Why Acceptance Is Not the Same as Giving Up More than twenty-one years ago, during premarital counseling, a therapist said something to me that I have never forgotten. He looked at me and said, "You need to stop fighting with life." Here is the strange part. I understood him immediately. The sentence landed the moment he said it, because I knew exactly what my fighting looked like. Like many young men, I believed that enough determination could overcome almost anything. If so

There are moments in life that don't just break your heart. They expose it. Not because grief creates something new, but because it reveals what was already there. A divorce. A death. A betrayal. A diagnosis. The loss itself is devastating, but underneath the pain is a question that is often harder to answer. Who am I now? Most people think grief is simply missing someone. Sometimes it is. But often grief is the collapse of an identity you never realized you were carrying. Th

A man can love his wife and still choose the bottle over her. That sentence sounds too harsh until you have lived on the other side of it. Until you are the spouse sitting in the car, embarrassed, exhausted, trying to get home while the person who promised to protect you keeps insisting he is fine. He is not fine. And neither is the marriage. Alcohol does not have to be an everyday problem to be a real problem. Some people do not crave it on Tuesday morning. They do not hide

How good marriages turn into performance reviews. He describes his marriage the way a man describes a car with high mileage. Still running. Costs more than it used to. Not sure it is worth what he keeps putting into it. He does not mean to be cruel. He is being precise, in the only vocabulary he has left. His wife sits beside him in my office with her own accounting, and her numbers are just as carefully kept. Nine years married. No affair. No addiction. No crisis a friend co