{"id":57638,"date":"2026-02-13T08:43:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/?p=57638"},"modified":"2026-02-17T13:16:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T20:16:32","slug":"a-new-marriage-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/publicsquaremag.org\/media-education\/pop-culture\/a-new-marriage-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Marriage Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/picture> Download Print-Friendly Version<\/a><\/p>\n

If you want critical movie acclaim, there\u2019s a reliable formula: tell a <\/span>love story<\/span><\/a> backward.<\/span><\/p>\n

Start in the wreckage. Someone has cheated. Someone has checked out. The husband drinks too much, the wife works too much, and there\u2019s a dead-eyed distance until one of them says something like, \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m in love anymore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Then cut to an earlier version of the same couple\u2014young, magnetic, and unmistakably \u201cin love.\u201d They have a meet-cute, an immediate connection, a spontaneous slow dance. Cue the sweeping wedding montage, the surprise pregnancy, the tiny apartment made romantic with twinkle lights. We\u2019re asked to believe this is what good married love is: intensity, spontaneity, romance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cut forward again, and we get the discovery, the confession, the paperwork, the sad soundtrack. The same question hangs over every scene, \u201cHow did we get from there to here?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside the prestige marriage-in-freefall genre, the state of marriage on screen isn\u2019t exactly hopeful. In early 2025, <\/span>Millers in Marriage<\/span><\/i> arrived as a relationship drama about three adult siblings orbiting dissatisfaction, infidelity, and divorce-adjacent choices. Later that year, <\/span>Splitsville<\/span><\/i> took the modern \u201cmaybe monogamy is the problem\u201d premise and detonated it into chaos: a dissolving marriage collides with a supposedly successful open relationship, and it works out for no one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it time for a new marriage story?<\/span><\/p>\n

The thing about the marriage-falling-apart stories is that they\u2019re often very good. The best of them are relatable in some small way to even the happiest of married couples. They treat the couple with a thoughtfulness and nuance that\u2019s usually left out of the lighthearted rom-com genre.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Marriage isn\u2019t easy, and storytellers shouldn\u2019t pretend it is. But something has gone very wrong when the most talented writers, directors, and actors are exclusively drawn to the most melancholic stories, while stories about strong and happy marriages and families are left to the realm of low-budget holiday made-for-TV movies.\u00a0 Hollywood has gotten very good at depicting marital conflict and very bad at depicting marital <\/span>repair<\/span><\/i>. This repair is so often possible when marriage is viewed as a sacred <\/span>covenant<\/span><\/a> rather than a means of amusement and pleasure, something to be discarded when it ceases to serve that purpose.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t have to be this way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not long ago, a mainstream network drama gave viewers a marriage with real stress but no contempt and conflict without the constant threat of betrayal. <\/span>Friday Night Lights<\/span><\/i> wasn\u2019t a story about perfect people. It was a story about people under pressure\u2014career pressure, parenting pressure, community pressure\u2014and a marriage that didn\u2019t evaporate the moment it stopped feeling effortless.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marriage isn’t easy, and storytellers shouldn’t pretend it is.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>
\nHigh school football coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tami, a school counselor, fought and had misunderstandings. They dealt with the immense stress that comes from leading a 5A football team in Texas. They occasionally wanted different things at the same time. And then they did the thing that\u2019s so rare on screen, but so common to normal married couples: they repaired. It\u2019s why critics and viewers have so often pointed to them as an unusually realistic, aspirational depiction of marriage on television\u2014not because the Taylors were perfect, but because their marriage had a moral center.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why does it matter if healthy marriages are portrayed on screen? It matters because <\/span>we are formed<\/span><\/a> by the stories we binge, quote, and internalize. Young people, who increasingly spend their waking hours on screens, have <\/span>decreasing interest<\/span><\/a> in marriage and family. This is great cause for concern, especially for people of faith who believe that marriage and family are central to God\u2019s plan. Proverbs teaches, \u201cFor as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.\u201d Who are we shaping ourselves and our children to be if so much of our media sows cynicism and discontent about marriage?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My favorite movie about love\u2014a true bright spot for marriage in movies\u2014is Rob Reiner\u2019s <\/span>When Harry Met Sally\u2026.<\/span><\/i> What makes it quietly profound isn\u2019t only the central story of two friends falling in love. It\u2019s the way the film is stitched together with documentary-style interviews of elderly couples telling the stories of how they met.<\/span><\/p>\n

The couples on screen are actors. But the stories are drawn from interviews gathered during the writing process\u2014real people\u2019s memories shaped into monologues, then performed with ordinary tenderness. The movie opens with a sweet elderly couple sitting on a couch, with the husband relaying this story:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was sitting with my friend Arthur Kornblum, in a restaurant \u2026 And this beautiful girl walked in and I turned to Arthur, and I said Arthur, you see that girl? I’m going to marry her. And two weeks later we were married. And it’s over fifty years later and we are still married.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later in the movie, another husband shares:<\/span><\/p>\n

A man came to me and say, \u201cI find a nice girl for you. She lives in the next village, and she is ready for marriage.\u201d We were not supposed to meet until the wedding. But I wanted to make sure. So I sneak into her village, hid behind a tree, watch her washing the clothes. I think if I don\u2019t like the way she looks, I don\u2019t marry her. But she look <\/span>really nice<\/span><\/i> to me. So I say okay to the man. We get married. We married for <\/span>55 years<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These vignettes are not \u201cprestige tragedy.\u201d They don\u2019t build toward an award-worthy implosion. They\u2019re small and human, sometimes funny, and improbable. They\u2019re often surprisingly plain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps we are beginning to see a correction.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>
\nAnd yet they carry something modern marriage stories often avoid: the assumption that commitment can be interesting\u2014not because it\u2019s painless, but because it\u2019s <\/span>alive<\/span><\/i>. A long marriage contains drama of a different kind: competing goods, sacrifice, loyalty under stress, forgiveness that costs something, joy that\u2019s earned slowly, and the deep intimacy that only exists where two people keep choosing each other. And they\u2019re the kind of stories I want my own children to recognize as true love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps we are beginning to see a correction. Chlo\u00e9 Zhao, one of the best working directors today, crafts one of the year\u2019s best movies around the theme of marriage repair and reconciliation in her Oscar-nominated film \u201cHamnet.\u201d Other Best Picture-nominated films, such as \u201cTrain Dreams\u201d and \u201cSinners\u201d also show marriages strained and repaired. These films are showing a better, more interesting way forward. We have plenty of conflict, realism, and cynicism. What we need is repair.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you can only imagine love as a feeling you either have or don\u2019t, then the moment the feeling dips, the story is basically over. But if love is also a practice\u2014something you learn, fail at, return to, choose over and over again, and grow into\u2014then marriage doesn\u2019t have to be filmed as either a fairy tale or a tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings me back to Valentine\u2019s Day. We need better marriage stories that are honest about difficulty and honest about endurance: depictions of husbands and wives who don\u2019t merely \u201cstay together\u201d but learn how to turn back toward each other again and again until the ordinary becomes, in its own way, extraordinary.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve mastered cynicism about marriage; it\u2019s time to recover the drama of reconciliation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":57639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[495],"tags":[214,217,147,141,999,242,1259,245,241,111,20,211,520,210,319],"coauthors":[436],"class_list":["post-57638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-commitment","tag-covenants","tag-culture","tag-divorce","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-fidelity","tag-forgiveness","tag-interpersonal-relationships","tag-love","tag-marriage","tag-movies","tag-relationships","tag-television","tag-virtue"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMarriage in Movies Needs Repair, Not Betrayal - Public Square Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Marriage in movies can show conflict without contempt; 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