What No One Told Us About Marriage (And Why It Matters)

There is a moment in almost every initial therapy session when I share that only about 30 percent of marriages report being happy. The reaction is always the same: disbelief. It’s a statistic that feels incompatible with everything we are taught to expect about marriage.

So how is it possible that most people do not know this, yet we are all still getting married?

We enter marriage believing we are stepping into something normal, expected, and universal. But we are also stepping into an institution that most of us idealize long before we ever learn to navigate it. We imagine marriage as something we will naturally “figure out,” rather than a complex relational system that requires education, skill, and ongoing maintenance.

Most people prepare more thoroughly for standardized tests, childbirth, graduate school, or buying a home than they do for the most formative relationship of their adult lives.

I am not anti-marriage.

Marriage is not the problem. In fact, high-quality partnerships are among the strongest predictors of health and longevity across the lifespan. The issue is not that we marry. The issue is how we marry, why we marry, and what we believe marriage should feel like.

Here is what no one says out loud:
If roughly 30 percent of marriages are happy, then roughly 70 percent of couples are experiencing dissatisfaction. Yet when relationships become difficult, many people assume they themselves (or more likely their partner) are the problem instead of recognizing that the cultural model we inherited is incompatible with a happy marriage.

We marry with:

• romantic ideals

• hope

• assumptions

• conditioning

But we rarely marry with relational literacy.

Why Aren’t We Teaching Partnership Skills?

Premarital counseling is often optional, brief, or focused on logistics rather than relational structure. We spend very little time teaching the actual skills that create sustainable partnership:

• conflict as communication

• repair and re-attunement

• division of labor and cognitive load

• secure attachment

• emotional regulation

• sexual development across the lifespan

• identity, autonomy, and interdependence

Without this knowledge, couples are not failing. Couples are under-resourced.

We Are Working Against Culture

Modern partnership asks for emotional availability, shared power, equality, flexibility, self-awareness, and vulnerability while the culture surrounding us reinforces traditional gender norms, chronic overwork, burnout, overstimulation, and a widespread disconnection from community support.

We expect couples to build emotionally sophisticated relationships inside a social framework that was never designed to support them. It is not surprising that people are struggling in their partnerships.

My Take

I am pro-informed, pro-intentional, pro-skilled, pro-connected marriage.

When couples understand the relational skills required for partnership, and when they question the models they inherited, they can create relationships that do more than simply survive.

Healthy partnership is not luck.
It is literacy.