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We all know marriage takes work. But no one tells you what kind of work.
We assume it’s about fighting less, communicating better, keeping the passion alive.
But the real work? It’s learning to sit with your own discomfort when love stops matching your expectations. It’s realizing that the person you adore will also be the person who annoys you in ways no one else ever has. It’s learning that “forever” isn’t just something you say, it’s something you choose—over and over, even on the days you don’t feel like it.
Most of us step into relationships with some version of a fantasy: Love should feel easy. If it’s hard, something is wrong. If I’m unhappy, I must have chosen the wrong person. If they loved me enough, they would just know what I need. And if I have to ask, it doesn’t count.
These are the lies we carry.
Marriage, commitment, real partnership—these things don’t run on magic. They run on daily choices. On the willingness to sit in discomfort, to stretch beyond what feels good, to hold space for the moments when love is unrecognizable. Some days, love feels like the partner who left their socks in the same damn place again. It feels like resentment simmering under the surface of a conversation about taking out the trash. It feels like balancing the never-ending scorecard of who does what, who carries more, who gets more space to be tired.
It feels like the quiet, unresolved tension of different libidos, different needs for connection, different ways of communicating love. One person craves words, the other shows love through action. One person needs space, the other needs closeness. One wants sex to feel connected, the other needs to feel connected before sex even enters the picture. These differences, the ones we think love should smooth over, don’t disappear. They become the daily work of understanding, negotiating, and choosing not to resent the ways you are fundamentally not the same.
There are nights when you lie in bed, inches apart but feeling miles away, wondering if this distance is normal or a warning sign. There are fights that start over something as small as a misplaced coffee mug but unravel into something deeper—years of feeling unseen, unappreciated, misunderstood. There are mornings when your partner leaves for work, and instead of a kiss, there’s just a rushed goodbye, and you wonder when “us” started feeling more like “me” and “you.”
Love doesn’t always feel like love. Sometimes, it feels like obligation. Like effort. Like the weight of all the unsaid things sitting between you. It’s easy to look at this and think, Is this what it’s supposed to be? Stress has a way of distorting everything, making you forget the reasons you chose this person in the first place.
We expect love to be grand. To announce itself. To feel like certainty. But love doesn’t crash through the door with flowers and a speech. It doesn’t cue the orchestra at just the right moment or stop time with a cinematic kiss. Love is quieter than that. It slips in unnoticed, camouflaged as routine, mistaken for ordinary.
Love is in the way they shift the car seat back because they know you’ll be driving next. It’s the way they wordlessly place your keys by the door because they know you’ll forget, the way they tilt their phone screen down at dinner so they’re fully present, the way they let you ramble about something that doesn’t interest them but they listen anyway—because it interests you. The small, invisible acts— how they don’t roll their eyes when you retell the same story, because they love the way you light up when you tell it. The way they send a text that just says, Thinking about you, on a day when you don’t even realize you needed it. The way they can tell the difference between your silence that means I need space and your silence that means Please, don’t go.
Love isn’t in the fireworks; it’s in the flickers—the small flashes of consideration, the details remembered, the weight quietly carried. It’s how they let you rant about a bad day, knowing you don’t need a solution, just a place to put it all down. It’s in the way they carry your exhaustion alongside their own, the way they fight fair even when they’re furious, the way they remember the details of stories you forgot you even told them.
We don’t lose love. We stop noticing it. We search for something louder, something that shakes us, forgetting that love is more often a whisper. And if we’re not careful, we’ll spend our lives chasing something we’ve already found, waiting for a moment that has been unfolding all along. It doesn’t come with a neon sign flashing, This is it. Pay attention. It sneaks in, settles into the spaces between grocery lists and doctor’s appointments, blends into the hum of everyday life.
Love isn’t the crescendo—it’s the quiet, the in-between, the unremarkable moments we overlook because we’re too busy searching for something bigger. Love hides in the things we don’t think to name. It’s in the way they wait to start a show until you’re on the couch next to them, in the way they leave your favorite mug at the front of the cabinet so you don’t have to reach for it in the morning, in how they learn the exact tone in your voice that means I’m not okay before you say a word.
Love isn’t missing. It’s just quieter than we expected. And if we’re not careful, we’ll spend a lifetime chasing the idea of love while standing right in the middle of it.
So why do people stay in forever relationships when they’re hard? Why do they keep showing up, even when love stops looking the way they thought it would? Because love, when built over time, is not about constant happiness. It’s about belonging. It’s about the deep, steady knowing that no matter how hard today is, you don’t have to do it alone. It’s about creating a life with someone who sees you, even in your worst moments, and still chooses you.
Maybe you’re two years in, and every conversation about plans for the weekend turns into an argument about who does more. Maybe it’s been five years, and intimacy has taken a backseat to the sheer effort of keeping everything running. Maybe you’re caught in a loop where one of you always feels unheard, and the other always feels like they’re failing. These aren’t signs that love is gone. They’re signs that love is being tested, stretched, reshaped into something deeper, something more real.
The hardest thing about love is that it requires faith. Not the blind kind, not the naive kind, but the kind that chooses to see what is real instead of chasing what is missing. The kind that knows love isn’t just a feeling—it’s a practice.
And the ones who build it, who return to it, who choose it again and again? They are the ones who end up with something worth holding onto.
This is not what I thought love would feel like. But maybe, just maybe, it’s better.
~
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