The Evolution of Love: Marriage, Survival, and Personal Reinvention in a Changing World

A Society Experiences Growing Pains

I took this picture of a wall hanging in the lobby of a hotel we were staying at in Granada, Spain. Somehow, the couples whose heads are disintegrating felt like a fitting image for the essay on marriage I was writing.

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of human relationships for a long time. I recall vividly from 2023, one afternoon when a friend of mine had called me upset after finding out that her 8 year old daughter was the only one who attended a birthday party of a girl whose mother had recently divorced.

I’ve had complex relationships in my own life, and thankfully, so far, marriage is not one of them. Don’t get me wrong, its a lot of work for both of us, and I make no qualms about it. But at this point, I’ve lost count of how many people I know, or know of, who are struggling in their marriages.

As I was dropping off my son to his college earlier this month, my 21-year-old asked me out of the blue, “Why would someone have to get married, Amma?” I didn’t have an eloquent answer.

So, through an objective lens, I want to explore how the definition of marriage is evolving in our modern world.

One of the clearest signs of a society evolving with its time is the transformation of its core institutions, and marriage is no exception. An old institution that once stood for stability, culture, and a robust patriarchy has now transformed into an open-ended question.

For some, what once felt like the unbearable tyranny of rigor has become an adventure story, where a few illicit pages are on fire. And when I ask why they’re cheating or contemplating cheating, they say, its to make their marriage sustainable and to give themselves room to breathe and be happy.

I’ve written about love, marriage, and relationships for years, and when I look back at what I wrote in 2017, 2024, or even more recently, I see a profound evolution in my own thinking. There has been a seismic societal shift in what it means to love another human being for an extended period of time.

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2017: Marriage as Silent Endurance

In 2017, I heard from men and women about how they’re making it work for the sake of stability, children or even peace of mind, atleast in the immediate present they have to live with. Marriage, it seems, had become a silent endurance test.

Back then, I had written about a young wife collapsing under the emotional labor of doing everything for everyone. No one heard her warning until she literally collapsed to her death. Marriage then seemed to survive on sacrifice, loyalty, and grit. Especially for South Asian women, it has always been about checkboxes, milestones and part of our cultural ethos.

“Stay married, even if it kills you emotionally” seemed to be the unspoken rule. Many women continue living this reality for financial reasons or for deeply personal ones, like wanting to give their children a stable, peaceful home. In the process, if they are shrinking and enduring, it is framed as a noble sacrifice. Honor and duty to the family are placed above love between the couple.

Those were some good times

The Middle Years: Gray Divorce and the Loneliness Epidemic

Fast forward to 2024, and the story had shifted. Millennials had long started redefining the meaning of a long term relationship and Gen Z was also coming of age. 50 years olds had meanwhile started their own trend of “Gray divorce”, quietly dissolving after 25, 30, even 40 years, after their kids had left the nests. These were people who had built homes, raised children, paid mortgages, hosted Diwali parties and Thanksgiving dinners, and then looked at each other at age 55 and were not happy with how the rest of their lives would look like.

In 2017, marriages died from patriarchal oppression. By 2024, they were dying from emotional disconnection.

The tragedy of modern love is not that people stop caring. It’s that they stop noticing. The surge of the loneliness epidemic within marriages was already happening. In these scenarios, there are no fights or affairs. Its just two people slowly starving each other of emotional attention and drifting apart.

There were people who were going through trial seperations, and reconciling. There were people who extended this drift until the paperwork was signed.

2026: The Third Wheel

As society adapts to new definitions of intimacy and technology reshapes the ways we connect, the emotional landscape of marriage continues to shift in ways we are only beginning to understand. I’m writing this in 2026, and already a third wheel has entered what used to be the sacred dual relationship of marriage or love: AI.

We are now living in an Attachment Economy, where humans are emotionally attaching themselves to chatbots and sex robots because there is low risk of rejection, misinterpretation, or the other person disappearing entirely.

Imagine how this changes the way single people think about marriage. And it’s not just singles, married people are now “cheating” on their partners with AI bots. The new landscape of intimacy is strange, fascinating, and sometimes unsettling, and it is changing the very way we think about love in the age of AI.

“Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has used a chatbot to simulate a romantic partner; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human – A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.” 

Read more HERE.

Falling in love with AI

Now: Going Zombie

I highly recommend you read Monica Corcoran Harel’s article on how women in their 40’s are quietly checking out of their marriages rather than deal with the drama of divorce.

“That was 40 years ago, back in the ’80s, when the divorce rate in the U.S. was actually at a historic annual high of around 20 divorces for every 1,000 married women. (My mother eventually divorced my father in 1990.) Now, that rate sits near 14. Still, at parties, I hear women hiss their contempt for their selfish spouses. One middle-age friend without kids in a decade-old dented marriage recently told me she now only travels solo, to “take much-needed vacations from my annoying husband.” Another moved into her daughter’s bedroom as soon as their teen left for college: “I can watch old episodes of Broad City. He can look at porn — or whatever he does,” she said of her husband. She sounded more than fine with the arrangement, even gleeful.”

This shows how society is subconsciously uncoupling while staying in a marriage. One woman goes fully zombie mode on her husband so she can reallocate her energy and make life liveable.

“One woman who I’ll call Blair believes “going zombie” in her marriage a year ago changed her life for the better. “I lowered my overall expectations, which lowered my disappointment in my husband — and in myself,” she says. Blair, who has no children but shares a fancy condo and two rescue dogs in New Jersey with her husband of 12 years, told me she has redirected all that effort and energy into work and her favorite female friendships: “It freed me up to learn how to make jewelry too.” Why not just leave and start over? “Who says I’m not starting over in my own mind?” she says. “It’s sort of like I’m single again, but not struggling paycheck to paycheck or worrying about being single.””

Read more HERE.

#OpenToMarriage

Interestingly enough, there are still people who are going viral for being open to marriage. Which I feel is a good sign of our times. Of course, Shubham Gune posted this on LinkedIn, which is altogether another discussion point. (eye roll) I guess, Indians known for their big fat weddings as status signaling will continue to be there.

“This is my last resort. I’ve tried dating apps, I’ve tried matrimony apps. I’ve tried meeting through friends, I’ve tried meeting through relatives. If LinkedIn can get us jobs, clients, mentors, and investors…Why can’t it help us find love? Let’s start something called hashtag #OpenToMarry.” 

Trust, Identity, and Human Complexity

The biggest shift has come from women who are no longer willing to accept emotional poverty in a relationship. Men were always taught to provide, and now they are being asked to be emotionally present. As a result, what was once a duty is now a choice.

We have realized that we were only taught wedding rituals, not relationship skills. As we evolve as people, our opinions, biases, and interests evolve too. If communication doesn’t keep up, it’s easy to see how two people who are growing in their personal and professional lives can drift apart.

Animals mate for life more easily than humans because they don’t overthink everything. They don’t sabotage what they actually want. They hear the other one’s primal whimpers and instinctively their neural networks get activated. For us, providing doesn’t just mean meeting physical needs. We also need freedom, belonging, safety, adventure, independence, and intimacy. All of these require attention, patience, and a willingness to compromise from both partners. No wonder our need for grand gestures is screwing us over.

A relationship scientist explains how arranged marriages gave way to marrying for passionate love, a shift brought on by the Romantic era. No matter the type of marriage, long-lasting ones share a key ingredient: companionate love, the joy of simply being with your partner, not wanting to run away. Watch it HERE.

An Evolving Landscape

How society will evolve is that we won’t fight for the old idea of marriage. We’ve crossed that bridge. What we need now is a wiser model, one that helps long-term relationships sustain and endure. Gender norms have been tossed out the window, and a growing majority of women in marriages have the financial independence to drive their own decisions.

I understand why younger generations are terrified of long-term commitment. Women are increasingly choosing independence over restrictive societal roles or patriarchal institutions because they have witnessed “miserable” marriages in their own families. I have some thoughts on traditional stability and modern individualism, but I need to reflect a little more before I can truly answer my son in a way that is relevant and applicable to the modern world he is living in. I need to understand what a sustainable relationship means amid our conversations around AI, independence, and evolving expectations.

Space Where Dignity Endures

Just as a home must be a place where your personal freedom and dignity are respected, so should a loving marriage. If you are currently in a marriage that pulls you away from whatever your personal definition of love is, remember this. The universal idea of love is that it should never ask you to abandon yourself or leave your loved ones behind. In the right marriage, you should never be afraid of who you are. The right union does not shrink the soul, it frees it.

If you often find yourself flustered, agonized, or out of alignment with your true self, it is time to reconsider who you are spending your precious life with. I say this with all the responsibility of a woman who respects culture, norms, and societal constructs, so if you are thinking of leaving, build an exit strategy considering all your resources. If it is not working, it is not working. It is what it is. Gone are the days when failed marriages were considered a personal defeat.

Like life, marriage is messy, complicated, and sometimes terrifying. But with the right partner, it can also be a stunning journey of personal growth and discovery.

The words I hear most often are, “I feel sorry to leave him. I have been with her for 30 plus years. I eloped to marry him, and he will be lonely if I leave. How will she support herself? What will happen to him if I leave?”

To these people, I ask, what about you? Something irreversible is already being lost in your life — time.

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True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care-with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. ~ David Foster Wallace