By Lisa* (*not her real name)
I read the article on this site about marriage and commitment (The Checkbox and the Covenant) twice.
The first time I read it as someone who has lived the exact tensions it describes. The second time I read it as someone who thinks the author is asking the right questions and arriving at the wrong answers.
Both readings led me to the same place.
He's not wrong about the science. He's not wrong about the history. He's not wrong that some people rush to the altar for the wrong reasons and end up in hollow marriages. I've seen it. I lived something close to a version of it for more than twenty years.
But I think he's solving for the wrong thing. And I'm writing this because I believe it matters, not just for him, but for every person reading this who has been hurt enough that caution starts to feel like the only intelligent response to love.
What I Know About Risk
I am not someone who doesn't understand what marriage costs.
A few months after our wedding, my husband told me he had married me out of spite for an ex-girlfriend. Then he left. Not for a conversation, not for a walk around the block. He left in a way that made it clear, or seemed to make it clear, that the marriage was over. I sat with that. I faced what it might mean to be alone again so soon after everything I had believed about us. Then he came back. He apologized. And I stayed, because I loved him and because I believed in what we could be together. We spent more than twenty years building a life.
The last eight of those years, it became clear, in the way these things become clear without anyone having to say them out loud, that his heart was elsewhere. I never investigated the details. I did not want to, and I did not need to. The contempt and criticism that crept into how he treated me told me enough. I think now that it was partly his way of managing what he already knew about himself. My love for him never faltered through any of it. Not because I was weak, but because that is genuinely how I am built. I love completely. I stay. I show up.
I am not angry at him. I feel something closer to compassion now than anything romantic. I understand that a relationship with him is one-sided and unworkable, and I have made peace with that. But I want anyone reading this to understand where I am speaking from. When I say I believe in marriage, I am not speaking from innocence. I am speaking from the other side of something very hard, with my conviction still intact.
That is not naivety. That is a choice I make every morning.
What Marriage Actually Feels Like When It's Real
I think about a particular kind of morning. The kind where you wake up next to someone who has chosen you completely, and you have chosen them completely, and the whole day opens up differently because of it. There is a safety in that feeling I have never been able to replicate any other way. Not through closeness alone. Not through time. Not through all the right conversations, as good as those can be.
The article is right that intimacy builds bonds. It's right that two people pulling back from each other in the name of rules can slowly starve something that deserved to grow. I believe that.
But the deepest opening, the kind where you stop managing and protecting and presenting and you simply become fully yourself with another person, that opening requires a foundation. The foundation I need is knowing that you are here. Fully. Without an exit plan.
I know who I am without a man in my life. My life is full and it is mine. I am still deeply involved in the lives of my four adult children, and that relationship, watching them become who they are, is one of the great joys of my life. My weekly temple attendance, my work with the young women in my ward, the rhythm of activity and service that structures my week: these are not obligations I fulfill. They are the things that keep me grounded and remind me who I am. What I also know, from all of that, is what I am capable of giving when I feel genuinely safe. And it is something I cannot fully access any other way.
The Science He Left Out
The article cited the oxytocin research accurately. Physical intimacy builds bonds. That is real.
But there is another piece of the same science that didn't make it in.
Each intimate relationship we enter and then leave creates a kind of residue. The research calls this pair bond erosion. Repeated cycles of bonding and loss gradually affect our capacity to bond fully with someone new. The oxytocin receptors that respond to closeness and attachment become, over time, a little less responsive. Not dramatically, not irreversibly in most cases, but measurably.
In plain language, this is something many of us have felt without having words for it. The first time you fall in love, you fall completely. By the fourth or fifth time, there is a part of you that holds back. Not because you're broken, but because your nervous system has learned, through experience, that this kind of opening comes with real risk. It has learned to protect you.
The solution to that protection is not more experience. It is building something safe enough that the protection is no longer necessary.
That is what marriage offers me. Not rules. Not control. A place safe enough to fully arrive.
And here is something I will admit that I have not said out loud very often. I have maintained my standards throughout my relationships after my divorce. I have not crossed the lines my faith asks me to hold. And yet, in my recently ended relationship, through the closeness and the affection and all the warmth that grows between partners naturally, I developed a bond that is powerful and real. The oxytocin is real even without sex. And I find myself sitting with a small, honest regret about that, not because anything wrong happened, but because that bond has made me deeply vulnerable to the loss of this relationship. I allowed myself to feel things fully before the foundation was secure. I understand now, from the inside, exactly what the article is describing. I just draw a different conclusion about what to do with it.
What You're Actually Asking Her to Risk
When a woman asks for marriage, or says she cannot fully give herself without that foundation, she is not asking anyone to check a box. She is not asking for compliance with an organization's requirements. She is telling you something true about how she is built and what she needs in order to give the thing you both actually want.
When that is met with hesitation, with a prenup-ready pragmatism, with "let's see how it goes," the man offering it may believe he is being honest. He may believe he is protecting both of them from a mistake. What she hears is something simpler: I am not certain enough about you to be fully here.
That uncertainty does not inspire her to open further. It inspires her to protect herself. And then both people wonder why the connection isn't deepening.
I have watched this happen to women I love. Women who gave themselves physically and emotionally to a man outside of marriage, who believed the relationship was heading somewhere real, and who were left when it didn't. The loss they carried was as deep as any divorce. The bond that had formed was just as real. But because there was no ceremony, no ring, no public commitment, the world did not treat it as a real loss. There was no language for what had been taken from them. Nobody brought flowers. Nobody said "I'm so sorry." They were just expected to move on from something that had quietly restructured them from the inside.
I have seen this in my own family. I have watched women I care about pay that price. And it is part of why I hold the position I hold, not because a rule told me to, but because I have seen with my own eyes what it costs.
On Fear, and What It Costs
There is a version of caution that is wisdom. It knows its own patterns. It moves carefully. It protects the people involved from avoidable pain. I have seen the man I was dating demonstrate exactly that kind of wisdom, and it is one of the things I admire most about him. He understands people. He pays attention. He is genuinely good at helping others find their way toward what they need.
But there is another version of caution that wears wisdom's clothes and is quietly something else. It builds very good arguments for staying exactly where it is. It finds the real flaws in commitment and holds them up carefully as evidence. It is kind and thoughtful and it will break your heart slowly and with great sincerity.
When a very intelligent person is carrying real fear, they can construct a very convincing case for why the thing they fear is actually the problem.
The exit plan is not honesty. The prenup-ready posture is not wisdom. They are, in many cases, the architecture of someone who has been hurt enough that they have decided, not always consciously, never again to be fully in a place where that can happen.
I had every reason to build those same walls. I had been told to my face that I was chosen as a prop in someone else's story. I had spent years being treated with contempt by a man I loved without reservation. And since then, in my dating relationships, I have at times felt hesitant in a way I could not immediately explain. I held back. I paid attention to that hesitation rather than overriding it. And it sometimes turned out to be warranted ... anger or dishonesty was revealed, and everything I needed to know about what a marriage to these men would have been like.
My caution was not fear. It was wisdom. And it protected me.
What I want, and what I am still willing to hope for, is not just any commitment. It is the right one. A man with genuine kindness and emotional intelligence who wants to give what I am capable of giving in return. I am not willing to settle. But I am also not willing to give up.
That willingness, after everything, is something I am proud of.
This Is Not About Rules
My conviction about marriage is not about earning access to something. It is not about performing worthiness or satisfying a requirement.
It is about the kind of love I know I am capable of and the conditions under which I can fully give it. I have thought about this carefully. I have lived enough to know the difference between a rule I follow and a truth I have found for myself.
The truth I have found is this: I cannot fully open to someone who has one foot out the door. Not because I am fragile, but because I am not. I know what I have to give. I am not willing to give all of it to something with an exit clause built in.
That is strength. Not fear. The difference matters enormously.
What I Want for Everyone Reading This
I am genuinely sad for anyone who has been hurt enough that marriage looks more like a risk than a gift. I understand how you got there. Most of us in this community carry the same scar tissue.
But the love that is possible on the other side of genuine commitment is worth it. The morning I described at the beginning of this piece is real. It is available. And it does not require you to be naive about the risks. It only requires you, at some point, to decide that the life you want matters more than the fear of losing it.
The man I was dating is one of the kindest, most sincere men I have ever known. He sees people clearly. He asks the right questions. He makes the people around him feel genuinely understood. I hope with everything I have that he finds his way to this, not because of me, but because he deserves the kind of morning I described. I believe he is capable of it.
To everyone else standing at the edge of something real, trying to decide whether to step in:
Step in. The water is cold for a moment. And then it is the most alive you have ever felt.
My marriage will be a beautiful thing. I believe that without reservation.
I hope yours will be too.
Lisa is a contributing voice at Unchaperoned Life. She writes from her own experience as a woman of faith who has loved fully, lost much, and chosen hope anyway.