Episode 104 : Real Talk: Is Marriage Worth the Risk? (Plus: Our Mexico City Adventure)
Why Marriage Is Still Worth the Risk
A few weeks ago, we floated quietly over the pyramids outside Mexico City in a hot air balloon.
The sun was just coming up. The air was still. Dozens of balloons drifted alongside us. It felt surreal peaceful, expansive, almost unreal.
And then, when we landed, we hit a tree.
Nothing terrible happened. Everyone was fine. But it was a sharp reminder of something we don’t talk about enough: sometimes the most meaningful perspectives in life require risk. And sometimes they come with a few scratches.
Marriage is a lot like that balloon ride.
The Perspective You Can’t Get From the Ground
When you’re standing on the ground, everything feels immediate. Small problems feel big. Emotions feel intense. Fear feels convincing. From the air, the landscape changes. That’s what long-term partnership offers a wider view of life. Not because it eliminates hardship, but because it allows you to witness it together.
We recently met a young woman in her early 30s who had been married once before. The relationship was strong before the wedding. Afterward, everything shifted. The marriage ended painfully, and with it, her trust in the institution of marriage itself.
She isn’t unusual. Across cultures and countries, people still long for deep connection but many are opting out of marriage entirely. Not because they don’t want intimacy, but because they’ve seen how much it can hurt when things fall apart.The question isn’t whether marriage can be painful. It can. The question is whether the pain has meaning.
Marriage as a Witness to Your Life
There’s a line from the movie Shall We Dance that stopped us in our tracks:
“In a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.”
That’s the heart of marriage.
Not passion alone.
Not convenience.
Not even happiness all the time.
It’s having someone who sees your life who knows where you’ve been, who you were before the losses and the doubts and the changes, and who stays long enough to understand the whole arc of you. That kind of witnessing creates meaning. And meaning is what sustains people when passion fades or circumstances shift.
When Protecting Each Other Starts to Hurt the Marriage
Here’s where things get complicated.
Many couples don’t fight loudly. They fight quietly by withholding.
One partner has a hard day but shares only the surface version.
The other senses tension and avoids asking too many questions.
Both think they’re protecting each other. Over time, something subtle happens. You stop being fully known.
When both people are constantly managing the other’s emotions tiptoeing, softening, filtering the relationship can slowly slide into what many couples experience but rarely name: roommate syndrome.
There’s peace, but not depth.
Stability, but not intimacy.
Kindness, but not full honesty.
The problem isn’t a lack of love. It’s a lack of shared discomfort.
Intimacy Requires Sitting in the Messy Middle
Real intimacy isn’t built by never hurting each other. It’s built by learning how to sit together when things are uncomfortable without attacking, shutting down, or rushing to fix.
That means:
Allowing your partner to have feelings you didn’t cause and can’t solve
Trusting that honesty, even when imperfect, is safer than silence
Taking responsibility for your own emotional work instead of outsourcing it
Marriage isn’t about eliminating pain. It’s about having someone beside you while you work through it.Not to rescue you.Not to erase it. But to witness it.
Why the Long View Matters
We recently spent time with elderly parents one living with Alzheimer’s, the other sitting beside her, holding her hand for hours each day.
Their marriage wasn’t perfect. No marriage is.But decades of shared life have created something deeper than memory alone. Love doesn’t disappear when circumstances change it transforms.That kind of love doesn’t come from avoiding risk. It comes from staying.
The Invitation of Marriage
Marriage asks something difficult of us.
It asks us to stay present…
To be seen…
To allow discomfort to shape us instead of scare us away…
Like a hot air balloon ride, it won’t be perfect. You may hit a tree on the way down. But the view the meaning, the shared witness, the depth is something you can’t get any other way.
And for many of us, that makes the risk worth it.
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Hello everybody, and welcome back to another Real Talk episode of Marriage IQ.
This is where we get down to the nitty gritty and unscripted, unscripted.
And today, we're going to share with you some things that have been a lot on our mind since our hot air balloon ride over the pyramids in Mexico City.
1:29
That's right.
We were just there a couple weeks ago.
1:34
We've had a couple of experiences that happened because of that, that we thought we'd share some things that have been on our mind and we're just going to see where this goes.
1:43
Heidi gave me a once in a lifetime bucket list kind of a thing that she got me for Christmas last year and she knows I love adventure and travel.
And so I got to choose an adventure and as soon as I saw hot air ballooning, I'm like, that's what I want, that's what I want to do.
2:07
So I just didn't know it was in Mexico.
We got the tickets, we went down to Mexico City.
We had a grand time, great weekend. 4:30 in the morning, we are up and at it to get to the site.
And I will tell you, I'm afraid of heights normally.
2:26
And I so I didn't know how this was going to go, but.
2:29
And it should have been some kind of a a clue when we looked around this room at 4:30 in the morning and saw that we were decades older than everybody else.
And they were talking about this is adventure.
2:41
I would not say decades.
2:43
I think most of them were in their 20s and 30s.
2:45
All right, Well, in any case.
2:48
And I did not even stop to think that this might be a risky venture.
2:52
It was serene, it was beautiful, it was peaceful.
It was just otherworldly, actually.
2:57
Speaker 1
Yeah, a perspective that we've never had before.
High above the ground, watching the sunrise floating over Teotihuacan.
The Pyramid of the Sun.
The Pyramid of the Moon.
3:11
Speaker 2
Yeah, down near Mexico City.
3:12
Speaker 1
Dozens and dozens of other hot air balloons in the sky.
It was truly a magnificent experience.
But sometimes you have to take a little bit of risk to get that really amazing perspective of things.
3:27
Speaker 2
I think what we made it up, what, 1500 feet maybe before we started coming down and when we came down we hit a tree.
It was a little nerve wracking.
3:38
Speaker 1
Everything went perfect.
I mean, it was pretty awesome for the vast, vast majority of the time.
But yeah, they told us when we start going down, duck your knees, hold on to the rope and put your head down.
3:55
But we were so enthralled by everything going on that we didn't really follow the directions we.
4:00
Speaker 2
Forgot, but look, the people in front of us got the full brunt of the tree.
4:03
Speaker 1
They got scratched up a bit and probably the guys on the ground trying to catch the ropes to the balloon to help it land.
I think some of them kind of flew through the trees as well.
4:13
Speaker 2
But we all survived and good times were had by all.
4:17
Speaker 1
And we learned some things from that and we'll come back to that a little bit later.
But we did want to share that exciting experience with you kind of as a framework for what we're going to talk about for our real talk.
4:30
Speaker 2
Yeah.
So if you ever thought about going hot air ballooning, just do it.
Just do it.
It'll be, it'll be great.
4:36
Speaker 1
And if you want to know the company that does the bucket list, e-mail us at hello@marriageiq.com and I will send you a link.
4:45
Exploring Societal Trends and Skepticism Towards Commitment
So we did.
We met some people.
That's what we do.
We meet people and all over, we love meeting people.
This young couple, we ended up going to breakfast with them.
4:56
Speaker 1
They were great.
We really, really enjoyed.
4:58
Speaker 2
Never met them before.
We spent like the next couple of hours with these people and we talked about marriage because that's what kind of what we do now.
5:08
Speaker 1
When people ask us what do you do, that kind of comes up.
The woman that we were eating breakfast with had some pretty.
5:17
Speaker 2
Early 30s, right?
Yeah.
5:19
Speaker 1
Early 30s, some pretty strong opinions about marriage.
And as we dove into that a little bit, we recognized that she'd had a really bad first marriage.
She had been together with this guy for seven years.
5:34
Great relationship with them.
They decided to tie the knot, get married, jump all in and things totally changed after they got married and that left her with a bad taste in her mouth or possibility of ever getting married again.
5:52
Speaker 2
You know, it's interesting, Heidi, that talking to her because I wanted to drill down on this further.
They're from the East, I think New York.
Both of these people, they're not married, but they're, you know, they're traveling the world together.
They're a couple, a guy and a girl that even with this lifestyle, not really religious, not really particularly traditional.
6:17
I asked about her friends and about marriage in general, and she said that all of her friends want ideally to be married, all of them, not just a few and not even just a majority.
6:34
And so.
6:35
Speaker 1
I want.
6:36
Speaker 2
To ask these questions, especially people who don't identify as particularly as religious or traditional, because my point is, and my theory is that I think we all long for this deep connection that is called marriage, religious or not.
6:57
And it was very.
6:58
Speaker 1
Eye open.
We long for this deep connection, but there is a trend that we're seeing a lot more of where people are finding ways around the marriage part, particularly when marriage.
7:11
Speaker 2
That.
7:12
Speaker 1
Goes awry, ends in divorce and gets drug through the court systems for a long time or issues with kids or there's oppression or abuse.
I was talking to a guy in this group that I belong to for online creators from China last week and told him a little bit about what we're doing and he said, oh wow, in China nobody I know gets married anymore.
7:40
He was in his 30s, I believe also, and he said largely the people that he knows because women can work now and they're not reliant upon a man for their economic well-being.
They go to school, they get a good job, they have in vitro fertilization and have children because they want to be mothers.
8:00
But their parents take care of the children and they do this whole family thing without ever even including a man in it.
8:11
Speaker 2
That's really sad, I think.
8:15
Speaker 1
So I don't, I don't know.
And then I've heard trends in South Korea.
My brother told me that the stores sell far more adult diapers than they do baby diapers, so families are kind of in a few.
8:32
Speaker 2
Decades, yeah.
8:33
Speaker 1
Both of those Asian countries and there are probably others as well.
So that's really caused us to talk a lot about and think a lot about the last little while.
8:43
The Profound Purpose of Partnership: Being Each Other's Witness
Why do people get married?
Anyway?
I found this clip today.
I found this movie clip.
I'm going to play it and I want you to respond to it, OK?
Why is it?
8:54
Speaker 3
Do you think that people get married?
8:56
Speaker 2
Passion.
8:58
Speaker 3
No.
8:59
Speaker 2
It's interesting because I would have taken you for a romantic.
Why then?
9:05
Speaker 3
Because we need a witness to our lives.
There's a billion people on the planet.
I mean, what does anyone life really mean?
But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything.
The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things, all of it, all the time, every day.
9:25
You're saying your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it.
Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.
9:39
Speaker 2
Well.
9:42
Speaker 1
What do you think about that?
9:44
Speaker 2
I think that Susan Sarandon needs an Oscar for that.
9:49
Speaker 1
That's from the movie Shall We Dance with Susan Strandon and Richard Gere, and that's one of our movies that we really love.
And I don't remember that quote.
10:02
Speaker 2
Until I don't either, but that's freaking awesome, let me just tell you.
10:07
Speaker 1
So she said that we get married through the good, through the bad, to witness each other's life.
Yeah.
Do you agree with her?
10:20
Speaker 2
Well, of course I agree with her.
I think, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to marry, right?
But it's that special, that intimate.
Like she said, the witness, somebody there is, is by your side, witnessing your life, so you don't feel like you're going through it all alone.
10:40
Speaker 1
Right, she asked him.
By marriage and.
10:44
Speaker 2
I think.
10:44
Speaker 1
Desire of passion.
10:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think certainly that can be be a really good part of it, a scintillating part of it.
But she said no, it's way more than that.
It's way deeper than that.
10:59
Speaker 1
And I would say that's a little bit like that hot air balloon ride.
11:03
Speaker 2
Yeah.
11:04
Speaker 1
We did that together.
It's something you've been looking forward to.
You were excited about.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect.
11:14
Speaker 2
We both witnessed it together.
11:15
Speaker 1
So we witnessed it together.
We witnessed each of our reactions to it together.
11:22
Speaker 2
Right.
That's cool.
Yeah.
11:24
How Enduring Challenges Leads to Deeper Marital Development
So getting back to that couple, why this couple, why we talked about them?
11:29
Speaker 1
What do you mean?
11:30
Speaker 2
Well, I think that this is a common theme throughout the world, right?
That marriage just doesn't matter at all.
It's superfluous, and what we're trying to do here, I was eloquently verbalized on that movie, is that it does matter.
11:52
It's worth fighting for.
It's worth girding up our loins and continuing on this fight.
11:59
Speaker 1
I really feel like coming from a human development background, educationally, it is through the good and the bad, the hard and the easy, the stressful and the peaceful, that we move to higher levels of development, that we create richer relationships.
12:22
When there is no hard and there is no joy.
I don't know.
I guess the book The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.
I have been reading a favorite of my dad's and he talks about it's where the hard carves out this place in you that then it can be filled up with joy.
12:52
Speaker 2
OK, that's kind of hard to do though, my love, because we're two different people.
Every marriage out there are two different people.
Yeah.
Two different backgrounds, two different histories, two different genders, all of these things.
13:10
Speaker 1
That we are not the same.
13:12
Speaker 2
That make life as a married couple really, really difficult.
13:20
Speaker 1
Sometimes agonizing.
I've been married before.
I've been married to you almost 30 years now.
I'm not here to say that we need to stay in a marriage no matter how hard it gets, but I will say.
13:34
Speaker 2
I mean, there are those marriages where it's just.
13:36
Speaker 1
Yeah.
13:37
Speaker 2
It's very clear that there's that there's.
13:39
Speaker 1
Some not going to work.
It's real.
13:40
Speaker 2
Trauma going on, yeah, but.
13:42
Speaker 1
In a lot of cases you see people later in life, maybe they had a really difficult marriage earlier on, but they stick with it, they stay committed and somehow things turn around.
It does, however, take both people working their program working their own stuff.
14:00
Why Protecting Each Other Can Lead to 'Roommate Syndrome'
Speaking about working our own program, we had a conversation this evening.
It was a little.
14:07
Speaker 1
During dinner.
14:09
Speaker 2
What was it?
It was a little raw and I think that.
14:15
Speaker 1
That's how they go in our house, guys.
14:17
Speaker 2
Well, I think it goes just with any married couple, though.
I think what you were trying to do, you're trying to protect me by maybe not sharing all of your feelings because you, you felt like it would hurt me.
14:29
Speaker 1
I asked some questions about how your day had gone and I was looking to you to see, OK, is he able to tolerate the discomfort of me having not had a really comfortable day of me having some internal struggles that I was dealing with.
14:51
And when I tiptoe into it, I say just a little bit and he starts reacting a little bit negatively.
Then I shut it down.
15:03
Speaker 2
And I think.
15:03
Speaker 1
That's not very healthy, ultimately.
15:06
Speaker 2
I think, and it goes the other way too, right?
Like, I don't want to hurt you by whatever emotional baggage I bring to this conversation.
And so I don't say it.
15:22
I don't express it because I don't want to hurt you.
You don't want to hurt me.
And so you hold back.
And so here we are, two people in a relationship trying to protect each other, when in reality we're hurting each other ultimately.
15:39
Speaker 1
We can't either one be our authentic selves and I'm going to be honest, there are a lot of people out there that they are probably thinking if only we were so worried about each other to not hurt each other's feelings in our situation.
15:55
It's lobbing right insults and helpful.
16:00
Speaker 2
Yep, I think that's true.
But I, I think, I think actually, I think most marriages have this.
They just don't know it.
They don't think about it.
They don't think about I I want to keep things steady.
I don't want to hurt my spouse.
And so nothing gets said.
16:16
Yeah, it's all kept inside here.
And so I think what we're wanting to do this evening a little bit is just peel back the curtain of reality.
Humanity.
16:31
We are all humans.
That means we're all imperfect.
We're all messy, all of us.
And if we come to the table realizing that we're all messy to some degree, you know, then we can have this middle ground, this space to I, I'm giving you space, I'm giving you grace to be you, to work your own system, your own program.
17:02
And you're doing the same for me.
17:04
Speaker 1
So here's a question for you.
When I tiptoe into saying whatever it is and I am watching for your reaction so I can determine, do I proceed to really say this?
17:22
This was hard for me today.
This is something that was really hard for me today.
If I notice that you start shutting down emotionally or that's my perception, is that at being a reflected sense of self?
We talk about self differentiation a lot.
17:38
Speaker 2
No.
17:39
Speaker 1
OK.
Or is it being emotionally intelligent because I can read the room?
17:43
Speaker 2
Yes, actually it's insight, my love.
That's external self-awareness, which is part of insight.
Just reading, be able to read the room, so to speak.
Reading my emotions.
Now I'm not saying it's good to stay there and only read our emotions.
18:00
I mean, you still have to be yourself too.
18:02
Speaker 1
Yeah, So what happens when we're both so sensitive to each other's emotions that we don't truly let each other see a lot of parts of ourselves?
18:15
Speaker 2
We start our communication program right.
We talked about these in other episodes about certain communication patterns that can help open up these sensitive times and just be curious.
18:31
Speaker 1
Because if I keep shutting myself down because I see that you're getting defensive or I see that you're shutting down, or I see that you're feeling hurt.
So I never say anything that's truly at the heart of what I'm thinking.
Do they become roommates then because there's no eventually emotional connection?
18:51
Speaker 2
That's correct.
That's I would imagine, yes, that's roommate syndrome.
18:57
Navigating Messiness and Repair for Authentic Connection
When that doesn't get addressed, when we keep sweeping things under the rug because we don't want to create ways, we don't want to hurt our spouse, we don't want to face that emotional turmoil and pain together.
19:12
And what I'm saying is tonight we did something very emotionally intelligent and that is we had a very sensitive topic that we're both discussing and we're both reacting to.
And you gave me space.
19:27
I took it.
I felt somewhat hurt and I did kind of start shutting down.
But then I came back and said, I want you to not hide your feelings.
You, you need to feel your feelings.
19:44
And I am going to work through this.
I'm going to work through these feelings I feel right now.
I know it's hard for me because I'm just a human.
But so are you just human with human emotions and human feelings and human things that we can't really automatically change.
20:05
And so here we are.
This is the meat grinder.
This is how the sausage is made.
Right here and just allowing this middle space between us, not to push us apart to but help us come together, yeah.
20:23
Speaker 1
So truly, like Khalil Gibran says you, and this wasn't a big huge digging out and making space for joy to fill, but it is, to some extent, right.
That's what a scintillating marriage is made of, is learning to sit in discomfort.
20:44
Learning to sit through the parts of us that are uncomfortable and sometimes painful.
Again, not abuse, but uncomfortable things, and then being able to look at it from a lot of different perspectives.
21:01
Being responsible for our own emotional healing instead of relying on our spouse for emotional healing.
21:11
Speaker 2
I think I do, I agree.
There's some some common themes.
I think when we're communicating like this and it's very sensitive.
We, I think just that general acknowledgement with each other that we're both flawed people.
21:29
We are both flawed.
We're not perfect, I'm not perfect, she's not perfect, and we're also both curious.
I want to know, hey, what's going on right now with you?
I want to know.
I'd like to know.
21:44
And I don't want to accuse.
I don't want to attack, just desire to know.
21:50
Speaker 1
I think the more we've done marriage IQ for the last year and a half, the more we're realizing we both have a lot to learn.
We're both very imperfect.
22:02
Speaker 2
Well, that's The funny thing is, that's not a.
22:03
Speaker 1
Bad thing.
22:05
Speaker 2
We can teach principals.
We can teach skills, we can teach tools and tricks and tips all day long about how to become a better spouse.
And we do.
We also try to back it up with research.
22:22
And so here at Marriage IQ, we really try to hit everything.
What to do?
But also, what happens when it goes bad and we revert back to, yeah, we're humans, It's not an excuse, but it is an explanation.
22:39
Not an excuse for what I did, but it is an explanation.
And if we can both look at it like that, it just tends to lessen that impact.
22:52
Speaker 1
The really great thing is, with almost 30 years of marriage now, we know how to repair pretty quickly.
We know how to look at our own selves and see, hey, I might be a little bit quiet for a day or two.
23:09
I'm trying to work through.
For me, the grief of my parents passing comes up frequently this year.
The stress from the podcast comes up frequently this year.
The doubt in my own self and my own capacities comes up frequently this year.
23:26
A lot of different things keep coming up.
It's been an extraordinary year in that way, but we've also had some really amazing times and if I need to work through some things within myself, I want you to know it's not your responsibility to fix that.
23:49
Speaker 2
But I will be here.
23:50
Speaker 1
My responsibility.
23:52
Speaker 2
But I will be here to to witness your life.
23:57
Speaker 1
Yes, and when you are going through things that are so hard and take you down to the mat and make you wonder about your own capacity and your own value and your own identity, who you are, as things in life shake up, I will be here to witness, to stand by you, the empathetic, to remember those really high view perspectives that we've gained, even if we do hit the trees coming down.
24:29
Speaker 2
Well, we survived.
24:31
A Touching Example of Deep, Unwavering Love in Later Life
We did.
It was really wonderful.
24:34
Speaker 2
All right.
Well, that's kind of what was on our mind tonight and we wanted to share it with you.
This becoming really vulnerable, we're kind of practicing that, modeling it so you can start using it in your own relationships.
24:51
What does it look like to be vulnerable?
What does it look like to really dig in?
And it can be a little scary, especially when we're doing it in front of a bunch of people.
But ultimately this is what it's all about.
25:06
This is part of that witness that she's talking about.
This is why we can talk to this 30 something year old single woman who.
25:16
Speaker 1
Has lost trust.
25:19
Speaker 2
In marriage and say it is worth it.
This is how we do it.
25:25
Speaker 1
You know, we spent the weekend with Scott's parents, both in their elderly years in an assisted living place.
His mom has Alzheimer's, and his dad sits next to her in the recliner holding her hand for hours a day.
25:43
And every time we talk to him on the phone lately, he just says with tears in his eyes that the love he has for her is deeper than it's ever, ever been.
They didn't have a perfect marriage.
My parents didn't have a perfect marriage.
25:59
Speaker 2
So should we just blow it off but they forget it?
26:03
Speaker 1
It's.
26:04
Speaker 2
Almost not perfect.
I'm out of.
26:05
Speaker 1
Here, it's almost like he's hit a gold mine and she can't even probably remember who he is sometimes.
But just remembering all their history together, all the wonderful times that they've had together, what a good mother she was, and just watching him adore her deeply is huge inspiration.
26:25
Speaker 2
Thank you, that is an inspiration.
26:28
Speaker 1
All right, everybody.
Thanks for joining us on this REAL TALK.
And if you have other ideas that you'd like us to tackle every once in a while, let us know.
26:37
Speaker 2
And if you have a friend, family, somebody who might really want to hear us with our vulnerability tonight, just share it.
26:47
Speaker 1
With them, it would mean a lot to us.
It really, truly would mean a lot to us.
26:52
Speaker 2
And until next time, we'll see you on another exciting episode of Marriage IQ.
