We need to continually return to love. It is a choice. Finally, a shared sense of meaning and purpose, serving a greater mission together. These are some things that help us to accomplish the tasks of marriage. Wendell Berry is a poet who wrote a short essay about marriage as a form, as a discipline to contain our lives.
Difficult virtues are again necessary.
And failure, permanent failure is possible. But it is this possibility of failure, together with the formal bounds that turns us back from fantasy, wishful thinking, and self-pity into the real terms and occasions of our lives. It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It maybe that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.