Grounds for Divorce (Sometimes)

On drift, dishwashers, betrayal, and the God who rebuilds what we nearly destroy.

“You must catch the troubling foxes,
those sly little foxes that hinder our relationship.
For they raid our budding vineyard of love
to ruin what I’ve planted within you.” Song of Solomon 2:15

The dishwasher was overflowing again.

Plastic lids balanced like unstable theology.
Coffee mugs from three days ago.
A crusted bowl someone swore they rinsed.
Tiny forks.
Half-melted Tupperware.
A sippy cup rolling around the bottom like a threat.

And there we stood in the kitchen at Why-Are-We-Still-Awake O’Clock, exhausted and irritated, having the same dumb argument married people have been having since the invention of indoor plumbing.

Who loaded it wrong.
Who forgot again.
Who always does whatever.
Who notices more.
Who carries more.
Who is more tired.

It sounds ridiculous now.

Marriages rarely fall apart in one dramatic moment.

Most erode quietly.

Not through dramatic betrayal at first, but through accumulation.
Tiny unattended fractures.
Small disappointments.
Chronic exhaustion.
Unspoken hurt.
Unspoken everything.
Coldness that arrives so gradually you don’t notice it until one day you’re standing beside someone you still love but can no longer seem to reach.

Over ten years ago, adultery entered our marriage, and we collapsed under the weight of it.

It felt sudden.
Nuclear.
Hostile.
Like waking up inside someone else’s nightmare.

Our home became quiet in all the wrong ways. We moved around each other like strangers carrying shared trauma. Some days I wanted to fight for us. Some days I wanted to burn the whole thing to the ground.

Barren wastelands took over our home.

Dry bones stretched from room to room.

I was vacant.
Standing ankle-deep in the wreckage of a covenant I no longer recognized.

Maybe a covenant I no longer wanted.

I know the wreckage was not the first fracture.
It was the exposure.

The drift had started long before either of us admitted how far away we’d become.

Church hurt.
Stress.
Overwork.
Emotional exhaustion.
Spiritual complacency.
Life moving too fast.
Pain stacking on top of pain until neither of us could distinguish fresh wounds from old ones.

We were surviving, not tending.

Roommates.

You can live in the same house, raise the same children, pay the same bills, sleep in the same bed, and still stop seeing one another.

Nobody’s trending conversations are about this kind of marriage death.

At some point, we stopped fighting for each other and started fighting for survival.

And survival mode is dangerous because it convinces you that maintenance is intimacy.

Passing each other in the kitchen is not connection.
Discussing schedules is not vulnerability.
Managing a household is not the same thing as nurturing a marriage.

We had grounds for divorce. Real ones. No contest.

The kind nobody wants to write about publicly because exposure feels terrifying and vulnerability is costly.

The near destruction of our marriage did not begin with betrayal.

Betrayal just overturned the rock.

Mercy is strange. Sometimes it enters through the very wound that should have destroyed you.

And, folks, complacency is glitzy expensive.

The Bible says, carelessness kills; complacency is murder (Proverbs 1:32 MSG)

I think people kill each other this way all the time.

Not with knives or screaming or betrayal or drop-kicks.

Sometimes with neglect, with too much screentime, with televisions in the bedroom...

...with indifference.

Sometimes by treating sacred things casually.
Sometimes by assuming love can survive on leftovers, Starbucks, and exhaustion for all eternity.

Carelessness kills marriages long before the divorce papers are drawn up.

And eventually, someone bleeds internally while both people continue loading the dishwasher in their own chaotic way while paying the mortgage like everything is fine.

Complacency is the numbing agent blurring the life within our beautiful marriages.

It sounds like:
“We’re just busy.”
“We’re just tired.”
“It’s just a season.”
“We’ll reconnect later.”
"Not tonight."

Meanwhile, resentment ferments.
Loneliness deepens.
Tenderness dies quietly in the background.

By the time most people realize their marriage is starving, one or both of them are already emotionally a-goner.

The little things are rarely little.
They are stitches holding the fabric together — or tiny cuts weakening it over time.

Sometimes the dishwasher is just a dishwasher.
Sometimes the dishwasher is d-day with our guts blasted out.

Sometimes love looks less like winning an argument and more like moving over quietly so the other person has room beside you at the sink.

Sometimes covenant is profoundly uncinematic.

Not roses.
Not violins.
Not movie monologues.

Just:
“I know we’re tired.”
“I know life is heavy.”
“I know we’ve both changed.”
"I see you."
“I still choose you.”

Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.

I wanted to think that lasting love was sustained by intensity, passion, and poetry dramatic enough to survive shipwrecks.

Now I think it’s sustained by attention, by time, by reciprocity, by serving, by honesty.

Tiny acts of mercy.
Tiny acts of forgiveness.
Tiny acts of humility.
Tiny acts of staying.

That’s the strange holiness of marriage:
two flawed people repeatedly laying down weapons they are fully justified in using.

And somehow, by the grace of God, building a life anyway.

We quote “a cord of three strands is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12) as if marriage is some kind of magical immunity from suffering.

But the verse does not say the cord is unbreakable.

And, make no mistake, it frickin matters that there are three strands.

Not two exhausted people white-knuckling survival.
Not two wounded people bleeding on each other.
Not two selfish people demanding to be understood while refusing to understand.
Because Lord knows we are exhausted, wounded, and selfish every dang day. 

Three strands.

Him.
Her.
And God.

The truth is: we two alone just ain’t got it.

Not enough patience.
Not enough mercy.
Not enough endurance.
Not enough wisdom.
Not enough grace to carry a covenant through betrayal, exhaustion, disappointment, church hurt, resentment, financial stress, sleepless nights, sickness, parenting, and all the thousand tiny foxes trying to raid the vineyard.

We fail.

And if marriage rests entirely on the strength of two flawed human beings, eventually the strain becomes too much.

That third strand matters because God is the only thing holding two people together when they no longer know how to hold onto each other.

There were seasons where Jon and I loved God more faithfully than we loved one another. (We didn't even like each other.)
And honestly?
That is the reason we survived.

When I could not trust my feelings, I trusted covenant.
When I could not feel tenderness, I leaned on obedience.
When we had nothing emotionally beautiful left to offer each other, God remained steady beneath us both.

The cord held because He held.

He held us.

The dishwasher still gets overloaded.

Life is still loud.
The arguments still happen.
The stress still creeps in if we let it.

But now, when I stand in the kitchen late at night surrounded by plastic chaos and ordinary fatigue, I no longer see evidence of failure.

I see evidence that God still restores what people nearly destroy.

And honestly?

Grace-soaked reconstruction feels holier than effortless romance ever did.

Fight for your marriage.

Not blindly.
Not while enabling abuse.
Not while pretending devastation doesn’t devastate.

But if there is still humility, repentance, tenderness, willingness, and breath inside the covenant—fight for it.

Fight for softness in a culture that rewards contempt.
Fight for tenderness when exhaustion makes indifference too easy.
Fight for one another when life gets loud, and cold, and painfully mundane.

Because love rarely dies dramatically.
It usually starves slowly beneath unattended things.

Catch the little foxes.
Pay attention to drift.
Speak before silence hardens.
Apologize quickly.
Forgive repeatedly.
Protect what God entrusted to you.

And when your own strength runs out—because eventually it will—cling to the third strand.

“He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.” Isaiah 40:29

The cord held for us because God held us. 🩷