Why good marriages still fail: Lessons from the stories that make us uncomfortable
Modern marriage isn't just challenging—it's an anachronism in today's world. It was crafted for an era where lives were predictable, identities unchanging, and gender roles set in stone. Fast forward to now, where careers flip, identities evolve, and personal growth is non-negotiable. Is it any shock that divorce rates are skyrocketing and marital satisfaction is plummeting? The very structure meant to support us is a roadblock to the personal evolution that modern life demands.
Three recent works of art have done what our collective cultural conversation refuses to: they've told the truth about why marriages really end. Tayari Jones's An American Marriage, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, and Miranda July's All Fours aren't just stories about divorce— they're autopsies of a system that was never designed for the people we've become.
Systemic Racism and Mass Incarceration Destroyed This Marriage: Lessons from An American Marriage
Jones understands something most marriage counselors won't tell you: sometimes love dies because America kills it first. In An American Marriage, Roy's wrongful incarceration doesn't just separate him from Celestial—it transforms them both into people their younger selves wouldn't recognize. The prison-industrial complex becomes the third party in their marriage, more destructive than any affair. This isn't about "working through difficulties." This is about recognizing that when systemic racism can steal years of your life, the luxury of maintaining romantic ideals becomes exactly that—a luxury. As the New York Times noted, Jones forces us to confront "a love story warped by larger forces," and the warping is permanent. Celestial's evolution during Roy's absence isn't betrayal—it's survival. She becomes an artist, a businesswoman, a person who exists beyond the role of "waiting wife." When Roy returns, he's returning to a woman who learned to live without him, and that learning can't be undone.
Communication Breakdown and Career Conflict: What Marriage Story Reveals About Modern Divorce
Baumbach's Marriage Story strips away the mythology entirely. Charlie and Nicole aren't victims of dramatic betrayal or tragic circumstances—they're casualties of the most mundane killer of all: the slow accumulation of small resentments. They love each other, and that love makes their destruction of each other even more brutal. The genius of Baumbach's approach is how he refuses to give us a villain. These are good people who become toxic to each other, not through malice but through the simple inability to see past their own needs. Their lawyers become proxies for the violence they can't express directly, turning love into litigation. What Marriage Story reveals is perhaps the most uncomfortable truth of all: sometimes the people we love most are the ones least equipped to witness our growth.
Midlife Marriage Crisis and Female Identity: Miranda July's All Fours
Miranda July's All Fours is the most radical of the three because it doesn't even bother with the formalities of ending. The protagonist simply... stops participating. She checks into a motel room and begins the slow work of figuring out who she is when she's not performing the role of wife. This is divorce as existential experiment. As The New Yorker described it, the novel explores "the liminal space between wanting to leave and being gone"—that purgatory where most modern marriages actually exist. July understands that the decision to leave often happens long before anyone says the words out loud. The protagonist's journey isn't about finding another person or even about finding herself—it's about giving herself permission to exist as a question rather than an answer. In a culture that demands we know what we want and justify our choices, July offers something more honest: confusion as a valid state of being.
The Cultural Reckoning We're Avoiding
The Psychology Behind Modern Marriage Failure: Why Love Isn't Enough Anymore. Here's what these stories are really telling us: our entire framework for understanding marriage is broken, and highlights the need to focus on our well being. We're still operating under the assumption that love conquers all, that commitment means never changing, that growth happens in parallel rather than in conflict. But people aren't static. The person you married at 25 is not the person you're married to at 45, and pretending otherwise is a form of consensual delusion. We've created a system where personal evolution is treated as relationship failure, where growing apart is seen as giving up rather than growing up. The real tragedy isn't that marriages end—it's that we've made ending so shameful that people stay in relationships that have become graveyards for their best selves.
What We Do Now: Moving Beyond Shame and Failure Narratives
The conversation has to change, and it has to change now. We need to stop treating divorce like a moral failure and start treating it like what it often is: a rational response to becoming incompatible people.
This means:
Getting comfortable with impermanence. Maybe marriage works best when we stop pretending it's forever and start treating it like what it actually is—a contract between two people who are constantly changing.
Rejecting the shame narrative. The person who leaves isn't always the villain. The person who stays isn't always the hero. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit that love isn't enough.
Embracing complexity. Stop asking "whose fault was it?" Start asking "what did we learn?" The end of a marriage can be as meaningful as its beginning—if we let it be.
Supporting without solving. When someone tells you their marriage is over, your job isn't to fix it or find blame. Your job is to witness their truth and help them write the next chapter. Be a good friend, you never know if they are going through something similar, like our guest Amber Dorsey, who got the courage to leave her marriage after she saw others do the same.
The stories we tell ourselves about marriage matter because they shape what we think we're allowed to want. Jones, Baumbach, and July are giving us permission to want something different—not perfect love, but honest reckoning. Not forever, but for now. Not happily ever after, but authentically right now.
The marriage myth is dead. Marriages lingers on… and truths and foundation we build in the myth’s place is up to us.