What marriage means to us has indeed ballooned into an idealized version of the old and the new, the fairy-tale and the mundane. The endless demands and entitlement towards happiness, acceptance, and romantic love have creeped into our implicit ways of thinking and living. It's now easier to feel dissatisfied and want more - the flip side of healthy self-worth. Everyone is worthy of the type of love that unconditionally and unfailingly fulfills them through decades, right?

We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul just keeps getting longer.

This litany of expectations is a grand setup for failure. Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.

They say "Do not judge a book by its cover". To that I say, "Do not judge a marriage by its external appearance either". No marriage/relationship is as it appears on the outside. The tangled webs are often not even visible to the people in the relationship. You can spend decades with a person and still not know them well enough. And what an irony that many successful marriages owe more to the buried secrets than honest revelations.

It's becoming increasingly common for us to understand someone when they say - "I love my spouse, but I'm no longer 'in love' with them". Ah, the problems plaguing the first world!

It's an interesting state of affairs, indeed.