There was a running joke in my friend group in our late twenties.
Brooke married a man she described as “fine, reliable, and extremely solvent.” We laughed the way women laugh when they think they understand something completely. Not cruelly—we loved her—but with a certain confidence. A verdict disguised as affection.
She’d chosen safety over spark. Comfort over chemistry. A retirement plan over a love story.
We told her she’d at least have a beautiful kitchen someday. We said it lightly, but underneath it was a quiet reassurance to ourselves: we would never make that trade. We were the romantics. We were brave enough to risk everything for the kind of love that rearranges your molecules.
I went home to the man I was wildly, breathlessly in love with and felt something I didn’t admit at the time.
Relief.
Relief that I had chosen the grand version of love. Relief that I wasn’t the woman who settled. Relief that I understood what really mattered.
I wore that certainty like armor. It made me feel evolved. Principled. Deep.
That marriage ended when I was 41.
The years between the wedding and the divorce weren’t a tragedy. They were tender and chaotic and real. We loved each other in a way that felt cinematic at first and quietly exhausting later. We were also, for most of our marriage, one broken appliance away from panic. One medical bill away from a fight we both pretended wasn’t about money.
We told ourselves love would cover it. That love was bigger than logistics. That passion was proof we’d chosen correctly.
I’m 52 now.
Brooke just got back from her third trip to Portugal. Her kitchen is, in fact, beautiful.
But that’s not the part that lingers when I think about her life. What lingers is the steadiness in her voice. The absence of strain around the edges. The way her marriage seems to move forward instead of sideways.
I’m not writing this to argue against love. I still believe in it. I just no longer believe it is self-sufficient.
Over the past decade, I’ve had to sit with the uncomfortable realization that some of my most passionate convictions in my twenties weren’t wisdom. They were avoidance dressed up as romance.
And some of the women I thought were settling were actually seeing clearly.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.
1. Money Stuff Bleeds Into Everything Else
Not just the bank account. Everything.
The way you speak to each other at the end of a hard month. The small resentments that build when one person’s choices keep costing the other person sleep. The particular exhaustion of having the same argument so many times that you stop having it out loud and start having it silently, which is somehow so much worse.
Researchers who study marital satisfaction have found that financial conflict is the single strongest predictor of divorce—more than incompatibility, more than infidelity, more than the growing apart that people usually cite when they’re trying to explain what happened.
I believed, going in, that love was insulation against all of that. That if you chose right emotionally, the practical stuff would figure itself out.
It didn’t figure itself out. It just waited.
2. What I Called Settling Was Actually Paying Attention
That framing was mine, and it was lazy.
What Brooke actually did was choose someone whose relationship with money—his earning of it, his management of it, his fundamental orientation toward stability—was compatible with her own. That’s not mercenary. That’s paying attention to something that turns out to matter enormously over thirty years of shared life.
I called it marrying for money because it was easier than admitting she was being more clear-eyed about the whole thing than I was. More honest about what a life together actually requires. Less willing to pretend that love alone was going to handle the details.
3. Love Is Real But So Are The Bills
We were so in love. Genuinely, completely, the kind that makes everything feel like it’s going to be fine because it feels so right.
And then the bills arrived.
The mortgage we couldn’t quite sustain.
The career pivots that never quite landed.
The specific exhaustion of two people trying to build something solid on a foundation that kept shifting underneath them.
Psychologists who study long-term relationships have found that couples who enter marriage with aligned financial values report significantly higher satisfaction at the ten and twenty year marks than those with stronger initial romantic intensity but financial misalignment. I would have rolled my eyes at that sentence at 28.
At 52, I find it almost unbearably accurate.
4. Financial Stress Doesn’t Stay Quiet For Long
I didn’t experience it as anxiety after a while. It just felt like the weather—ambient, constant, so normalized I’d stopped registering it as something that wasn’t supposed to be there.
What I didn’t understand until it was over was how much of me it was quietly consuming. How much mental bandwidth was occupied by calculations I was running in the background all the time. Whether we could cover the car registration this month. Whether bringing up the credit card would start another fight. Whether this was just a hard year or whether hard years were simply what our life was now.
The absence of that noise, after the marriage ended, was one of the more startling things I’ve ever felt. I hadn’t known how loud it was until it stopped.
5. My “Romanticism” Was Really Avoidance
Looking back, the confidence I felt about marrying for love was covering something I didn’t want to examine.
An unwillingness to admit that partnership is also a practical arrangement. That two people building a life together need compatible approaches to money, work, and risk as much as they need chemistry. I wanted love to be purely transcendent—unsullied by anything as mundane as a credit score—and I pretended that avoidance was wisdom when it was closer to willful naivety.
There’s research suggesting that people who explicitly discount practical compatibility in favor of romantic intensity tend to report lower satisfaction over time, not because the love wasn’t real, but because love alone doesn’t build a functional life. I discounted it completely. And called my friends shallow for not doing the same.
6. The Marriages I Underestimated Were The Ones That Lasted
This is the part that took the most sitting with.
Brooke is happy. Actually happy, in the specific way that comes from a life that feels stable and chosen and like it’s going somewhere she can see. Her marriage isn’t a compromise she’s quietly managing. It’s a partnership that works, with someone she loves in a quieter register than I loved my ex-husband, but in a way that has proved far more durable than I expected quiet love to be.
I owe her an apology I’ve never delivered. Not just for the teasing. For the verdict I carried for years underneath it—that she’d settled, that she’d chosen small, that she’d missed the point of the whole thing. She hadn’t missed anything. I had.
7. Wanting Love And Security Doesn’t Make You Greedy
Here’s what I’ve only recently been able to say honestly:
I wanted passion and I wanted security, and somewhere along the way I decided wanting both was greedy or naive—so I picked one and dismissed the other as shallow.
Psychologists who study how people choose long-term partners have found that most people, when asked honestly rather than publicly, want both romantic compatibility and financial stability.
But social scripts around love make it hard to admit the practical part without feeling like you’ve said something embarrassing. I internalized that script so completely that I mocked the people brave enough to hold both things at once, because I’d already talked myself out of believing you could have them.
8. Intensity Isn’t The Same Thing As Depth
The most electric connection I’ve ever felt was with my ex-husband.
That electricity was real.
It was also, I’ve come to understand, partly a product of the instability between us—the push and pull, the uncertainty, the feeling of something that could tip either way on any given day.
That kind of intensity is easy to mistake for depth when you’re living inside it. From a distance it looks more like turbulence.
The marriages I most admire now are the ones that look almost boring from the outside. Low drama. High trust. Two people who have made themselves genuinely easy to live with and seem to have quietly agreed that’s the whole project. I used to pity those marriages. I don’t anymore.
9. I Mistook Reliability For Boredom
I operated for years as though stability and romance were opposites—as though choosing someone dependable meant choosing someone unexciting, as though security and passion sat at opposite ends of a scale and you could only stand in one place.
That’s not something I reasoned my way into. It’s something I absorbed from every love story I’d ever been told, and I never questioned it because it was so pervasive it felt like the truth. The couples I know who have built something genuinely good together have almost universally stopped treating those things as opposites. They found the romance inside the reliability. It just doesn’t look the way movies said it would, and for a long time that gap was enough to make me dismiss it entirely.
10. I’d Go Back And Ask Better Questions
I loved my ex-husband. I don’t regret the marriage, not fully, not in the clean way that would make for a neater ending to this story.
But I’d go back and take my hands out of my pockets.
Stop performing certainty about things I hadn’t actually examined.
Take the practical questions as seriously as the romantic ones—not instead of them, alongside them, as though both things mattered because both things did.
I’d go back and stop laughing at the friends who were paying attention to things I’d decided were beneath consideration. They weren’t beneath consideration. They were just inconvenient to consider, and I was very good at avoiding inconvenient things and calling it conviction.
