How Your Emotions Are Lying to You About Your Marriage
“I was never happy. We were never really good together. I don’t think we ever should have gotten married.”
Your spouse just said this to you. And you’re standing there, completely mystified. You have years… maybe decades of evidence to the contrary. You remember the good times. The laughter. The connection. The moments when you were absolutely certain you’d found your person.
But your spouse? They genuinely cannot access those memories right now. It’s not manipulation. It’s not rewriting history to justify an affair or an exit plan (though it might coincide with those things).
It’s something more fundamental — and more fixable — than that.
Two patterns are quietly destroying your spouse’s ability to see your marriage clearly: emotional thinking and emotional remembering. And here’s what makes this crucial: They’re doing the same thing to YOU, just from a different emotional state.
The Setup
When your spouse says “we were never happy,” they’re not lying. They genuinely believe it. When you insist “but we WERE happy — remember that vacation? That anniversary? When the kids were born?” — you’re also telling the truth as you experience it.
You’re both right… and you’re both wrong.
This isn’t about who has the accurate memory or who’s being dramatic. This is about how human brains are wired to let current emotions rewrite both our thoughts AND our memories. And in a marriage crisis, these patterns don’t just color your perspective — they create entirely different versions of your shared history.
Emotional Thinking Explained
Let’s start with something outside of marriage so you can see the pattern clearly.
You’re feeling anxious before a work presentation. That anxiety whispers: “You’re going to bomb this. You always mess these up. Everyone will think you’re incompetent.”
Notice what just happened? A feeling (anxiety) created thoughts about reality (you’ll fail) and about the future (you always fail, you’ll never succeed). And in that moment, those thoughts feel absolutely TRUE. Not like opinions or possibilities. But like facts.
That’s emotional thinking. Your current emotional state is generating your thoughts, and you’re treating those emotion-generated thoughts as reliable information about reality.
Now bring this into your marriage:
You feel disconnected from your spouse right now. That disconnection whispers: “We have nothing in common. We never really connected. This relationship is over. I’ll always feel this way.”
And you believe it. Completely. Even though:
You felt differently last month, last year, five years ago
You’ve felt disconnected before, and it shifted
Emotions are literally designed to be temporary signals, not permanent states
The problem isn’t that emotions influence your thinking. That’s normal and often useful. The problem is you’re letting emotions CREATE your thinking without realizing it’s happening. You’re treating “I feel disconnected” as proof that “We ARE disconnected and always will be.”
Emotional Remembering Explained
Here’s where it gets worse. Your current emotional state doesn’t just shape your thoughts. It also determines which memories your brain can easily access.
Again, let’s start outside marriage. You’re in a great mood after getting good news. A friend asks about your job. Suddenly, you remember all the wins, the funny moments with coworkers, the projects you’re proud of.
Next week, you are stressed and exhausted. Same friend asks about the same job. Now you remember every frustration, every conflict, every thing that’s gone wrong.
Did the job change? No. Did your memories change? No. They’re all still there. But your emotional state determines which ones surface easily.
This is called mood-congruent memory, and it’s not a bug in your brain. It’s actually a feature. Your brain is trying to help you by making memories available that match your current state. Problem is, in a marriage crisis, this “helpful” feature becomes destructive.
When your spouse is angry or hurt or checked out, their brain serves up every memory that matches those feelings:
Every argument
Every disappointment
Every time they felt unheard or unseen
Every moment of disconnection
The good memories? They’re still there. Your brain hasn’t deleted your wedding day or that amazing vacation or the night your first child was born. But when you’re in a negative emotional state, your brain isn’t surfacing those memories. It’s like they’re in a file cabinet you can’t quite reach right now.
So when your spouse says “we were never happy,” they genuinely cannot easily recall the times you WERE happy. They are not lying. Their brain literally isn’t giving them access to those memories right now.
Why This Matters: The Feedback Loop
Here’s where emotional thinking and emotional remembering become truly dangerous: They reinforce each other in a self-sustaining cycle.
Watch how this works:
Your spouse feels disconnected (emotional state) → This triggers emotional thinking: “We’ve never really been compatible” → That thought triggers negative emotions → Those negative emotions make it easier to remember past disconnection → Those memories confirm the thought “we’ve never been compatible” → Which deepens the negative emotion → Which makes MORE negative memories accessible → Which generates MORE negative thoughts.
Round and round it goes.
And here’s the insidious part: The longer this cycle runs, the more CERTAIN your spouse becomes that their distorted view is accurate. They’re not gathering evidence objectively. They’re in a closed loop where their emotions are creating thoughts that trigger emotions that surface memories that confirm those thoughts.
This is why your spouse can look you in the eye and say with complete conviction: “I’ve never loved you. We’ve always been wrong for each other. This was always going to end.” They BELIEVE it. The feedback loop has created such a consistent internal experience that it feels like absolute truth.
And you? You’re probably in your own version of this loop, just from a different starting emotion. Maybe you’re anxious, so you’re remembering every time your spouse pulled away. Maybe you’re hurt, so you’re cataloging every rejection. Maybe you’re angry, so you’re building a case for why THEY are the problem.
Both of you are operating from emotionally-distorted thinking and emotionally-filtered memories. Both of you are absolutely certain you’re seeing reality clearly. Both of you are wrong.
This is a latent condition, an underlying systemic issue that makes marriage crises almost inevitable. You’re not fighting about what actually happened or what’s actually true. You’re fighting from inside two different feedback loops, each creating its own version of reality.
Where to Start: Recognition
The first step isn’t to stop having emotions (impossible) or to distrust all your thoughts (unhelpful). The first step is simply to RECOGNIZE when emotional thinking and emotional remembering are happening.
For recognizing emotional thinking in yourself:
Ask yourself: “Is what I’m thinking right now being filtered through how I’m FEELING right now?”
Not “is my thinking influenced by emotions.” Of course it is, you’re human. But: “Am I treating my current feeling as evidence about permanent reality?”
Red flag phrases that signal emotional thinking:
“I’ve ALWAYS felt this way”
“This will NEVER change”
“We’ve NEVER been good together”
Any absolute statement (always, never, completely, totally) that contradicts your actual history
When you catch yourself thinking in absolutes, pause. You’ve probably slipped into emotional thinking.
For recognizing emotional remembering in yourself:
Notice which memories are surfacing easily right now. Are they all negative? All disappointments? All conflicts?
Then ask: “Are there counter-examples I’m not remembering right now? Times that contradict this pattern?”
Your brain won’t automatically serve up those memories. You have to go looking for them deliberately. This isn’t about forcing false positivity. It’s about recognizing that your current emotional state is acting like a filter on your memory access.
For recognizing these patterns in your spouse:
This is crucial: When your spouse is emotionally thinking or emotionally remembering, they’re not being manipulative or deliberately unfair. They genuinely cannot see past their current emotional state.
So when your spouse says, “we were never happy,” your job is NOT to argue with them about history. That’s trying to win a fight against their brain’s current memory retrieval system. You will lose.
Instead, recognize: “My spouse is emotionally remembering right now. Their brain isn’t giving them access to different memories. This isn’t the whole truth… it’s their current emotional truth.”
This recognition doesn’t mean you agree with their distorted version. It means you don’t waste energy fighting it, and you don’t let THEIR emotional distortion trigger YOUR emotional distortion in response.
One Thing You Can Do Right Now
Next time you find yourself thinking something absolute about your marriage, like “This will never work” or “We’ve always struggled” or “I never should have married them,” do this:
Stop. Take a breath. Say out loud: “That’s what I feel right now. What do I actually KNOW?”
Then force yourself to list three facts that contradict the absolute statement. Not feelings. Facts.
“We’ve always struggled” → “We navigated his job loss together in 2019. We threw our daughter an amazing 10th birthday party last year. We laughed together at that movie two months ago.”
You’re not trying to talk yourself out of your feelings. You’re interrupting the pattern of letting feelings create false certainties about reality.
Do this enough times, and you’ll start catching emotional thinking and emotional remembering BEFORE they create that false certainty. You’ll start recognizing “I feel disconnected right now” as different from “We ARE disconnected forever.”
That recognition — that little bit of space between feeling and fact — is where change becomes possible.
The Path Forward
Your emotions aren’t the enemy. They’re important signals about your internal experience. But they’re terrible historians and worse fortune-tellers.
When you learn to recognize emotional thinking and emotional remembering — in yourself AND in your spouse — you stop fighting about competing versions of history. You stop making permanent decisions based on temporary emotional states.
And you start creating space for something different to emerge.
This pattern of emotional thinking and emotional remembering is one example of the feedback loops that keep couples stuck in crisis. It’s also related to what I call latent conditions — the underlying systemic issues that make marriage problems almost inevitable. If you want to explore how these patterns connect to the larger dynamics in your marriage, you can find more in my other articles on feedback loops and the systems that either support or sabotage your relationship.