100% of Marriages End in Death Or Divorce
How to Actually Stay in Love
I’m not perfect and nor is my relationship, but the simple fact of the matter is this…
We don’t talk about this enough: 100% of marriages end in either death or divorce.
Morbid as it may be, this was one of my biggest takeaways from James Sexton’s (A successful Divorce Attorney) book How To Stay In Love.
So… Morbid? Maybe. But it’s clarifying. Most relationships don’t implode from one big fight, they dissolve from a thousand papercuts: feeling unseen, unappreciated, or unprioritized. And when that erosion happens, temptation doesn’t always show up as another person. Sometimes it’s secrecy around money. Sometimes it’s a distraction that becomes an escape. Sometimes it’s emotional distance so slow you don’t notice it until it’s wide.
So how do you stay in love, actually in love, once you’ve found the right person?
As someone who’s been with their partner for 14 years as of this writing, these are my biggest takeaways and the advice I’m taking with me into the next season of my marriage…
1. You don’t get to love someone à la carte.
When you choose your partner, you choose all of them. The charming parts, the complicated parts, the “are you okay?” moments. As hard as that whole person may be to love at times, that’s what you’ve signed up for. But here’s the flip: it’s also what THEY signed up for in YOU. It’s so easy to get frustrated with your partner when they are not being the best version of themself, but let me ask you this: Would you want someone to love only your highlight reel and disappear the second you’re messy, emotional, or overwhelmed?
Exactly.
Grace is love in practice. You have to offer the same softness you hope to receive.
2. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask: Would I date me right now?
We are egotistical creatures. We are the center of our own universe. Yet, most times we are thinking about how people are relating to US, not thinking about how we are relating to those around us.
Think about who you were when you met your spouse. Think about how they experienced you, what qualities they really loved about you, the things they told their friends and family about you before those people got to meet you and see for themselves just how great you were…
Now, go stand in front of a mirror and not from a place of self-criticism, but from a place of self-awareness, imagine that you were meeting your partner for the first time again…. TODAY.
Would you be drawn to who you are?
Are you bringing generosity, fun, accountability, sincerity, presence, and kindness?
Are you bearing witness to them and appreciating the things they do, big and small, with words of gratitude and delight?
OR
Are you venting, withdrawing, or asking for things you’re not giving?
Are you holding them to standards and ideals that you’re not willing to hold yourself to?
Marriage thrives when both people stay conscious of who they’re becoming, not just who they were when they met.
3. Renegotiate your marriage every seven years.
Biologically, you’re nearly a new human every seven years. Emotionally? Absolutely. As someone who’s been in her relationship for 14 years, this was a really striking idea, to renegotiate every seven years. I realized in this insight that even if we’re not deliberately renegotiating our marriage contract every seven years, we ARE falling into patterns, that when upheld long enough, become an unintentional emotional contract between us, so it’s important to be intentional about it. If you became the “Mr Fix It” in the house, but you never wanted that role, could now be a time to talk about it? If your spouse became the “The Banker” in the house but hates what that responsibility does to your partnership, how could you reinvent this aspect?
The person you married is not the same person you live with now. Marriage works when you honor the evolving human in front of you.
Every few years, ask:
What do we need now?
What’s working?
What’s not?
Who are we becoming individually—and together?
Intentional recalibration prevents accidental drift.
4. The “Divorce Thought Experiment” (that actually saves marriages).
This idea really got me. Do a “Divorce Thought Experiment exercise” together… BUT not because you should divorce.
BUT because simply by imagining what you BOTH would be doing “after” a divorce shows you what’s missing from your life now.
If you divorced tomorrow:
How would you share the kids? If custody suddenly becomes 50/50 in divorce, why isn’t the load shared more evenly now? If the holidays all of a sudden look more evenly split between families (e.g. Thanksgiving with my parents, Christmas with yours) then why are you making things difficult on both of you and the kids now? Using “hypothetical co-parenting as a divorced couple” to audit your real-life partnership today will probably illuminate some BIG things that you could change up now that would dramatically improve your ability to be good parents to your kids, good partners to each other, and actually enjoy your life and your commitments more as a result. For example, let’s say that in your ideal split you have a 50/50 custody with the kids. One spouse is on duty Mon - Wed morning, the other Wed afternoon - Fri and then you swap weekends so you both get two weekends per month with the kiddos, and then you were guaranteed to have the kids the weeks of Thanksgiving and Easter, with your spouse getting Christmas and Fourth of July. If you knew this was going to be your schedule, per court order, for the next 10 years, how would that make you feel? How would you plan for and use that time with your kids? And then too…
How would you plan for and use the time you DIDN’T HAVE the kids? Have you ever noticed that divorced people have hobbies? Friendships? A space that says ‘this is my aesthetic and how I keep my home’? A lot of them lose weight, and finally take that trip they were always talking about…
So let me ask you this: Why NOT? Why NOT now? Why wait for a crisis to reclaim parts of yourself?
There’s actually something really cool about learning from divorced couples while you are still married so that you have the opportunity to start integrating life changes now that not only serve you as an individual, but serve your spouse, your marriage, your kids, and collectively your family!
Aliveness shouldn’t be a post-divorce perk… especially when you have a loving partner to team up with on this now.
5. Decide what success looks like—for both of you.
On the topic of “court ordered contracts” you can’t build a life together if you’re building silent, separate visions. One of the best aspects of marriage is that life is big and expanding. That and that alone means life is also complex. When complexity exists without boundaries or mutually-understood paths for channeling those complexities through, you have chaos. And chaos is a really hard place to operate from as a team. As an individual, sure it works. As a team? No. Teams need to know what plays are going to get run and how to run those plays.
Talking about the things most people avoid is like giving your marriage a playbook, and learning how to run those plays together, so that you can operate independently while moving in the same direction for the success of the team.
Here are a few categories to consider and some of the questions you could ask.
Finances
What are our expectations for earning, spending, saving?
How transparent will we be?
What financial goals matter to us?
Intimacy (emotional + physical)
What does connection look like to each of us?
What does a satisfying intimate life require?
How do we talk about it when we drift?
Home
What environment do we each need?
Who does what?
What systems keep resentment out of the daily grind?
Family
What memories do we want to create?
What boundaries are non-negotiable?
What does true partnership in parenting look like?
Marriage Itself
How do we stay connected when life gets loud?
What rituals or habits keep us choosing each other?
Where in the F do you find the time to do all of this marriage management?
You might be thinking: This is a lot. Who has time to go through all of this?
But let me point something out:
The year you got married, the two of you spent hours, probably days, maybe even weeks planning one single day. Guest lists. Venue tours. Food tastings. Meetings with bands or DJs. Seating charts. Dress fittings. Conversations about who would stand up in the wedding. Invitations designed, addressed, stamped, mailed.
Add it all up and you invested a staggering amount of time into just one thing: the wedding.
If you could FIND and SPEND that much time working on your marriage in the year you said “I do”… you can FIND and SPEND at least a fraction of it (which is what going over all of this would take with your spouse) working on the actual partnership you’re in.
And frankly, I think its essential you do it.
Because again: 100% of marriages end in death or divorce.
And while sadly, you don’t control which one you get… You do control whether you show up for each other in the meantime.
So… How to Stay In Love, Really
Staying in love isn’t an accident. It’s a choice you make daily through attention, honesty, curiosity, generosity, and intention.
You can let the papercuts pile up, or you can tend to the relationship like something alive and evolving, because it is. It really is.
One path is passive, the other is partnership.
You choose.
