Should I Stay in a Marriage for the Children?

This is the one that feels least selfish and is therefore the hardest to look at honestly, because the children give the guilt somewhere clean to hide. You tell yourself you're staying for them, and the sentence is unanswerable, and so you never have to ask the second question, which is whether staying for them is what they'd actually be served by. The love is real. That's not in doubt. What's in doubt is whether the story you've built on top of the love is true.

Children don't primarily register whether their parents are married. They register the emotional weather of the house. A child living inside two people who've gone cold, who move around each other like careful strangers, who've stopped touching and started performing, absorbs that as the baseline of what love is. They learn it in their body before they have words for it, and they carry it forward into their own relationships as the template for normal. You can stay together in the same building and still teach them that intimacy is a performance held together by duty. That lesson lands whether or not anyone ever raises their voice.

So the honest question isn't stay or go. It's what you're modelling by staying. If staying means the two of you are genuinely working, repairing, choosing each other again, then the children get to watch adults do hard relational work and survive it, and that's a gift. If staying means two people quietly disappearing so the structure stays intact, then the children are being handed a picture of marriage as endurance, and they will either repeat it or spend years trying to unlearn it. Same house, opposite lessons.

There's a cost to naming this and a cost to not naming it, and the second cost is steeper because it's paid by people who didn't choose it. When you use the children as the reason, you also make them the load-bearing wall of your own avoidance. Part of them senses this. Children are exquisitely tuned to being the thing holding their parents in place, and it's a heavy job to hand a person who never applied for it.

This isn't an argument for leaving. Plenty of families are better held together, well and honestly. It's an argument for knowing which one yours is. If you want to look at what's actually true underneath the reason you give, the free book Before Approaching the Threshold and the free Atlas at app.codexofthearchitect.com are a quiet place to start.