Navigating the Crossroads of Marriage: An Open Letter

Finding a Path Forward in Relationships

Dear R.,

A few days ago, you contacted my colleague Amos Prives, seeking advice regarding the crossroads you are facing. You wrote that you are 40 years old and that you appreciate and like your wife, but your satisfaction is clouded by unmet emotional needs. You lack romance, love, thrills, and more interest, and you don't want to give them up. For these reasons, you are toying with the idea of separation. The main barrier for you right now is the difficulty a separation may cause for your extended family and children.

I read the serious answer you received from Prieves, and I know there is a reason why you turned to him and not to me. Even so, I allow myself to answer you and offer another point of view, because I think the trap you are in is quite common, and it is important to me that others in similar situations know there is another way to see things.

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I'll start from the end: the advice you received from Prieves is likely to lead you to have an extramarital affair. This is not a judgmental statement but a professional prediction, and I hope you can treat it like a traffic report informing you of a serious traffic jam ahead if you continue on this road.

From my perspective as a couples therapist, the blind spot in Prieves' educated answer is the dynamic between you and your wife. The way you describe the outbursts and despondency in your connection suggests you see the poor state of the relationship as a given, like an old computer that is starting to falter, and you are considering whether it is worthwhile to replace it.

Your wife is not "something" but "someone," and most likely, you did not enter this marriage to get a divorce. The melancholy and the sense of weight and responsibility on your shoulders are palpable. However, a very central fact is completely omitted from this description: your feelings within the relationship result from the dynamic you created with your wife. This dynamic escalated, at least in part, because of the ineffective way you tried over the years to get your emotional needs met.

Understanding Ineffective Coping Mechanisms

When our needs are not met in a relationship, there are three common ways to reduce distress: give up our needs, get the other party to give up their needs, or disconnect from our feelings. It seems the way that helped you survive the relationship for many years was giving up your needs. When this solution didn't work, you probably also learned to detach from your feelings. My hypothesis is primarily based on the fact that despite the problems in the relationship bothering you to the point of considering divorce, you chose to consult a foreign psychologist before sharing your troubles with your wife.

Your letter, despite the great pain it presents, does not express much sadness and grief. The main barrier you refer to is the pain of the children and the extended family, but there are two central people in this drama—yourself and your wife—and you don't talk about their pain at all.

Even if separation from your wife seems like it will bring you joy, you did not enter this marriage to get a divorce. At the age of 20, you never imagined that at 40 you would feel, as Amir Lev wrote in the song "Don't worry":

"Heavy meals destroy me

I have no strength for drugs

A comfortable armchair is the beginning of the end

The most important thing is the children"

The Importance of Vulnerability

This sorrow, the loss, and the pain about yourself, the place you arrived at, and the paths you did not take are absent from your letter. Since you don't make room for your deep pains, it's easy to understand why you are unable to relate to the pain your wife will experience if you break up with her by surprise, have an affair, or continue to live next to her in a pleasant robotic way.

The solutions you used to last in your marriage—compliance and surrender—worked only in the short term and exacted prices that became higher over time. These tactics reduced tensions in the short term but led you to the undesirable point where you are today. Frequent disconnection may have eased your pain but contributed to the problem not being resolved.

Prieves' alternatives work with your defenders. Even if you understand "what's behind the romantic dreams you cultivate" without dealing with the defense mechanisms you use to avoid pain, you won't be able to escape the outbursts transformatively. You may have an affair or divorce your wife and find a new partner, and initially, things will be easier. But if you want to shake up your life and marriage to allow growth, it's important to start allowing your vulnerability to hurt.

If you truly want to move forward, the most urgent thing is to start bringing your vulnerability to your wife. Right now, you don't, and it's important to understand what threatens you about talking about your true feelings. Gradually, you will also see things in her that you currently do not see.

The Nature of Love and Relationships

The American psychoanalyst Steven Mitchell, in his book "Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time," published posthumously, explains that falling in love is not a fantasy. It is a rare and powerful magic, but because love is such a strong experience, it makes us dependent, helpless, and places us in a fragile and needy position. Mitchell explains that describing your wife as a stable and predictable person is a fantasy. This defense allowed you to survive the relationship but also destroyed it. Your wife is a mysterious, deep creature you can never fully control.

Dear R., much vitality, joy, and excitement lie in the authentic recognition that there is no way to guarantee that your wife will always love you and never prefer someone else or break your heart.

Ethical Considerations in Relationships

In the perspective of the philosopher Martin Buber, it is worth remembering that your wife is a subject, not an object. We enter and stay in relationships to fulfill our needs, but our partners do not exist solely to satisfy our emotional needs. Your wife is not "something." She is "someone." Over the years, as you defended yourself and distanced yourself, you began to forget that your wife is a person with her own center of experience.

Closed in your den and lonely inside the house, your wife has become an object in your imagination, a foreign element that disturbs you, a barrier to happiness. The questions Prieves directed you to think about are fascinating, but their blindness to the ethical questions relevant to a long-term monogamous relationship demonstrates why individual therapy can be destructive to a relationship.

The ethical perspective directs us to see how your question and Prieves' answer demonstrate how we easily apply capitalist thinking to romantic relationships. To simplify Prieves' words: if the problem is with you (stemming from childish fantasies), it is unlikely you will get a better deal outside, so you are advised to stay. If the problem is not you, you must decide whether to stay and settle for less but safe, or take a risk for a better deal outside the relationship.

Ethical and Emotional Considerations

Sociologist Eva Illouz, in her new and important book, emphasizes the moral distortion in organizing marital relations as market relations. Ending a relationship is a difficult psychological experience, accepted as a matter of course in cultures saturated with sexualization and emotional volatility. It increases the chance of suicide, reduces the desire to start new relationships, causes depression, and damages self-perception and self-worth. It is appropriate to examine the limits of consent guiding relationships.

In the spirit of Prieves' answer, I end with a quote from Wisława Szymborska's "Happy Love":

"Happy love, is it necessary?

Good taste and common sense teach to keep quiet about it

As a scandal from the upper echelons of life.

Great children are born without its help.

It never successfully populated the globe,

After all, it only happens rarely.

Those who do not know happy love

Claim that there is no happy love anywhere.

With this faith, it will be easy for them to live, and also to die."

(from "End and Beginning," "Shades" Publishing House, 1996)

Kind regards,