Should you stay or should you go? In this uncensored look inside a marriage therapist's office, psychologist and Harvard Medical School instructor Mark O'Connell shows why it's worthwhile to make the difficult decision to work on long-term relationships and explains how to grapple with unrealistic expectations of marriage. An excerpt.

Introduction
Growing up together: Midlife challenges and midlife relationships
This is a book about marriage, but it’s not the kind of “how to make your marriage better” book that we have come to expect. This is a book about how stretching the boundaries of what we imagine to be possible can turn our intimate relationships into remarkable opportunities for growth and change. This is a book about how our relationships can make us better. And this is also a book that offers a radical and contemporary answer to an age-old question. Why stay married? Because our long-term relationships can, at their best, help us to navigate the maddeningly relentless passage of time. They can teach us how to find purpose and meaning even in the face of life’s most immovable limits, making growing older an expanding, rather than a diminishing, experience.

A date
Philip and Marie slipped into the empty seats, a rarity for rush hour on the Lexington Avenue subway. Usually they met at their uptown apartment, often quite late now that Drew was off at college and Kaetlin spent most evenings with her high school friends. But last night Philip had proposed dinner in the Village at a new restaurant he’d seen reviewed in the Times.

Marie had been pleased by her husband’s suggestion. Things worked fine between them; Philip was kind and fair, and she didn’t doubt they loved each other. But they had talked less and less to each other over the past few years, and when they did it was mostly about the business of their marriage — money, kids, social engagements, and the like.

As the train picked up speed, heading downtown from the Fifty-ninth Street station, Philip glanced at his wife and saw her brief return smile. He wanted to talk to her, he knew he could start a conversation about yesterday’s argument with Kaetlin, but he wanted something else, and he couldn’t find the opening. In their familiarity with each other she somehow seemed to have grown more unfamiliar to him.

Marie had seen Philip’s glance, and she wanted to grab her husband’s momentary availability. But by the time she could think of anything to say he had opened his briefcase, extracting one of those manila folders that always seemed to occupy the space between them. She, too, opened her briefcase, though she bypassed the briefs and depositions for the college catalogues: Kaetlin would be heading off next fall.

The subway pulled out of Union Square, heading toward Bleecker. In place of the predictable middle-aged disgorgements of the midtown offices, their car now filled with young people; kids dressed in black, with lots of piercings, and with this the quiet turned to laughter and loud conversation.

A woman in her early twenties caught Philip’s attention. She’s not exactly beautiful, he thought, noting that he’d gone from being awed by the power women held over him to regarding them with some kind of controlling, clinical evaluation. Still, there was something about this girl: the smoothness of her skin, the litheness of her body. But it’s more than her looks, he thought, it’s that sex is still her currency. Marie was still beautiful to him, but since the kids had been born she had dressed to be taken seriously, not to be sexy.

Marie noticed Philip’s interest in the girl. She always noticed when he looked, and always she wanted to ask: “Will you fantasize about her?” “Do you wish I looked like that?” She didn’t really fear the answers to these questions, she just wanted to know. When they were younger they had talked about everything, but somehow, over the years, so much of what they thought about seemed to have become off-limits.

Philip had seen Marie notice his glance. Did she know that his looking at women wasn’t really about sex but about something else — a time past that he missed, even a part of himself that he seemed to have lost? He wanted to talk to his wife about these things, but something blocked him, embarrassment maybe, and beneath that a lurking sadness that he needed to turn away from.

Now Marie looked at the young woman. She remembered when she was that lean, twenty-five years and two kids ago. She missed the feeling of being alive in her body, of waking up and swinging her legs out of bed, her feet landing lightly on the floor. What was worse, the thickening of her body seemed to have been accompanied by a thickening of her mind. She watched the girl’s eyes dart between her companions, taking as much pleasure in the emerging power of her own young being as in the company of her friends, and she remembered when she had felt ironic and sharp, when she had looked at life from those slightly off-kilter angles. She wanted to tell Philip all of this, but she feared he’d see her as even older and less appealing than he probably already thought she was.

The sign for Spring Street appeared through the train’s window, and Philip and Marie rearranged themselves. Standing together, they shared a quick smile as he touched her shoulder, gently ushering her toward the door.

We are growing older, but are we growing up?
A generation of baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) has reached midlife. Most of us have made the life-defining choices — jobs, spouses, and even, on a deeper level, outlooks and philosophies — that have become the stuff of our lives. If we have worked hard, been wise in our decisions, and, perhaps more than we would like to admit, been blessed with a bit of plain old good luck, our lives hold many rewards and satisfactions.

We have also, however, become acutely aware of the paths we have not taken, of the costs that accompany even our most rewarding choices. What once felt like life-expanding opportunities now feel, more often than we would like, like life-narrowing obligations. Where previously we thought in terms of what could be, now we are faced with daily reminders of what will probably not be. And where before we imagined an unlimited future, now we ask the questions that come with the awareness that time is finite: What must we concede as being unattainable? What will we look back on as having really mattered? And what will be the most rewarding and meaningful way to spend the precious, and hopefully not insignificant, time that remains?

Over the next twenty to thirty years, we baby boomers will need to answer these questions. They are, however, questions that our generation is uniquely ill-equipped to address. Products of a “we can have it all and if we don’t somebody is to blame” culture, we hold tight to our already overextended adolescences. We imagine that all gratifications are possible, that all losses are avoidable, and that all constraints are negotiable. As a result, we experience life’s hardships and complexities as unnecessary inconveniences rather than defining, meaning-making aspects of being human.

The result? Perhaps more than any previous generation, we will struggle with the inevitable reckoning with reality that comes with middle and older age. Bluntly speaking, we risk becoming the first generation to die before it actually grows up. Fortunately, there is help. Powerful help. In the pages that follow, I will argue that our long-term intimate relationships can help us to grow up, or, to put it another way, they can help us to live fully and creatively even as our private hopes and expectations meet the immutable realities that come with our advancing years. Even better, they can help us with core midlife challenges while bringing us joy, allowing us moments of unexpected laughter and lightness, and helping us to become our best selves.

Of course, things that are this good are rarely easy or free. There is also a hard truth lurking in all this good news. For starters, our mutual relationships, like our individual selves, face a litany of midlife problems:

We are dealing with the loss and disruption of our kids leaving home. We are embarking on the sometimes oppressive task of tallying our losses and disappointments; in life, in work, and, of course, in marriage. We are trying, often unsuccessfully, to avoid the seduction of infidelity, a seduction that beckons us not only as an alternative to boredom and disappointment, but also as a balm for our growing sense of diminishment. We are struggling to reengage with each other after years of focusing on work and children. We are negotiating the often excruciating hardships of increasing medical and health problems. We are combating the legion of habits and addictions that we have used to mitigate our anxiety, depression, and boredom. And we are looking to find each other sexually even as our libido is lowered for both biological and psychological reasons.

And if all this weren’t daunting enough, we have to meet these challenges within a society that encourages us to think that our wildest wishes and expectations should be seamlessly transformed into our daily realities. A society that tells us that someone or something is to blame when life delivers us anything short of lasting romance, a stunningly attractive partner, great sex, exceptional kids, impeccable health, and easily resolvable disagreements. We have to come to terms with things as they really are, even as we are increasingly inclined to believe that we should be given a “cheat code” whenever the game of  life doesn’t go our way.

If we baby boomers are poorly equipped to age well, we are even more poorly equipped to age well together.

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