Winter arrives in every marriage. Sometimes it comes with a job loss, a diagnosis, a child in crisis. Sometimes it arrives for no visible reason at all.

The modern instinct is to read winter as a verdict: we must have chosen wrong. But no season is a verdict. A season is a season.

Winter has work of its own. It strips a marriage down to what is structural. Couples discover in winter whether they built on shared feeling or shared commitment.

Keep walking. Keep talking. Keep touching. Do the small things you would do if you still felt like it — the feelings follow behavior far more often than the reverse.

Spring is not a reward for good marriages. It is what happens to couples who stayed through winter.