Marriage Is for Losers (2025)
On a Friday morning in the spring of 2012, I published my ninth blog post and then left all my devices behind for a silent retreat weekend.
I returned on Sunday evening to discover it had gone viral. My first post had been read by a handful of friends and family—the ninth would be read by millions. But have you read it?
In case you haven't—and even if you have—here’s the 2025 edit.
The most substantial change includes the use of the word ego. To be clear, ego isn’t simply arrogance. Ego is the complex matrix of self-protections each of us began building in childhood, when being human became too painful for our souls to handle. Arrogance is simply one common manifestation of ego.
The need to win is another…
Many therapists aren’t crazy about doing marital therapy.
It’s complicated and messy, and it often feels out of control. In the worst case scenario, the therapist has a front row seat to a regularly-scheduled fight. But I love to do couples work, because I keep one simple principle in mind:
If marriage is going to work, it needs to become a contest to see who will let their ego lose the most, and it needs to be a race that goes down to the wire.
When it comes to winning and losing, there are three kinds of marriage.
In the first kind of marriage, both egos are competing to win, and it’s a devastating duel. Spouses are armed with a vast arsenal ranging from fists, to words, to silence. Half of marriages end in divorce, and this kind of marriage accounts for most of those divorces, and then some.
The second kind of marriage has plenty of winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same—one ego dominates, the other submits, and in the process, both people are stripped of their dignity. These are the marriages of narcissists and codependents, addicts and enablers, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.
However, there is a third kind of marriage. It isn’t perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two souls have decided to love each other to the limit by making the most difficult sacrifice of all—their egos. In these marriages, “losing” becomes a way of life. It’s a competition to see who can listen, care, serve, forgive, accept, give, and grow the most. These marriages form people who can be gentle and humble, merciful and peaceful.
When my ego is clinging to winning, I try to remember a phone call we received from my son’s second grade teacher.
She called us one day after school to tell us there’d been an incident in gym class. After a fierce athletic competition, in which the prize was the privilege to leave the gym first, my son’s team had lost. The losers were standing by, grumbling and complaining about second-grade-versions of injustice, as the victors filed past.
And that’s when my son started to clap.
He clapped for the winners as they passed, with a big dopey grin on his face and a smile stretched from one ear of his heart to the other. His startled gym teacher quickly exhorted the rest of his team to follow suit. So, a bunch of second grade losers gave a rousing ovation for their victorious peers and, in doing so, embraced the fullness of what it can mean to let your ego lose.
When my ego is triggered, I try to remember the heart of a boy—a heart that can lose graciously and reach out with affection to the victors.
In marriage, losing is letting go of the need to fix everything for and about your partner.
It’s listening to their most wounded parts with sadness rather than a solution.
It’s being even more present in the painful times than in the pleasant times.
It’s finding ways to be humble and open, even when your ego insists you’re right and they’re wrong.
It’s forgiveness, quickly and voluntarily.
It’s giving up some of the distractions you love, if they keep you from being fully present.
It’s accepting the healthy but crazy-making things about your partner because, you remember, those were the things you fell in love with in the first place.
It’s knowing your people may never love you unconditionally—because they are human, too—and then loving them as unconditionally as you can muster anyway.
Maybe marriage, when it’s lived by two losers in a household culture of mutual surrender, is just the training we need to walk through this world without the constant fear of getting the short end of the stick. Maybe we need to be formed in such a way that winning loses its glamour, so we can sacrifice the competition in favor of connection. Maybe what we need, really, is to become a bunch of losers in a world being torn apart by its obsession with winning. If we did that, maybe we’d be able to see that, really, we’re all on the same team anyway.
And maybe we’d be able to clap for the winners walking by.
Have you read this post before, or is it your first time? How do the themes hold up thirteen years later? Do you love it, or do you resist it? What other reactions do you notice? Feel free to share in the comments, and I’ll be sure to reply!
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This is the first time that I can remember reading this. The title caught my attention because it's not a statement I believe. It's only when the marriage is a competition that you have winners and losers. When marriage becomes what it was meant to be you have 2 winners. Marriage is about connection at the most intimate level. This can only happen when we embrace vulnerability with humility. Then we can become wounded healers for each other and the people around us.
Seeing a marriage as a series of wins and losses is a problem in itself. A good marriage is a supportive partnership of two people who truly care for each other. I’ve had two marriages. One (8 years) was your category 2. The second (24 years and still loving each other) does not belong to any of your categories because neither of us is losing anything at all in this mutually supportive and deep understanding.