For more than four decades, Stephen Grosz has listened to people talk about love, betrayal, desire, heartbreak, and the messy human work of trying to build a life with another person without losing yourself in the process. This week, on marie claire’s You’re Going To Want To Hear This, he shares what he’s learnt – and why so many people don’t leave relationships because they’ve stopped loving their partner, but because they no longer like who they’ve become inside them.
There are some conversations that continue unfolding in your mind long after they’re over, not because they offer easy solutions or neatly packaged wisdom, but because they manage to put language around things you may have felt for years and never quite known how to articulate. This week’s episode of You’re Going To Want To Hear This is very much one of those conversations.
When Marie Claire editor Georgie McCourt sat down with psychoanalyst and bestselling author Stephen Grosz, the intention was to talk about his new book, Love’s Labour. What unfolded instead felt less like an author interview and more like the kind of conversation that quietly rearranges your understanding of your own relationships.
Listen To You’re Gonna Want To Hear This
After 75,000 Hours In The Consulting Room, What Still Breaks People Apart?
For more than forty years, Grosz has sat across from people as they attempt to make sense of the most intimate parts of being human. He has listened to marriages that appeared perfect from the outside quietly unravel behind closed doors. He has worked with individuals who found themselves in affairs they never imagined having. He has watched couples arrive in his consulting room consumed by anger, humiliation, resentment and heartbreak – only to discover that the crisis they believed would destroy them became the very thing that forced them to finally tell the truth.
As Grosz tells McCourt during the episode, he estimates he has now spent more than 75,000 hours in the consulting room. It’s the kind of number that stops you for a moment. And when he begins to speak, you understand why every sentence seems to land with such precision.
“People Think Love Is A Feeling. But Love Requires Work.”
One of the first myths Grosz dismantles is perhaps the most enduring myth of all: that love is something we simply fall into.
“People think of love as a feeling,” he tells McCourt early in the conversation. “But the longer I do what I do… the more aware I am that it does require work.”
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that forms the foundation of everything that follows.
Because if the early stages of love are often defined by chemistry, projection, passion and possibility, what happens when real life arrives? What happens when there are mortgages to pay, careers to build, young children to raise, ageing parents to care for, financial pressures, exhaustion, emotional labour, and the thousands of small disappointments that inevitably accompany adult life?
According to Grosz, that is often when the real relationship begins.
Why Resentment Can Feel Almost Addictive
At one point, McCourt asks about resentment – that slow, corrosive emotion that can creep into even the healthiest partnerships.
Grosz doesn’t hesitate.
“Every couple hits a wall at some point,” he says. “There can be a terrible breakdown into resentment between two people.” But, he adds, what appears to be a breakdown can also become a breakthrough, if both people are willing to stop defending themselves long enough to truly see the other person.
What makes resentment so dangerous, he explains, is that it can feel strangely good.
“There’s almost a deliciousness to it,” he says, describing what he calls the “ecstasy of sanctimony” – the quiet pleasure of feeling morally superior, of believing you are the one who has been wronged.
The Emotion Grosz Says Most Marriages Don’t Survive
And yet, according to Grosz, the couples who survive are rarely the ones who avoid conflict altogether. In fact, he says arguments can often be a sign that two people still care deeply.
The real danger is not anger.
It’s contempt.
When McCourt asks why contempt is more destructive than anger, Grosz describes it as something far more insidious than raised voices or temporary frustration. Anger, he says, can be expressed, repaired, worked through. Contempt, by contrast, carries with it an unmistakable sense of superiority – a subtle but devastating message that one partner sees themselves as above the other.
“If there is that tone of contempt,” he tells her, “that marriage won’t survive that.”
Why People Often Leave – Even When They’re Still In Love
For many listeners, what Grosz says next may be the most confronting part of the conversation.
He tells McCourt that, in his experience, people rarely leave marriages simply because they have stopped loving their partner.
More often, they leave because they can no longer tolerate who they themselves have become inside the relationship.
“Most of the people who’ve been in this room and gone for divorce,” he says, “went for divorce ultimately because they hated the person they had become in that marriage.”
It is a line that lands with particular force – not least because it so neatly captures something many people have quietly felt but struggled to name.
What Affairs Are Really About – And Why They Don’t Always Mean The End
Later, the conversation moves into even more complicated territory: affairs.
In popular culture, infidelity is often reduced to a simple narrative of betrayal, lust, deception and moral failure. Grosz offers a far more psychologically nuanced view.
“Somebody’s not getting something they need in the marriage,” he explains. “They’re not living the life they want.”
And perhaps most surprisingly, he insists that affairs do not always signal the end.
He recounts the story of one couple whose marriage was blown apart after a wife returned home and discovered a condom in the family bathroom. The explosion, he says, was immediate and catastrophic. And yet, instead of treating the betrayal as the end of the marriage, Grosz framed it as something else entirely.
“This could be a breakthrough.”
The couple stayed together. According to Grosz, they later described themselves as being closer than they had ever been.
The Definition Of Happiness
For all the difficult truths explored throughout the episode – betrayal, resentment, contempt, emotional exhaustion – what lingers most is not the heaviness, but the hope.
Near the end of the conversation, Grosz leaves McCourt – and listeners – with one final thought.
“I sometimes think happiness is quite simple,” he says. “It is the deep pleasure of desiring exactly what you already have.”
It is not the kind of advice that trends on social media.
But it may just change the way you think about love.
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