The year my friend Dave lost his job, he and his wife Sarah fought about money almost every night. Not productive conversations. Ugly ones. The kind where you say the thing you know will land hardest because you're scared and angry and you want the other person to feel as bad as you do. He told me once that he sat in his car in the driveway for twenty minutes one evening, just trying to figure out if he still wanted to go inside.

He went inside. They're still married. Not because they read the right book or had some breakthrough therapy session, but because they kept choosing each other in small, stubborn, unglamorous ways when it would have been easier not to.

That's resilience in marriage. Not the inspirational-quote version. The real version. The one that's built during the years you barely survived, not the ones that looked good in the Christmas card photo.

The myth of resilience in marriage

There's this idea floating around that strong marriages don't struggle. That if you're fighting a lot, or if one of you thought about leaving, something is fundamentally broken. That's wrong, and believing it makes hard seasons harder than they need to be.

Every long marriage has at least one chapter that almost ended it. The thing nobody tells you at the wedding is that staying married is a decision you make over and over, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly, and some of those decisions happen when you genuinely don't feel like making them.

Resilience in marriage isn't about being unshakable. It's about being shakable and staying anyway. It's about looking at your partner across a kitchen table covered in overdue bills and thinking, I don't like you very much right now, but I'm not going anywhere.

That's not weakness. That's the hardest kind of strength there is.

When the money runs out

Financial stress will test a marriage faster than almost anything else. Not because money itself is that important, but because of everything it represents — safety, freedom, identity, control. When the money gets tight, all of those deeper fears come screaming to the surface.

Dave and Sarah's fights weren't really about the budget. They were about the fact that he felt like a failure and she felt terrified. He heard her worry as blame. She heard his withdrawal as abandonment. They were both drowning and neither one knew how to say so.

What eventually helped wasn't a financial plan, though they made one. It was the night she sat down next to him on the couch and said, "I'm not mad at you. I'm just scared." And he said, "Me too." That was the turning point. Not because it solved anything practical, but because they stopped fighting each other and started facing the problem together.

If you're in a season like that right now, here's the thing I wish someone had told Dave earlier: your partner's anxiety about money is almost never an accusation against you. It's fear. And fear needs reassurance, not a defensive argument about who spent what.

Sit on the same side of the table. Look at the numbers together. Say the scared part out loud instead of the angry part. The way you communicate your needs during financial stress will determine whether it pulls you apart or pushes you closer.

The grief nobody talks about

A couple I'm close with had a miscarriage three years into their marriage. They told almost nobody. She grieved openly — crying, wanting to talk about it, needing to process. He went quiet. He took on extra projects at work. He said he was "fine" so many times that the word lost all meaning.

She thought he didn't care. He thought he was being strong for her. They nearly split up over a grief that neither of them knew how to carry.

This is what loss does to a marriage when you don't know how to grieve together. It doesn't just take the thing you lost. It takes the connection between you, because you're both in so much pain that you can't see each other clearly anymore.

Job loss, miscarriage, the death of a parent, a health diagnosis, infertility, a child struggling — these are the storms that don't care about your communication skills or your love languages or how good your relationship was before they hit. They just hit. And whatever cracks were already there get wider.

What helped that couple was one specific thing. She stopped waiting for him to grieve the way she did, and he stopped pretending he wasn't grieving at all. They found their own ways to honor what happened, and they gave each other room to be different about it. She talked. He wrote a letter he never sent. They planted a tree in the backyard.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't a movie scene. But it was theirs.

The night someone almost left

I think every long marriage has a moment — maybe more than one — where one person seriously considers leaving. Not in the casual, passing-thought way. In the way where you've mentally packed a bag and figured out where you'd stay.

Nobody likes admitting this. It feels like a betrayal just to have thought it. But it's more common than anyone talks about, and it doesn't mean your marriage is doomed. It means you're human and you hit your limit, or at least you thought you did.

What matters is what happens next. Do you leave? Do you stay but check out emotionally, which is its own kind of leaving? Or do you turn toward your partner and say something honest, even though it's the hardest conversation you've ever had?

A friend once told me, "I didn't stay because I was sure it would work. I stayed because I wasn't sure, and I decided I owed it to both of us to find out." That's not a romantic sentence. It's a brave one. Sometimes resilience looks less like conviction and more like choosing uncertainty over escape.

If you've been in that place — or you're there right now — I want you to know that the couples who make it through that moment often say it became a turning point. Not because the moment itself was good, but because it forced honesty that had been buried for too long. The ability to fight through conflict rather than around it is what separates the marriages that last from the ones that looked fine from the outside.

The small, stubborn acts

Resilience isn't built in the big dramatic moments. It's built in the small ones that nobody sees.

It's bringing your spouse coffee on a morning when you're still angry from last night's argument. It's texting "drive safe" even though things are tense. It's showing up to their doctor's appointment because you said you would, even though you'd rather be anywhere else. It's biting back the sarcastic comment. It's saying "I'm sorry" first, even when you're only 40% sure you were wrong.

These things seem insignificant. They're not. They're the bricks that resilience is made of.

I know a couple who, during the worst year of their marriage, had one rule: no matter how bad the day was, they said goodnight to each other. That was it. Some nights it was warm. Some nights it was barely a mumble. But they didn't stop. And something about that tiny, consistent act kept a thread of connection alive when everything else felt like it was unraveling.

You don't need a grand gesture to hold a marriage together. You need a hundred tiny ones, repeated on the days when you least feel like it. That's what daily appreciation actually looks like in practice — not a gratitude journal, but the stubborn refusal to stop showing up.

What forgiveness actually costs

Everyone talks about forgiveness like it's a switch you flip. It's not. Real forgiveness in a marriage is slow, ugly, nonlinear work. You think you've forgiven something, and then three months later you're in a new argument and the old wound reopens like it never healed at all.

That's normal. Forgiveness isn't a one-time event. It's a practice. Sometimes it's a daily practice, for a long time, before it finally sticks.

The hardest part of forgiving your spouse isn't letting go of the anger. It's letting go of the version of the story where you were entirely right and they were entirely wrong. Because that version is comforting. Being the wronged party gives you a kind of power — moral high ground, the right to be wounded, a permanent trump card in future arguments.

Letting go of that means accepting a messier, more honest version of what happened. One where maybe you both made mistakes. One where the person who hurt you was also hurting. That's not excusing what they did. It's just seeing the full picture instead of the flattering crop.

If you're struggling with forgiveness right now, here's what I'd say: you don't have to feel it yet. You just have to want to feel it eventually. That's enough to start. The feeling catches up to the decision, even if it takes a while.

What your marriage is made of

There's a question that comes up when things are really bad: What is this marriage actually made of? Not the good-times version. Not the wedding-day version. The version that's left after the worst year strips away everything that wasn't real.

The answer is different for everyone. For Dave and Sarah, it was stubbornness and shared history and a refusal to let fear make their decisions. For the couple who lost their pregnancy, it was the willingness to grieve differently without making different mean wrong. For my friend who almost left, it was the decision to compromise on something harder than furniture or vacation plans — it was compromising on the fantasy of a pain-free life and accepting the real one instead.

None of these stories are pretty. None of them would make a good movie montage. But they're true. And the marriages that survived them are deeper and more honest for having gone through them.

Your marriage will be tested. Maybe it already has been. The test isn't whether you can avoid the storm. It's whether you can look at the person standing next to you in the wreckage and say, "I'm still here. Are you?"

And if the answer is yes — if both of you can say yes, even when your voice shakes — that's enough. That's more than enough. That's everything.

The conversations you have during the hardest seasons of your marriage are the ones your family will carry forward. When I Die Files helps you preserve that hard-won wisdom — the lessons, the love, the things you want the people who matter most to know. Start your first letter here.