The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

There are two classic crisis periods in marriage—just after the children are born and in the doldrums of middle age. In the former, the temptation is to replace the complicated and difficult relationship you have with your spouse for the joyous and captivating love you have with your children. In the latter crisis, people in middle age are haunted by a feeling of generalized sadness and incompleteness. There’s a sense that life is slipping away, and a tendency to see the spouse, with all of their flaws and negativity, nagging and unhappiness, as the real problem, the real anchor that is holding you back from your fullness. During these crisis moments, there’s a tendency to recoil, to distance yourself from your partner. You begin to dissociate and withdraw. You construct parallel lives with outside interests and separate friend groups. You get used to marriage without intimacy—the marriage bed, as they say, where the spouses are a centimeter apart and a million miles away. You use drugs, booze, work, or the care of your children to occupy the psychic space formerly filled by the marriage. In a study at Cameron University in Oklahoma, Joanni L. Sailor interviewed people who had fallen out of love. The quotes she collected are a searing testimony of how horrible it is to be in a relationship after the fire has died: “During sex there was no kissing. I remember just craving to be kissed, but not by him.” “The pain is so overwhelming.” “I think I cried for a year.” “Yes, it wa...