up divorced, much less become a divorced dad. Yet here I am. I obviously can’t be objective, but I am the best dad/husband I know. Never had a fight, no drinking, smoking, drugs, cheating, no money issues. I gave my ex everything, but it wasn’t enough. At some point she fell out of love and decided to leave.
I think me and my husband are in love, or something like that. But he doesn’t love me how I want to be loved. He doesn’t treat me the way I want to be treated. At a certain point I’m going to have to choose myself. That’s just the sad facts. I think a lot of marriages go that way.
My advice would be to not marry someone before they’ve shown you they will follow through on things they promise you.
You can love anyone. You can love someone you are not compatible with. Or even someone abusive. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you should be with them. And sometimes we don’t see who a person is until after we marry them. Sometimes people change. And sometimes we always knew. But we married them anyway, thinking love would be enough.
Love isn’t enough by itself. Marriages are built on trust and respect.
My love based marriage is ending because my husband and I have realized after 9 years together that we are just not compatible enough to be together for the rest of our lives. When we decided to separate, we were both still in love and it hurt us both horribly, but we realized we were only talking in circles and couldn’t see any way forward that didn’t involve us parting ways eventually.
The problem with love is that it’s not stable enough to build a marriage on. Love ebbs and flows over time, so if you aren’t compatible in ways that matter, such as morals, values, having kids, religion, finance, resolving conflict, etc., all these factors will erode what affection you started out with eventually. Love needs to be nurtured, and it’s hard to nurture love for someone who was never on the same page as you on what matters.