Married couples who stay together are admired...

[Believe_N_Me]

...not because of a perfect marriage but because they overcame challenges and obstacles.

I find this to be very true.

I know of couples who stayed together through affairs, addictions, and even couples who came back to reconcile after separation and divorce. This shows the love they have for the life they built together and for their children and the descendants to come.

I have never seen anyone admire divorced people who remarried to someone whom they're never going to have children and build a family with. The public just doesn't find these second-chance relationships where no children are born from the relationship as inspiring or a cause for celebration.

It appears that such relationships are only to benefit the two people in it. For example, if an older divorcee remarries, that relationship really is just so she can have a companion, and not become a burden to her grown children. Her new man isn't exactly going to be daddy to her children. That relationship belongs only to her. And since they don't have children together due to their inability to produce children, what legacy are they really leaving? She has no real value to his clan so if he dies first, welps, that's it for her. Who from his clan is going to keep tabs on her when there is no child to be the link? She is only in their thoughts if she has some relation to them. Perhaps her new man was connected to her maternal clan in some way. If her new man is an introvert who isn't involved with his clan, it's likely that his own clan won't even know much about her.

But married couples who reconcile are viewed as strong and everyone rejoices.

A man whose extra-marital affairs became public scandal threw a retirement party for his wife. The guests showered them with compliments about the longevity of their marriage and hoped their own marriages would outlast the struggles of marital life.

A man abandoned his wife and young children, and married another woman. After 55 years of living separate lives, he found his way back to the first wife and proposed to remarry her. His grown children were overjoyed, and the community rejoiced at their renewed vows. 

People like to see families stay in tact. They like to see parents, and grandparents stay together so that children have elders who are their blood.

[AppleBrook]

for some, it is an obligations that they adhere.  for few others, it is an excuse to keep the marriage.  each "stayed" marriage has its own reasons.  it is not an one size fits all. 

[theking]

..it is not an one size fits all.

ZACTLY!

It's difficult for ignorant people to see that common sense common knowledge FACT!

FACT is some married couples are admired, some are not especially those that hate each other but feel forced to stay together i.e., sleeping in separate bedrooms, only interact when absolutely needed, etc.

[Dok_Champa]

Because they still choose each other thru the highs and the lows, flaws...

[theking]

Here some married couple sample scenarios and situations that are not admired by others:




So as I've stated, some married couple are admired, some are not, JUST THE FACT!

Also, as stated, living a life of misery ain't much livin...SAD BUT TRUE!

[JonniJacko]

...not because of a perfect marriage but because they overcame challenges and obstacles.

I find this to be very true.

I know of couples who stayed together through affairs, addictions, and even couples who came back to reconcile after separation and divorce. This shows the love they have for the life they built together and for their children and the descendants to come.

I have never seen anyone admire divorced people who remarried to someone whom they're never going to have children and build a family with. The public just doesn't find these second-chance relationships where no children are born from the relationship as inspiring or a cause for celebration.

It appears that such relationships are only to benefit the two people in it. For example, if an older divorcee remarries, that relationship really is just so she can have a companion, and not become a burden to her grown children. Her new man isn't exactly going to be daddy to her children. That relationship belongs only to her. And since they don't have children together due to their inability to produce children, what legacy are they really leaving? She has no real value to his clan so if he dies first, welps, that's it for her. Who from his clan is going to keep tabs on her when there is no child to be the link? She is only in their thoughts if she has some relation to them. Perhaps her new man was connected to her maternal clan in some way. If her new man is an introvert who isn't involved with his clan, it's likely that his own clan won't even know much about her.

But married couples who reconcile are viewed as strong and everyone rejoices.

A man whose extra-marital affairs became public scandal threw a retirement party for his wife. The guests showered them with compliments about the longevity of their marriage and hoped their own marriages would outlast the struggles of marital life.

A man abandoned his wife and young children, and married another woman. After 55 years of living separate lives, he found his way back to the first wife and proposed to remarry her. His grown children were overjoyed, and the community rejoiced at their renewed vows. 

People like to see families stay in tact. They like to see parents, and grandparents stay together so that children have elders who are their blood.

I don't know about this BNM, where I'm from, if someone stays with a cheater or gets back with one- they lose respect forever.....Di vorce people who co-parents and are trying their best and still giving their children their all- are highly respected.

People in this side of the world- they respect people who can do the right thing, over the "best" thing and will die for it even if it means dying alone.....haha ha

[theking]

NOPE, DEFINITELY NOT ADMIRABLE...

I’m in a marriage that feels like a quiet hostage situation, and I’ve realized that I’m not staying for the love; I’m staying because I’m terrified of the version of myself I’ll have to become to burn my entire life to the ground.

Nobody forced me to stay.

That’s the part I have to keep reminding myself, because the hostage metaphor only goes so far.

There is no captor. There is no threat.

There is just a life I built with another person, over many years, that has somehow become a structure I can’t see my way out of—not because the doors are locked, but because walking through them would require burning down everything on the other side.

The marriage is not violent. It is not cruel in any way I could point to in court. It is something harder to explain than that.

It is quiet. It is a little gray. It is the specific loneliness of being in a room with someone who knows you well and sees you less and less.

It is going to bed next to a person and lying there in the dark with a feeling that has no clean name—not hatred, not even sadness exactly, more like the awareness of an absence where something used to be.

I have been lying next to that absence for long enough that I’ve started to think of it as the furniture. Just part of the room. Just how things are.

I know that’s not okay. I know it while I’m writing it. I knew it before I started writing it. But knowing it has not, so far, changed anything.

What I mean by hostage

I mean that I have negotiated myself down to a version of this life I can survive.

Not thrive in. Survive. I have learned which topics to avoid, which moods to read, and which version of myself to bring to which situation. I have gotten very good at managing an atmosphere. I have, without ever deciding to, become someone whose primary domestic skill is keeping the temperature of the room from tipping into something worse.

That’s the hostage part. Not that he’s done anything to make me feel that way—or not only that. But that I have adapted so thoroughly to the conditions of this particular life that I have arranged myself around it rather than inside it. That I am always slightly braced. Always monitoring. Always one small degree away from full presence because full presence, in this life, doesn’t feel entirely safe.

I don’t think he knows this. I’m not sure I fully knew it until I said it out loud to a friend six months ago and watched her face go very still.

I know what I’m staying for, and it isn’t him
People stay in marriages for a lot of reasons that aren’t love. Comfort. Children. Money. Fear. Inertia. The specific exhaustion of having already invested so much that the idea of stopping feels like a loss too large to compute.

I’m familiar with most of those.

But the one I keep coming back to is simpler and harder to say. I am staying because leaving would require me to become someone I’m not sure I have in me. Not the paperwork, not the logistics, not even the grief. The becoming.

Leaving this life means becoming the person who left it. Who burned the house down. Who decided that what she needed mattered more than what she’d built. Who looked at fifteen years of shared history and said: This isn’t enough, and I’m going anyway.

I don’t know if I’m that person.

I’m not sure I want to be that person, even though I know she might be freer than I am. There is something about the scorched-earth version of this—the packing, the telling, the watching of a shared life come apart—that feels like a violence I’m not sure I’m capable of committing, even against a situation that is slowly committing one against me.

What I’m actually afraid of
Not being alone. I’ve been alone before, and I know I can do it.

Not starting over. Hard, but survivable.

What I’m afraid of is the in-between. The moment after the match is struck and before anything new exists. The period of pure rubble, where I am just a person who blew up her life and has to figure out what comes next from inside the ruins.

I’m afraid of who I’ll be in that period. Not in a romantic sense—I’m not worried about being unlovable or undesirable or any of the things women are told to be afraid of when a marriage ends. I’m worried about the version of me that will have to hold this alone. That will have to sit inside the weight of having decided this and live there while everything settles.

She sounds exhausting. She sounds like she’ll need a lot of things I don’t currently know how to give her.

And I don’t have a safety net for her either. I know what that version of life costs, in money and energy and the particular toll of rebuilding from scratch, and the cost is real and it is high and I’m not sure I have the reserves for it right now.

So I stay. And I lie next to the absence. And I tell myself I’m being practical.

What nobody tells you about the quiet ones
The loud marriages are easier to leave. There’s evidence. There’s a clear story. There’s a reason you can give people that they’ll nod at and understand.

The quiet ones are harder. Because nothing is wrong, exactly. Because he is not a bad man. Because the marriage has the shape of a marriage—shared history, shared property, shared habits—even if it has lost some of the substance.

And because the question you have to answer, if you’re honest, is not “is this a bad situation?” but “is this enough?”

That question is harder to answer. And the answer, even when you know it, is harder to act on. Because not enough isn’t the same as unlivable. Because you can survive not enough for a very long time before it becomes a reason.

I’ve been surviving it for a while now.

[JonniJacko]

Yes, seen many couples get back together or stay together, and people are relieved...Not happy for them per se, but relieved that at least they are each other's liability for now...or again....LOL