Love Takes Effort: Marriage Isn't Just Chemistry

My nannu used to say that the best players never show their hand. He was talking about cards, but he could have been talking about marriage.

I was thinking about this yesterday after a session with a couple who came to me because "the spark was gone." They'd been married eight years. She worked in finance, he in tech. Two children, a mortgage in Sliema, the whole Maltese middle-class dream assembled piece by careful piece.

"We love each other," she said, "but we're like roommates now."

He nodded. "We barely talk anymore. Just logistics. Who's picking up Emma, did you pay the electricity bill, what's for dinner."

This is the mythology that kills marriages: that love should feel effortless. That if you're "meant to be," passion maintains itself. That good relationships just *flow*.

Bullshit.

At the clinic, I see this pattern constantly. Couples who mistake the end of the honeymoon phase for the end of love itself. Who think that when relationships require work, something has gone wrong.

But here's what I've learned from sitting across from hundreds of couples, and from my own three attempts at getting it right: love is not a feeling you fall into and stay in. Love is a practice. A daily choice. A skill you develop.

The spark doesn't disappear because you've chosen the wrong person. It disappears because you've stopped feeding it.

That couple? I gave them homework. Not communication exercises or date nights — though those have their place. I told them to become curious about each other again.

"When did you stop asking questions?" I asked them. "When did you decide you knew everything there was to know about this person?"

She thought about it. "Probably around year three. We'd settled into routines."

"So ask new questions. Not 'how was work' — that's lazy. Ask what she's been thinking about lately. What she wishes were different. What she's afraid of that she wasn't afraid of five years ago."

People change. If you're not tracking those changes, you're living with a version of your partner that no longer exists. You're loving a ghost.

The hardest thing about long-term relationships isn't keeping the romance alive. It's accepting that the person you married will not be the person you're married to in five years. They'll have new dreams, new fears, new edges worn smooth or sharp. You can grow together or you can grow apart, but you will grow.

My nanna used to tend her jasmine with the same attention every May — pruning, feeding, watching for pests. Not because she didn't trust it to bloom, but because she understood that beautiful things require tending.

Marriage is like that jasmine. It will bloom if you take care of it. But care is not automatic. Care is intentional.

The real tragedy isn't couples who fight. It's couples who've stopped being interested enough to fight. Who've decided that peace is worth more than passion. Who mistake emotional safety for emotional death.

Your marriage doesn't need more chemistry — chemistry is what got you here. It needs more effort. The kind of daily, unglamorous effort that no one writes songs about but that builds something stronger than butterflies in your stomach.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: the couples who make it aren't the ones who never have problems. They're the ones who decided their relationship was worth solving problems for.