The camera moves through a house that has become a museum, and not a particularly joyful one. In the music video for his cover of "Hurt," filmed just months before his death in 2003, Johnny Cash sits at a table laden with a feast no one is eating. His hands, once capable of anchoring a rhythm that shook the floorboards of Folsom Prison, are now translucent and trembling. He looks like a man who has been dismantled by time and put back together with mismatched parts. But the most arresting image in that four-minute eulogy is not the legendary Man in Black himself; it is the woman standing on the stairs behind him. June Carter Cash looks at the back of her husband’s head with a gaze that is difficult to categorize. It is not the misty-eyed adoration of a newlywed, nor is it the hollowed-out exhaustion of a martyr. It is the look of a woman who is still, after thirty-five years of marriage, trying to solve a very complicated puzzle that she isn't entirely sure she wants to finish.

There is a pervasive myth in our culture that we fall out of love because people change. We speak of "growing apart" as if marriage were a geological event—two tectonic plates drifting toward separate oceans through no fault of their own. We lament that our partner is "no longer the person I married," as if the person we married was a finished product, a statue we purchased and placed in the garden, only to be disappointed when the stone began to breathe and walk away. But the tragedy of most failing long-term loves is not that the partners grew too much; it is that they stopped being curious about the growth. We don’t fall out of love because our partners become strangers; we fall out of love because we assume we already know exactly who they are, and we stop looking for the stranger within them. It is a peculiar form of arrogance to believe that after a decade of sharing a bathroom, you have mapped the entirety of another human soul. If we applied that same level of "certainty" to anything else—say, the weather or the stock market—we would be considered dangerously delusional.

Johnny and June are often served up as the couple who embodied "The Great Rescue." The popular narrative—aided by Hollywood—suggests that June found a broken, drug-addled outlaw, dusted him off, and through the sheer force of her vibrato and her virtue, fixed him. It is a lovely, symmetrical story, and like most symmetrical stories, it is largely a lie. To look at their lives is to see something far more harrowing and far more hopeful: a thirty-five-year cycle of falling out of love with an old version of a person and having the courage to introduce yourself to the new one.

When they first met backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in 1956, they were both married to other people. Johnny was a nervous, wire-thin sensation with a voice meant to be accompanied by tobacco; June was country music royalty, a woman who had been performing since she was old enough to stand. They were, in those early years, two high-speed trains passing in the night, fueled by mutual admiration and a shared understanding of the loneliness of the road. If they had married then, they likely wouldn't have lasted three years. They were in love with the icons the other was becoming, not the humans they actually were. There is something delightfully absurd about two people falling in love while wearing rhinestones and heavy stage makeup; it’s the ultimate act of optimism, or at least a good act of theater.

By the time they finally wed in 1968, the "golden period" began. This is the era the public remembers—the triumphant duets, the television specials, the sobriety that seemed, for a moment, to be a permanent victory. But the problem with a "golden period" is that it creates a frozen image of what the marriage is supposed to look like. It creates an expectation of a perpetual 1968, which is a lot of pressure for anyone, even for a steely man who looks that good in a black suit.

The real test of their union didn't come during the height of the addiction or the heat of the romance; it came in the late 1970s, when the "Man in Black" persona began to feel like a cage and the sobriety began to crack. Johnny relapsed, and he did so with a spectacular, destructive commitment. Their son, John Carter Cash, later reflected that during this period, his parents were "just the paperwork away from being divorced." This is the point where most stories end. The "rescue" had failed. The hero had reverted to a villain. The assumption had been made: I know who you are. You are a man who will always choose the pill over me.

Now, I am not a counselor. I haven’t been married very long. There isn’t much reason you should listen to me here. But I am a purveyor of ideas, and in the world of good ideas, this one has been particularly well studied.

In the lexicon of relationship psychology, specifically the work of Dr. John Gottman (the patron saint of my wife, who is an exceptional therapist herself), there is a concept known as the "Love Map." For the manly men reading this, just bear with me a second. (Also, you should probably give therapy a college try.)

A love map is the internal cognitive space where you store the details of your partner’s world—their favorite movies, yes, but also their current stressors, their evolving dreams, and their deepest fears. Gottman’s research found that the single most consistent predictor of marital stability is the "updatedness" of these maps. Couples who stay together aren't necessarily the ones who never change; they are the ones who realize that their partner’s map is being redrawn every single year.

Most of us, however, are terrible cartographers. We tend to draw the map during the honeymoon and then simply refuse to acknowledge any new mountains or rivers that might appear later. We are shocked when our spouse suddenly develops an interest in French cinema, or, God forbid, birdwatching, reacting as if they’ve committed a mild form of marital treason. But you hate birds, we say, as if we are the authorized biographers of their inner life.

In the late seventies, Johnny and June’s maps were decades out of date. June had assumed her role was the "Saintly Rescuer," a role that eventually breeds a quiet, simmering resentment. Johnny had assumed his role was the "Graced Sinner," a role that eventually breeds a suffocating guilt. They were reacting to ghosts of who they used to be. To stay together, they had to do something far more difficult than "fixing" one another: they had to admit they didn't know each other anymore.

I was given this advice, that long-married couples eventually come to view each other’s catastrophes in a unique, exceptionally patient way. It is said that June once dealt with Johnny’s erratic behavior not with a tearful ultimatum, but by simply out-waiting him—treating his drama with the same polite, slightly bored endurance one might show a neighbor’s leaf blower that is running a bit too long. It was a form of psychological aikido. She stopped trying to control the person she thought he was and started observing the person he actually was. It is a humbling thing to realize that your spouse’s most annoying habits are often just the side effects of their most beautiful qualities. A man who is stubborn enough to survive a dozen relapses is also, unfortunately, a man who will spend forty-five minutes arguing about the correct way to load the dishwasher.

Johnny went through rehab in 1983, then again in 1989, and again in 1992. June, too, faced her own quiet struggles with prescription drugs. The "paperwork" for the divorce sat in a drawer, metaphorically or literally, for years. They stayed, not because of a romantic vow whispered in 1968, but because they kept choosing to update the map. They allowed for the possibility that the man who fell in 1989 was not the same man who fell in 1967. He was older, more tired, more regretful, and importantly, more reachable.

We often think of "knowing" someone as the ultimate goal of intimacy. "He knows me better than anyone," we say with pride. But there is a hidden danger in being known. When we believe we fully know our partner, we stop listening to them. We start finishing their sentences. We interpret their silence as "moodiness" because that’s what their silence meant ten years ago. We stop asking questions because we are certain we already have the answers. In short, we replace our partner with a caricature of our partner, usually one that stacks the odds in our favor should an argument arise.

To Gottman and many others, falling out of love is frequently just a symptom of this intellectual laziness. We become bored with the caricature. We think, I’ve seen this movie before. But the person sitting across from you at the breakfast table is not a movie; they are a living, breathing, evolving consciousness that has been shaped by thousands of tiny new experiences since the last time you truly looked at them. If you are bored with your spouse, it is likely because you are looking at a snapshot from 2012 rather than the person standing in front of you in 2026. This isn't just a failure of the heart; it's a failure of the imagination.

By the time Johnny Cash sat in that chair for the "Hurt" video, he and June had reached what their son called a "happy after all" state. It’s a subtle but profound distinction from "happily ever after." "Happily ever after" implies a static state of bliss—a photograph where no one ever ages and the light never fades. "Happy after all" implies a hard-won peace that exists on the other side of disappointment. It implies that you have seen the worst versions of each other—the addict, the nag, the liar, the coward—and you have decided that those versions are not the final draft. Their love was stronger at the end because it was based on the truth of their fragility rather than the myth of their strength. It’s hard not to rewrite that sentence, because it sounds like fake, vague garbage, but I really do think it’s the truth. They had stopped trying to "save" each other and started trying to "see" each other.

If there is a wisdom here worth passing down to a child or a grandchild, it is this: Love is not a discovery you make once; it is a discovery you make every morning. When you marry someone, you aren't just marrying the person they are today; you are marrying all the people they are going to become over the next fifty years. Some of those people you will like immensely. Some of those people will be difficult, or sad, or unrecognizable. You might wake up one Tuesday to find you are married to a person who suddenly thinks a mid-life crisis should involve suddenly re-engaging with the Nintendo 64, or buying a very impractical hat. Ask my wife about this.

The secret to a long life together isn't finding the "right" person and freezing them in amber so they never change. The secret is to remain a perpetual student of the person you love. It’s about having the humility to realize that even after thirty years of sharing a bed and a checking account, there are still parts of your partner’s soul that you haven't visited yet.

Don't ever assume the map is finished. Keep your pencils sharp, stay curious, and when your partner changes—and they will—don't mourn the person they used to be. Instead, walk up to the stranger in your kitchen, hold out your hand, and introduce yourself again. You might find that the person they are becoming is even more interesting than the person you thought you knew. And if you’re lucky, they might just decide to do the same for you.

John

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad