Is my marriage over?

A marriage in a bad stretch and a marriage that has already ended feel identical from the inside. The differences are specific, and you can watch for them.

Signs of a bad stretch

• You fight, but you also make up, sometimes badly and late.
• There is a cause you can both name: a newborn, a job, an illness, a bereavement.
• You still get irritated. Irritation means you still expect something.
• When one of you reaches out, the other notices, even if they don't respond well.
• You can remember wanting them within the past year.

Signs of something more final

• Contempt. Not anger — the sense that they are beneath you, or you beneath them. It is the most reliable single predictor of divorce in the research.
• Stonewalling. One of you has stopped showing up for the conversation at all.
• Indifference. You no longer bother to complain. Nothing they do lands as a slight, because nothing is expected.
• Rewritten history. You describe the good years as a mistake or a performance. Couples who recover usually keep their past intact.
• A private future. When you imagine the next five years, they are not in it, and the picture is a relief rather than a grief.

"We're staying for the kids"

Worth being precise about. The research on children of divorce points at conflict and instability more than at separation itself; a low-conflict, mutually respectful marriage is genuinely better for children than a split, and a high-conflict household is not. The honest version of this reason is usually about wanting to keep the family shape, which is a legitimate thing to want. Just count it as its own reason rather than evidence the marriage works.

Before you decide anything

Give it a defined window — eight weeks is enough — and record it. Rate respect, repair, trust, intimacy, autonomy, future, effort and fear each week, and each week change one concrete thing and watch what comes back. Two months later you will know whether you are in a stretch or at an end, and you'll know it from evidence rather than from whichever Sunday night you happened to ask yourself.

If there is fear, coercion or violence in your marriage, this framing does not apply. Support is here.