Beyond the Rose-Tinted Glasses: Why Patience Runs Out in Marriage

“I’m fed up. He never changes. He keeps falling into the same awful patterns. He doesn’t even try,” Mira shouted.

“Do you think I’m not fed up?” Abraham shot back. “I can’t be myself. I’m constantly forced to change just to fit you. I’m done. I want to be me. Maybe you should be with someone else.”

“I want to end this relationship,” Mira turned to me and yelled. “And the sooner, the better.”

“You have the capacity to handle much more than you think,” I said calmly. “The fact that you’ve been through so much together means your ability to contain each other is far greater than what you feel right now. You’ve already endured major gaps and painful challenges throughout your marriage, including the long crisis you’re currently in.”

“It’s because I can handle so much,” Mira replied bitterly. “Maybe even too much.”

“It’s connected to personality,” I answered, “but that’s not the full picture.”

When Endurance Disappears

“Are you saying I can’t handle it?” Abraham jumped in. “That I’m weaker than her?”

“No,” I said. “You don’t want it the way she does.”

“What does that even mean?” he asked sharply.

“The ability to endure is directly tied to one thing: desire.”

“How?” Abraham demanded.

“If I want someone, I have patience for them,” I replied simply. “If I don’t want them, I don’t.”

“So maybe I don’t really want her anymore,” he said slowly. “Because I can’t handle this.”

“When the capacity to contain becomes very small,” I explained, “it usually means the desire has become very small. Somewhere inside, the relationship feels secondary.”

“What are you saying?” Abraham asked, alarmed.

“If we went back twenty years,” I asked him, “would you choose Mira again?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “If I had known she was like this, that she would hurt me this way, drain my soul, never accept me for who I am, I would never have chosen her.”

When Staying Is No Longer a Choice

“Exactly,” I said. “You feel stuck. You’re not looking for another relationship because of the children and because you’re used to each other. But your capacity to endure is very limited. You have no patience for the difficulties of marriage.”

“That’s why we’re here,” he said quickly. “So you can fix these problems.”

“What you’re really saying,” I replied, “is that if someone fixes the problems for you, then you’ll stay. And if not, you won’t.”

“Mira, it’s the same for you,” I continued. “In your distress, you’re hoping the therapist will be a kind of magician, someone from the outside who will solve everything.”

“It may not be easy to hear,” I said gently, “but the truth is this: you don’t want this relationship enough. Not truly.”

The room fell silent.

Then Mira looked at me helplessly. “But why don’t we want it? I don’t understand.”

The Gap That Drains Desire

“Your expectations,” I answered. “Mira, before you even entered this relationship, you carried a very different picture of what partnership should look like. And Abraham, you carried your own expectations as well. When you entered the marriage, reality didn’t match those images.”

“Deep down, you felt you didn’t really want this,” I said. “Why would you? It doesn’t fit what you imagined.”

“How can you see that so clearly?” she asked.

“Because suddenly you can’t tolerate anything,” I explained. “Every small thing feels unbearable. Everything triggers you. It’s not about what you can’t handle. It’s that you don’t want to handle it.”

“At the beginning of the relationship,” I continued, “you were dazzled by reality. You were willing to smooth things over and bend reality to fit your expectations. Over time, reality asserted itself, but your expectations stayed the same.”

“The gap between expectations and reality grew larger and larger. And the larger that gap becomes, the less desire remains for the relationship. No one wants a relationship that constantly feels like a disappointment.”

“As desire weakens, the ability to endure weakens with it.”

Beginning the Real Work

“We’ve reached a point where we can move to the next stage of therapy,” I concluded. “Now it’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses of expectation and the gray glasses of despair, and begin to truly see what’s happening here.”

“That means reducing the imagined gap between expectations and reality, and learning how to meet each other where you actually are.”

This column was inspired by the course of Rabbi Eliyahu Levy, Root Therapy in Relationships.