Growing Together, Not Apart

PART I

We have had the privilege of watching love up close for a long time.

We watched it in James’s grandparents 62 years of marriage before his grandfather passed. There was nothing theatrical about what they had. It was the kind of love that had long since settled into something quieter and more durable than romance alone: a shared language built over decades, the easy shorthand of two people who had weathered enough together that very little needed explaining. They didn’t perform their commitment. They simply lived it, season after season, in the accumulated weight of ordinary faithfulness.

We have watched it in pastors and their wives. These are couples who made the unusual choice to build not just a home together but a shared calling. That particular life asks a great deal. It asks you to be present for everyone while somehow remaining present for each other. It asks you to grow publicly, which is its own kind of pressure. The couples we have admired most are the ones who found a way to keep inviting each other into the growth, who treated the years not as a long stretch of the same thing, but as a continuing conversation about who they were becoming.

What we noticed, in all of these relationships, is the same thing. The ones that embodied thriving longevity were the ones where two people kept finding ways to grow in the same direction.

What Happens When the Paths Diverge

When observing the masses, you see what you’re looking for and a good amount of the opposite as well. Many couples don’t choose a path of unity and growth early enough to strengthen their relationships for the challenging moments of life eventually come. 

There is a documentary about the life and legacy of a well-known music producer whose career shaped decades of American music. His second wife speaks about their marriage with genuine warmth. By her account, it was a wonderful partnership. They traveled together, worked alongside each other, moved through the world as a unit. It was one of those marriages that seemed “right.”

Then, gradually, her capacity to keep up that pace shifted. She couldn’t travel as frequently. She couldn’t be present in the same ways she had been. What followed wasn’t dramatic, nor was there was a single rupture, no clear villain in the story. Yet, the distance came anyway.

One line from the documentary has stayed with us. She said, quietly and without bitterness: “When we stopped doing the things that we did together, he still traveled and worked — he grew in ways that I didn’t, and that changed things.”

That sentence carries more than it seems to on the surface. Because what she’s describing isn’t a failure of love. It’s a failure of shared growth, one of the most common and least-discussed reasons that marriages between otherwise decent, well-intentioned people slowly come apart.

He didn’t stop growing. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that growth, apart from intentional connection, became a wedge. Each new experience he had without her, each new version of himself that emerged on the road or in the studio, was a version she hadn’t traveled alongside. Over time, they were no longer narrating the same life.

Growth as a Shared Project

One of the quieter truths about long marriages is that you will not always grow at the same speed. Life sees to that. Illness, career demands, the particular weight of raising children or caring for aging parents are things that do not distribute themselves evenly across a partnership. There will be seasons when one of you is expanding rapidly and the other is holding the ground. That is not a flaw in the design. It’s just the shape of a long life shared.