by Susan Norman

Created on: June 19, 2009

Marriages continuing without the couple being in love is probably the oldest kind of marriage in the world.

Many times couples believe that they are in love when they get married. However, each person grows into being exactly who they always were after years and years in a relationship. Many times people grow apart from each other in marriage; their interests change, their children grow up and leave home, their friends change, sometimes one person grows and the other person doesn't and is left behind. A thousand different scenarios as individual as the couple themselves, can occur and the couple can grow apart and yet still stay together as husband and wife.

Relationships are ever changing and changeable. The couple in their 20's may have believed themselves to be "in love" when they married after college, only to find themselves changing their definition of marriage and love many times in the marriage. Their love changes perhaps from the desperate obsessive love of their 20's to a more mature love in their 40's, perhaps a deeper, more forgiving love; regardless it changes according to their own definitions. It ceases being the same relationship but they choose to stay in it anyway.

Perhaps they fall out of love and yet still stay married. Whatever their reasons they stay married. They stay married because they were both children in homes where their parents were divorced and they do not want that for their children. They stay married because they are in a church community that strongly discourages divorce and recommends counseling instead. Sometimes the social prohibitions are so strong for them to stay together no matter what, that they do stay married no matter what. There are couples everywhere that have long stopped loving each other who remain married because they cannot emotionally face divorce. They put up and shut up for years rather than face divorce court.

Sometimes these relationships are very abusive at their core, but the abused spouse cannot leave the abusing spouse for whatever reason. Sometimes the abused spouse has a very serious mental illness, where he or she will set themselves up for abuse repeatedly, rather than venture out into the world and get well and get divorced. People stay in marriages long after the love has gone because they are getting something out of the relationship, even if it is not love. The question has to be, "What payoff is this person receiving in this relationship that causes them to stay in it rather than get help to get out?"

Sometimes women stay in marriages where the love has long been gone because she cannot make enough money on her own, to feed and clothe her children in the manner to which they have become accustomed. So many times the question of divorce is by far overshadowed by the questions of economics. Can the mother and children survive in this society without the income of the father? For some women the answer is simply no and the choice is to stay married for however long, simply to have a lifestyle she deems necessary for herself and her children.

People continuing in marriages without the couple being in love is as old as history. This situation is the stuff of great movies such as "The Lion in Winter" where Eleanor of Aquitaine refuses to give Henry a divorce so he can marry a much younger woman. Throughout history, keeping marriages together with or without love, has been the stuff of politics, religion, history and geneology.

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