We were sitting in traffic the other day, brake lights glowing in the distance like a long, unmoving river of red. The air in the car was still, the hum of the engine filling the silence between us. It wasn’t a special night. No dinner reservations. No flowers in the backseat. Just the two of us, waiting for the line of cars to inch forward.

That is marriage more often than not. Not the mountaintop moments, but the pauses. The ordinary. The in-between.

I glanced over at him, his hand resting on the gear shift, his face half-lit by the glow of passing headlights. Years together have softened us and sharpened us all at once. We have carried one another through sickness, loss, and days when love felt more like a decision than a feeling. And here we were again, side by side, in a stretch of nothing but waiting.

It struck me how much of marriage is made in these kinds of pauses. Not in the grand gestures, but in the quiet choice to stay. To sit in the traffic. To lean into the silence instead of running from it. To trust that eventually the road will open up, that the light will turn green.

So many choose to give up. To move on instead of waiting. To find the nearest exit when the pause feels too long. But love that lasts is found in those very places, in the hard waiting and the stillness that tests our patience. It is in the commitment to work through the pauses rather than escape them.

Love is a vow, yes, but it is also a daily practice. It is forgiving when you would rather hold onto the sting. It is reaching for his hand when pride tells you to keep your arms crossed. It is showing up in the middle of the ordinary, when no one else is watching and nothing feels remarkable.

The truth is, we do not need candlelit dinners to prove our devotion. We need the quiet recommitments made at red lights and in waiting rooms, on long drives and in late-night conversations. We need the repeated “yes,” spoken not just at the altar years ago, but again and again in traffic, in chaos, in stillness.

That night, the brake lights eventually faded, and the road opened before us. But I held onto the reminder: love is not built in the rush. It is built in the waiting, in the choosing, in the staying. And if you are in a season of pause, I hope you choose to stay too. Because so many give up and move on, but lasting love is found in the ones who wait, who hold on, and who work through the pauses together.