Chapter 1

Should You Stay in an Unhappy Marriage?

From Hope for Troubled Marriages by Dr. Ken Newberger

Should I stay, or is it time to leave?

That’s a question I’ve heard many times over the years, and never casually. By the time someone asks it out loud, the hurt has usually been there a long time. The arguments don’t end. The distance keeps growing. Hope wanes, and you start to wonder whether your unhappiness is trying to tell you something.

It is. But probably not what you think.

Chest pain sends people to the emergency room, and it should. Sometimes it’s a heart attack. Sometimes it’s heartburn, a pulled muscle, a panic attack. From the inside, the feeling can be identical. That’s the whole reason nobody diagnoses chest pain from the chest pain. You find out what’s causing it.

Emotional pain in a marriage works the same way. It’s real, but it isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a reason to go find out.

So what do you do with pain that won’t go away? Try to ignore it? Escape it through alcohol, infidelity, another night of numbing yourself in front of the television? Those work, briefly. And all the while, the marriage is dying on the vine.

Before you decide anything, consider that your pain may be doing something for you that nothing else can.

Why Pain Exists: What Leprosy Patients Taught Dr. Paul Brand

Dr. Brand¹ worked with leprosy patients in India and America for most of his adult life. Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) represents an attack on the nervous system. Pain that would otherwise warn individuals they are in physical jeopardy does not occur. These individuals feel nothing.

In poorer regions of the world, rats chew on fingers and toes while a person sleeps. People’s hands get burned in cooking fires because there is no warning signal to prompt the brain to move the hand. Grim stories of deterioration can also be found in richer nations. Although the details differ, a pain-free existence becomes a living hell for those who contract the disease.

Dr. Brand’s goal was to create an artificial system that warned of danger. He and his team tried audible signals, blinking lights, and other innovations, but to no avail – patients would either ignore the painless yet annoying signals or simply turn them off, to their own detriment. Nothing grabs one’s attention the way pain does. After five years of work and millions of dollars spent, the team abandoned the project. Though nobody wants it, Dr. Brand concluded that pain is God’s gift to us: it compels us to take corrective action for our own good.

What Happens When You Numb the Pain Instead

Dr. Brand’s patients turned off their warning signals because the signals were merely annoying. Spouses do something similar – not by flipping a switch, but by tuning out. Listen to the words of one divorced New Yorker who did precisely that.

I smoked dope every day for twenty years. I thought I was pretty slick. I could smoke while working. I could get high and still run my company. I could pour concrete. I could roof a building. I felt like I could do anything.

But it ruined my marriage. I didn’t even realize it until years after my wife left me. But the dope ruined my marriage because it made me content. Nothing could bother me. Her feelings didn’t bother me. Her needs didn’t bother me. The dope put an emotional cover over what should have been obvious.

I told myself that if I didn’t see the problem, then it didn’t qualify as a problem. All I ever did was give her advice. I never asked for it. I never once felt the inspiration to say: ‘Darling, I know there’s something wrong. What can I do differently?’

This man blames the demise of his marriage on the fact that nothing bothered him. Failing to recognize and address his wife’s pain caused the marriage to crumble. He did not decide to end his marriage. He simply stopped feeling the thing that would have told him to save it.

So Should You Stay in an Unhappy Marriage?

Before you decide whether to end your marriage, you need to know what is causing the hurt. Some marriages carry a problem that no amount of skill will fix.

But most couples I see are not in that position. They still care about each other. They are simply stuck in a pattern of conflict they don’t know how to break. And after enough years, you resign yourself to the idea that this is the marriage. But the pattern is not the marriage.

The good news is, there is an alternative to traditional marriage counseling that identifies the real reason for the conflict instead of guessing at it.

Key Takeaways

• Emotional pain in a marriage is not something to eliminate – it is a signal telling you that something needs attention.
• Numbing the pain through distraction, substances, or busyness does not solve the problem. It only delays the damage while the marriage quietly deteriorates.
• Dismissing your spouse’s pain because it does not personally bother you is one of the fastest ways to lose a marriage.
• Feeling this much pain does not mean the marriage is over. It means something in it is asking to be addressed.
• Acting on emotional pain, rather than suppressing it, is the first step toward real change.

Questions to Consider

1. When did you last experience real emotional pain in your marriage, and how did you respond to it? Did you ignore it, escape it, or address it directly?
2. Is there something you use to numb or distract yourself – such as busyness, your phone, work, a hobby, or something else – that might reduce your awareness of your spouse’s pain?
3. What is one concern your spouse has expressed that you may have minimized simply because it did not affect you personally?
4. If pain is meant to prompt action, what is one issue or step in your marriage you have been putting off?
5. What would it look like this week to treat your spouse’s emotional pain with the same seriousness you would give to a physical warning sign?

1. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, The Gift of Pain, chapter 5. ↩

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