We are good at noticing when one or both partners fail for lack of effort. They weren’t persistent enough. They weren’t courageous enough. They didn’t follow through on the plans they made.
But what if that’s not the problem? What if they were trying too hard when their target was wrong?
The Transactional Standard
Ginny and Thomas had a very “fair” marriage. She did her part, he did his. The exchange was equal, and most people, including both of them for most of their marriage, considered this good. Not cold. It felt like respect and like intentionally not being a burden to either person.
But it located the marriage in a ledger. It became more like accounting than something either of them would describe as truly “satisfying” or “enriching.” They couldn’t figure out what was wrong. They didn’t have a notion of the “ideal” to know any better.
These marriages appear to remain stable until a crisis, illness, or genuine need tips the ledger badly. When this happens, the framework has no resources. Their notion of “fairness” can’t hold what true commitment was supposed to hold.
In these marriages, the goal is to deliver “emotional wellbeing.” They might say “I love you because you make me happy” and mean it. As long as they feel safe, secure, and, well, content, they consider it a good marriage.
This one gets culturally encouraged. It’s probably the most quietly destructive of the three. It assigns to one person or the institution of marriage itself, a “weight” it just can’t bear. “Be my best friend, my entire community, my therapeutic ally, and the healing force for a world that let me down.”
And it converts every season of unhappiness into evidence that something is wrong with the marriage, rather than evidence that you’re alive, that you need community, satisfying work, and a network of friends. And that therapists are paid for a reason.
When misery finds you, as it’s likely to do in every life, you look glaringly at your spouse.
“You changed!” It’s said as an accusation, not as a fact. It also appeared to be a Faustian trade, rather than a slow, evolving transformation. Yet who any of us is at age 28 isn’t fundamentally who we’ll remain. And if we’ve been married to this person, we have often been witness to this development and contributed to it. Change becomes a threat rather than expected growth. And it doesn’t look like a standard failure until a partner grows significantly through therapy, loss, or genuine transformation, and finds that the marriage has no architecture for that.
The Clinical Implications
Too often, when a couple comes in after years of genuine effort that hasn’t worked, they assume they haven’t tried hard enough or that they need new skills. This is sometimes the therapist’s assumption as well.
What pattern of communication is broken? What attachment wounds have been triggered? What pathology does one or the other need help with?
Less often do they ask a question that scholar Sir Richard Winn Livingston would ask: What did each of you think you were building?
While therapists are attached to feeling questions: “What do you feel?” and “What did you want to feel?”, these situations require reimagination. Instead, the question becomes:
For many couples, after years of fruitless struggle, they’ve been failing at something that wasn’t adequate to what either of them actually needed. And that’s an entirely different conversation. It’s a question about whether they can build a shared vision that is actually large enough to live in.
The Hardest Version of This
Two people can hold incompatible standards without either being morally wrong.
Neither is contemptible. They cannot, however, coexist in the long run without one person’s standards prevailing and the other’s losing.
That’s not a communication problem. That’s a design incompatibility that requires both to transcend their paradigmatic ideals into something that works for both. Or to recognize that no amount of effort applied to the incompatible standard will fix it without causing one person to “lose.”
The question Livingston is really asking isn’t diagnostic. It’s generative. Not what went wrong, but what were you actually trying to build, and is that worth building together? Some couples, when they finally get to this level, discover they’ve been loyal to a vision neither of them actually chose — inherited, assumed, never examined. The work from there isn’t repair. It’s design. And that turns out to be a conversation most couples have never had, because nobody told them it was necessary.
If you’ve been trying hard for a long time without getting anywhere, the problem may not be a lack of effort. It may be that nobody has ever asked you what you were actually trying to build. That’s a conversation worth having. Work with us.
