Growing up, I believed finding “The One” also meant “making it work.” Michelle Obama sharing, “For ten years, I couldn’t STAND my husband,” resonated with many. Her honesty challenges the notion that relationships should fall into place without effort.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: after surviving a pandemic, financial crisis, 9/11 and the terrifying implications of global warming – I don’t want to spend a decade “not standing my husband.” I want to use my emotional energy to love boldly and care for myself. Maybe life doesn’t have to be hard to be meaningful. What if we embraced ease, even during struggles? Could we let go of fear and do less, even if it meant being alone?
People often say they’d be apart if not for their kids. I wince when I hear this because I am the product of a marriage that contained that unconscious pressure, a burden I felt deeply, sensing that my mere existence was keeping my family together. My ambivalence around having kids was mainly because I could not, in good conscience, repeat that pattern. If I was going to have kids, I was going to be damn well sure to be whole and well enough to expect nothing of them other than their own pursuit of happiness.
I struggle with the belief that longevity is the ultimate accomplishment in a relationship. Why do we celebrate folks married for 40 years without asking about the quality of those years?
Isn’t being your authentic self in or out of partnership what truly matters? Why is a single woman pitied as if the most relationship isn’t with yourself? What if we celebrated the bravery of choosing yourself instead of forcing relationships to work?
What happens when you love someone so deeply that you can no longer ask them to be someone they’re not? What if self-love leads you to stop molding yourself into someone who stays over a person who simply is? What would it take to let that kind of love lead?
In therapy, I never promise to keep couples together. Sometimes, a graceful ending is healthiest. Our culture struggles with endings. We prefer salacious stories over complex truths. Instead of healthy goodbyes, we block, burn bridges, cancel, ghost, unmatch, breadcrumb, self sabotage, talk shit, quiet quit, avoid, and shut down. I help end things before resentment builds to the point of no return by helping folks consider the months and years that boundaries were ignored until it became so untenable that the only way out was to light the match. What if we chose to end things with intention, before there was scorched earth? What could we gain or preserve?
My husband and I may be some of the only people to go to couples therapy to end our marriage. We wanted to confront the hard conversations together with kindness and honesty, to gaze at each other in grief, honor what we’ve built, what we are dismantling and what we will begin to create anew together and separately. Like new vows: to hug and hold, reflect and apologize, take space, get what we need from others and learn how to get what we need from ourselves, watch a new season of Below Deck, drink the rest of our wedding wine, throw out our things, meet one another’s new partners, make a list of the things we still want from one another. Our marriage is successful because it is filled with truth and tenderness, now and always.
There are few models in popular culture to use as reference points. Do I want to consciously uncouple ala Gwyneth? Do I want to pull strength from FDR and Eleanor – validating marriage as a deep companionship above all? This is when my therapist reminds me that in the queer community, chosen families have long included exes.
What happens when your ex is still your most trusted family member? When they are still the one who can bear witness to your loudest sobs and care for your most tender parts? When only they know just how you like your knees to be massaged? Is that enough to still get invited into your future?
When the road ahead has one big question mark, I remember this framework. It asks: Is this person on the right bus or are they just in the wrong seat? I imagine my husband switching seats but staying on my bus. By letting the resentments and disappointments fade away, perhaps he is even in the front row now. A mantra I’ve repeated silently all year is: we decide.
As I move forward, I have no definitive answers, only more questions. I silently repeat the same phrase from poet Rilke that I share with my clients: “Learn to love the questions themselves.” What if we didn’t have to follow the narrative we were raised with? What if, instead, we listened deeply to ourselves and made our one life worth living?
Melissa Fulgieri is a therapist, author and professor. She helps millennial women embrace self-compassion and inner trust so they can build fully authentic relationships and lead satisfying lives. She is the author of Couples Therapy Activity Book. Her second book, which highlights how childhood trauma impacts romantic relationships, is out in Spring 2025. She teaches at Fordham University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.