You are not the hero of your marriage.
You don’t owe your life to a story arc.
You don’t owe your marriage a redemption narrative, a third‑act twist, or a triumphant soundtrack.
For a long time, I lived like I did.
When the story you’re living stops feeling true
For years, I stayed in a marriage that was quietly erasing me.
From the outside, it looked “fine.” We went to work. We went to church. We posted smiling photos. I read all the books, booked the therapists, prayed all the prayers.
On the inside, it felt like this:
My body tensed the second I heard his car in the driveway.
I could predict our next argument beat‑for‑beat before it even happened.
I lay awake at night bargaining with God (but for you it might be the universe, anyone who might be listening):
If I can just be better… prettier… kinder… more patient… sexier… less anxious… more successful… then our marriage will finally be ok. This will all be worth it. I will have earned the happy ending.
I’m past this time of my life now, but all these thoughts came flooding back recently when I watched a video essay called “Your Life Is Not a Hero’s Journey” by Like Stories of Old.
I highly suggest watching it all the way through but in short, this video essay talks about how stories follow a structured pattern. The hero leaves the ordinary world, enters the unknown, faces trials, and returns transformed. But our real lives feel messy, chaotic, and unresolved. Our experiences don’t line up into neat plot points. Our growth isn’t always clear. Our endings aren’t guaranteed.
He later notes that “we are increasingly occupied with turning our lives into adventures” (25:14–25:21), as if everything we do needs to be cinematic, meaningful, and worthy of a story.
Suddenly, I could see what I’d been trying to do all those years ago in my marriage.
I wasn’t just trying to have a happy marriage.
I was trying to be the hero.
How the hero’s journey sneaks into your marriage
Storytelling has given us a powerful pattern: the hero’s journey.
A hero lives an ordinary life… receives a call to adventure… resists… meets a mentor… crosses the threshold into the unknown… endures trials… faces a dark night of the soul… and eventually returns home transformed, carrying a gift or “boon” for others.
It’s a beautiful way to make meaning. It’s also deeply seductive.
We don’t just see it in epic fantasies. As the video points out, we see the same structure in romantic comedies: a chance encounter, rising connection, conflict, heartbreak, a grand gesture, and then the implied happily ever after (7:09–7:56).
Somewhere along the way, many of us quietly absorbed this idea:
If my relationship is hard, I must be in the middle of my hero’s journey. My job is to endure, transform, and save the story.
So we:
Turn our spouse into a person we’re meant to “save”
Turn ourselves into the long‑suffering protagonist
Turn every painful chapter into “character development”
Turn staying—no matter the cost—into proof of strength and loyalty
And because stories usually reward this kind of suffering with meaning and resolution, we assume life will too.
That’s where the dissonance the video talks about comes in: stories are structured backwards, from the end. The creator explains that stories are built with an idea of how they will turn out, and that “every step along the way tends to be imbued with an inherent sense of purpose” (video timestamp: 22:23–22:37).
Real life doesn’t work like that, especially not in an unhappy marriage.
You don’t know how this ends.
You don’t know if your partner will change.
You don’t know if the work you’re doing will bring you closer together or just keep you afloat one more month.
And yet, the pressure is there. As the essay says later, “the adventure always promises a potential for more” (video timestamp: 40:24–40:30):
More excitement
More transformation
More purpose
More love
Even when your life is already okay—or even good in some ways—that whisper is still there: You can do more. Be more. Fix more. Earn more meaning.
That whisper can be holy. It can also be a trap.
The spiritual violence of making yourself the savior
If you grew up with certain religious or romantic stories, it’s easy to fuse faith, love, and the hero’s journey into one heavy burden:
“Good spouses never give up.”
“Love always perseveres.”
“God hates divorce.”
“If I’m faithful enough, God will redeem this story.”
Suddenly, your marriage isn’t just a relationship between two humans with limits, histories, mental health, and free will. It’s a stage on which you must prove your goodness.
If your partner lies, cheats, stonewalls, numbs out, refuses therapy, or keeps repeating the same patterns, it becomes a test:
Will I stay? Will I forgive? Will I keep loving unconditionally? Will I be the kind of person who never gives up?
Underneath all of that is a brutal implication:
If this marriage fails, it means I failed my story. I didn’t hero hard enough. I wasn’t faithful enough. I didn’t suffer beautifully enough.
That isn’t spirituality. That’s spiritual violence turned inward.
Whatever you call it—God, the universe, your intuition, your deepest self—there is something in you that knows when you are shrinking, when your nervous system has been in fight‑or‑flight for years. When your body is breaking down under chronic stress. When your children are taking on more emotional load than they should. When you’re existing, not living.
That knowing is not sin, weakness, or betrayal.
It isn’t the villain in your story.
It’s the part of you that refuses nihilism. The part of you that insists your life is not just a cautionary tale about what happens when you martyr yourself past your breaking point.
The Heroic Suffering Myth (and why it keeps you stuck)
Let’s give this a name:
The Heroic Suffering Myth
The belief that if you sacrifice yourself long enough in a relationship, you will be rewarded with transformation, redemption, and a story that makes it all worth it.
When you’re inside this myth, staying feels like the morally superior path:
“If I leave, I’m a quitter.”
“If I stay, I’m strong.”
“If I leave, I’ll have to explain.”
“If I stay, everyone will see how faithful I am.”
“If I leave, my suffering will be pointless.”
“If I stay, maybe one day I’ll be able to say, ‘See? It was worth it.’”
So you stay.
You go to therapy.
You buy the books.
You go to church.
You work on yourself endlessly.
You twist and contort and soften and harden and forgive and forgive and forgive.
And maybe a small part of you—very quiet, almost shameful—thinks:
If I can make this work, the story will be incredible. People will admire me. I’ll admire me.
The video talks about how we retell life like this all the time. We take what actually happened and turn it into something neater, more coherent, more purposeful. When we recount our lives as stories, “we are basically fictionalizing what really was” (23:08–23:15, paraphrased).
That act of retrospective storytelling can be healing.
But when you drag that same clean narrative into the present and force your current self to justify every new day of suffering because it might someday make a great story, it becomes a cage.
You stop asking:
Is this healthy?
Is this safe?
Is this mutual?
And instead you ask:
Does this look like a heroic marriage?
Does this sound like a good testimony?
Will people understand why I stayed?
At that point, you’re no longer living your life.
You’re auditioning for the role of “The One Who Stayed.”
Your soul is not a supporting character
The video spends a lot of time asking: Who gets to be the hero? Historically, stories have reserved that role for a very specific kind of person—often straight, white, male—while others are pushed into supporting roles, villains, or extras (48:37–49:06).
You may have done the same thing inside your own marriage.
You made your partner the protagonist:
Their moods set the tone of the home
Their needs outweighed yours
Their comfort dictated what was “allowed”
Their wounds became the organizing principle of your life
Meanwhile, you cast yourself as:
The fixer
The emotional shock absorber
The spiritual warrior
The logistics manager
The therapist, cheerleader, and human shield
You weren’t the main character; you were the infrastructure.
Here’s the quiet, radical truth:
Your soul is not a supporting character in your own life.
You were not put here to be the background music to someone else’s refusal to grow. You were not designed to be the spiritual exoskeleton of a person who won’t hold themselves up.
Whatever your beliefs about God, destiny, or randomness, your inner aliveness matters. Your joy matters. Your ability to show up in the world as a whole human matters.
You don’t need to be the hero of your marriage.
But you do have the sacred responsibility of being the guardian of your own life.
From hero of the marriage → guardian of your life
So if you’re not the hero trying to save the relationship at all costs… who are you?
Here’s the identity shift that changed everything for me:
I am not the savior of this marriage.
I am the guardian of my life, my children, and my capacity to love.
That shift doesn’t automatically mean you leave.
It does mean you start asking different questions.
Instead of:
How do I fix this?
How do I prove I tried everything?
How do I become enough for them to finally change?
You start asking:
What is true, consistently, over time?
What is this relationship doing to my body, mind, and spirit?
If nothing changed for the next five years, what would that mean for me and those I love?
What am I responsible for—and what am I not?
The video makes a crucial point: we live forward, but we only understand backward (58:22–58:29, paraphrased from Kierkegaard).
You don’t get to know in advance which choices will become the “turning points” in your story.
You can’t guarantee that staying will lead to redemption.
You can’t guarantee that leaving will feel like victory.
You can only act in alignment with truth as you understand it today, and with the deepest care you can offer—to yourself, to your children if you have them, and yes, even to your partner as a fellow human being, not a project.
That is spiritual work. That is grown‑up work. That is sacred work.
How to take off the hero cape (3 shifts)
You don’t need a five‑year plan. You don’t need to decide everything today. You don’t need to make your next step “epic.”
You just need to begin taking off the hero cape in small, concrete ways.
1. See what’s real (not what you’re hoping for)
For a moment, suspend the future: no “but if he…” or “maybe we’ll…”
Look at the last 6–12 months like a scientist:
How do conflicts typically start and end?
When you express hurt, does your partner consistently take responsibility and change behavior, or mostly defend and minimize?
Has there been any sustained change—three months or more—or just cycles of apology followed by the same pattern?
How do you actually feel in your body most days: settled, safe, at ease? Or anxious, braced, hyper‑vigilant?
Write it down. Not as a story. As data.
This isn’t about blaming. It’s about telling the truth.
2. Honor what it’s doing to you
Your nervous system could be telling you something that no amount of hope, positive thinking, or fortitude can fix. Chronic relationship stress can show up as:
Insomnia or bone‑deep exhaustion
Irritability with your kids or friends
Brain fog and trouble focusing
Loss of interest in things you used to enjoy
Health issues that your doctor can’t fully explain
This isn’t you “being dramatic.” This is your body living in a war it can’t name. Be curious. Be kind as you explore this.
Ask: What has it cost me to continue to carry this relationship on my back?
Let whatever answer comes be valid—even if it contradicts the story you wish you were telling.
3. Choose from truth, not from story
Finally, from what you’ve seen and honored, ask:
Given what is real right now, what is the next kind, honest step I can take?
Not the next heroic step.
Not the next impressive step.
The next kind and honest one.
For some people, that might be:
Insisting on structured couples therapy with clear goals and timelines.
Setting a boundary around what you will no longer accept (and following through).
Separating temporarily to get clarity and safety.
Beginning to quietly plan an exit with support, if you already know you need to leave.
Or simply telling one trusted person the whole truth for the first time.
Whatever it is, let it be rooted in reality, not in the promise of a cinematic resolution.
Hope without fantasy
The video ends in a surprisingly tender place (like most of his videos). After all the critique of the hero’s journey and all the philosophical wrestling, it suggests that maybe the real “heroic” work isn’t about becoming the main character of some grand adventure.
Maybe it’s about this:
Letting go of the rigid structures that tell you who you must be.
Owning your freedom to create meaning in a world that doesn’t hand it to you.
Staying open to beauty in the ordinary and the painful.
Living “to the point of tears” (1:14:06–1:14:12, paraphrased from Camus) not because your suffering will be rewarded, but because you refuse to go numb.
At one point the creator says, “we want our lives to be meaningful” (25:27–25:32).
That’s true in marriage, too.
You want this pain to mean something.
You want these years to have mattered.
You want the version of you who tried so hard not to be wasted.
Here’s the quiet miracle:
You don’t need your marriage to turn into a hero’s journey for that to be true.
Your effort, your love, your trying—that already mattered. It formed you. It revealed your capacity to commit, to care, to endure.
If this feels uncomfortably close and you don’t want to do it alone…
This is the work we do.
We help people who have been:
Over‑functioning and over‑responsible
Spiritually guilt‑tripped into staying small
Exhausted from trying to “save” their relationship alone
to move from Heroic Suffering Myth → Honest, grounded living, whether that eventually means rebuilding or releasing the relationship.
If what you’ve just read feels like someone has been watching your life, you don’t have to keep carrying it alone.
Whatever you choose—staying and rebuilding with real change, or leaving and grieving what you hoped for—remember:
You are not failing because your marriage doesn’t look like a hero’s journey.
You are not selfish for wanting more than survival.
You are not required to sacrifice your life to a story that isn’t working.
You don’t have to be the hero. You just have to be honest and brave enough to act on what you know.
My invitation to you, fellow traveller
Our team puts together the tools that we wish we had based on the research we wish we knew.
If this post spoke to your experience, I would invite you to start with the Clarity360 assessment. It’s an affordable, but life-changing tool to help you see your relationship as it really is. Not how you wish it was.
I wish I had this when I was trying to be the hero. May it help you on your journey be a little brighter “when all other lights go out”.
