Listen to the blog:
I walked a different route to our usual pew at church on Sunday, which caused me to quite literally run into my friend. After a quick rebound from our collision, he said, “Man, Allison, you really had me messed up this week.”
“Why is that?”
“Adoration.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That video you shared on Instagram about how we need to adore our wives.”
(He’s talking about this video with Arthur Brooks that describes the evolutionary importance of a woman’s need to feel adored by her spouse as it contributes to the needs of safety and wellbeing, causing us to want to be fruitful and multiply!)
He went on to say, “we have been married over 20 years now. We’ve both hurt each other quite a lot. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, so to speak. When things are good, she’s my favorite person on the planet. When things are not going well, how am I supposed to adore her? It’s just so dang hard!” (Side note: If this type of spur-of-the-moment authenticity and vulnerability at church seems foreign to you, you should consider looking for another church!)
As is often the case, casual conversations with friends get my therapeutic wheels turning. I know this man to be a deeply loving and committed husband and dad. His wife is as steady and faithful as they come. But what he’s describing is real and what I’ve started calling “middle marriage.”
I’ve written before about middle age as it pertains to us as individuals, but it’s also true that our marriages experience their own type of middle age transition. And I think that’s what my friend is getting at.
The dichotomy of mutual infatuation combined with communication SNAFUs of newlywed life is well documented, as is the seven-year itch. But if we stay the course after those two problematic seasons, the research indicates that we don’t see another big divorce spike until year 25. From the 8th to the 24th anniversary, a lot of life is lived—both deeply good and exceedingly hard.
My own marriage is about a month away from being a legal driver on the open road. I have several friends whose marriages can vote now, others whose marriage can legally drink. And even a few whose marriages are seeing a reduction on car insurance premiums. Ha. Praise God.
This middle marriage season is different from the others. It is a season of deep commitment to one another. The kids are no longer a safety risk to be constantly monitored. Most of us are beginning to caretake our parents or learning what it is to be without them for the first time. We have learned communication and empathy skills, we know how to resolve conflict or at very least, how to skillfully avoid the ones that we know never will resolve. What started out as a cute quirk has long since become a raging annoyance. Many husbands have graduated from the occasional adorable snore to a CPAP machine. And don’t even get women my age started on perimenopause!
And this is just the cute stuff.
This next part is going to feel like an aside, but I promise it matters.
Perimenopause
One thing that is happening in middle marriage is the onset of perimenopause. When we were in our childbearing years, progesterone gave us the gift of being a little nicer and easier to deal with. It rounded out our sharp edges and decreased irritability. The logic follows that if progesterone decreases, as it does beginning in perimenopause, then hello sharp edges and irritability. Add what’s aptly named “erratic estrogen,” and we get brain fog, mood swings, anxiety, depression, fatigue.
Practically speaking, the things that always have driven us nuts still drive us nuts, but the filter we once accessed easily has gone missing. It’s not that we’re finding new things to be irritated about. But it may feel that way to our husbands. This is where I start hearing a lot of, “But you never used to care about this before!” And “we’ve always done it this way and it’s never bothered you!”
Yes, dear husbands. This is probably true. You have deeply benefited from our filter and even-keeled nature that our younger hormone production provided. But now, since we don’t need to have your babies anymore, we are ready to tell you about some things, so buckle up.
Husbands in my therapy office often report feeling blindsided by this shift and even irritated that compromise and accommodations are now needed. I get it. It can feel like a very abrupt change. But it’s time to make space for the opinions and preferences that your wife has been sitting on for all this time. This is a major part of the work of middle marriage.
Scar Tissue
And most people I know who have been married as long as us have faced some really incredible hardships, let alone multiple seasons of deep level of marital unrest. And I would say most of the people I know personally I’d describe as happily married. EVEN IN HAPPY MARRIAGE, by the time we are in “middle marriage,” most of us have accumulated a lot of scar tissue.
That’s what my buddy at church was getting at this morning. It’s not that he’s having a hard time adoring his wife because she occasionally has morning breath and a little bit of cellulite. By this stage, we have DEEPLY wounded each other.
We have made promises we did not keep. We have spoken words so unkind and unloving that they could have peeled paint off the walls. We have discovered things and confessed things that have broken our hearts. We have forgiven things our younger selves would have NEVER IMAGINED. We have chosen to move forward, with tenuous hope, again and again.
And THAT, my friend, is still what is worth adoring. Even when things are hard.
We have dealt with the things that have happened, and how the things that have happened have altered and changed us irrevocably.
And even still.
We still care. We still show up. We still want to have great marriages. Joy still finds a way. Light shines in through the cracks.
We don’t want the marriage that some of us saw, where a couple celebrated 50 years of marriage and went home to separate bedrooms. We don’t just want to stay married for the sake of staying married. We deeply desire beautiful, meaningful, engaged and enveloping, loving marriages that continue to surprise us. We want to enjoy love, even though it looks different from our early naive projections of what it “should” look like.
We want to maintain our sense of self and solo identity. We want to pull apart and come back together. We want the friction and the salve. We want to fight the fights that are worth fighting. We want to remind each other that we still see what’s charming and alluring about us and even them. We still want to be chosen and elevated and given the better part. That will keep marriage alive, long after we have done our best to damage and wound.
How Do We Choose Adoration Anyway?
My friend asked the right question. After 20 years of marriage, after the wounding and the forgiving and the choosing to stay, how do we actually adore each other?
Here’s what I notice: The couples I know who stay genuinely connected—who aren’t just cohabiting or managing logistics—they tend to stay curious about each other. Not in a self-help, “practice these five things” way. But in a more fundamental way. They seem to remember that this person is still a separate human they don’t actually fully know.
They’ve let go of the script they thought this would be. They’re not operating from the assumption that after 20 years, they have their spouse figured out. They know the patterns, the shortcuts, the top-layer stuff. But they don’t have a complete map of the other’s inner world. They can’t, really. We don’t even have a complete map of our own selves.
And so they stay genuinely interested in how their spouse is changing, even when—especially when—that change is inconvenient. Even when it means compromise and accommodation. Even when the perimenopause version of your wife is not the woman you married.
They notice the otherness. This person is a completely separate human from you. They may make a horrible version of you, but they make a wonderful version of them. That difference, that otherness—that’s where the mystery lives. And mystery is what keeps attraction alive.
You stay curious not because it’s a technique. You stay curious because the alternative is assuming you know someone you’ve been living with for 20 years. And that’s not adoration. That’s just cohabitation.
Adoration in middle marriage is choosing, again and again, to see this person as someone still unfolding, still surprising, still worth elevating. Even when they irritate the hell out of you. Especially then.
It takes endurance. It takes humility. It takes the choice, made over and over, to show up. It takes humor and authentic support from those around you. And it takes faith that this messy, difficult, scar-tissue-laden relationship is still worth tending.
Marriage isn’t static. It’s movement: expansion and contraction, togetherness and separateness, evolution and homeostasis. You need both polarities to find adoration in the other.
While love in middle marriage may not be as easy as it once was when we were naive and idealistic, the flavors and textures of time allow for a beautiful and nuanced adoring love that we wouldn’t have imagined in the early days. And that kind of love—the kind that chooses, that sees, that stays curious—that’s the kind worth fighting for.
