Marriages end when the gap between who people are becoming and who they promised to be together gets too wide to bridge.

Sometimes it's dramatic - betrayal, cruelty, addiction. But more often it's erosion. Two people stop choosing each other in the small moments. They stop being curious about who the other person is now, not who they were five years ago. The daily work of staying known to each other stops happening, and you end up as polite strangers sharing a lease.

Resentment is a big killer. When one person feels chronically unseen or unmet, and they stop saying it out loud because saying it hasn't changed anything, the silence calcifies. Eventually the prospect of starting over alone feels less lonely than staying.

And sometimes people just grow in directions that aren't compatible anymore. The person you married at 24 might want fundamentally different things at 38, and neither of you is wrong - you're just no longer building toward the same life.

The marriages that last aren't the ones without conflict. They're the ones where both people keep showing up to the hard conversations, keep choosing repair over retreat, and keep actually liking who the other person is becoming.

What's behind the question for you?