What Fireflies Know About Marriage

I love wildlife. It genuinely fascinates me.

Consider how a colony of ants can carry ten to fifty times their own body weight. Or migrating birds forming a V-shape to optimize aerodynamics. Or the anglerfish, carrying its own lantern through the absolute darkness of the deep ocean.

I come away in awe every time. Millions of species, and not one is a copy of another. Every bug, bird, animal, and sea creature solving the problem of being alive in its own way.

We have so much to learn from them.

And here is what the wild has taught me about relationships.

She Is Not Performing. She Is Deciding.

In the majority of species, the female is the one being courted. Cherished. Treated like royalty. The male works for her attention, and she decides whether he has earned it.

In the mangrove forests of Malaysia, thousands of male fireflies gather in the riverside trees. Then they flash. Together. Three pulses a second, in perfect synchrony — whole trees lighting up like they are breathing. The females sit in the branches and watch. She is not performing. She is deciding.

In a beehive, the stakes are even higher. When a young queen rises for her mating flight, hundreds of males chase her, and only the fastest reach her. The act of mating tears the organ from his body and he dies. She mates with ten to twenty, then flies home and leads the colony for years. She is the queen. They are the offering.

Off the coast of Japan, a pufferfish the size of your hand spends nine days flapping his fins to build a sand circle two meters wide — ridges, valleys, a maze in the middle, decorated with shells. Then he waits, perfectly still, while she inspects his work and decides if it is good enough.

In nature, the male does not sit back and expect to be served.

Then I Open My Office Door on a Monday Morning

And one of the most common things I hear — again and again, year after year — is this:

I don’t feel like a partner. I feel like a mother.

She runs his schedule, remembers his family’s birthdays, manages the children, keeps the house moving, and squeezes her own career into whatever is left. He works hard, provides well, and genuinely cannot understand what the problem is.

One woman told me about dinner. For nineteen years, she made his plate first every single night, exactly the way he likes it. Then one Tuesday, she just didn’t. She served herself first and sat down.

He looked at the empty plate. Then at her. And he said, “Why didn’t you get my food?”

Five seconds. Nineteen years, revealed in five seconds.

This Is Not Male Bashing

I want to be clear about that. He is not a villain. He was doing what he was taught, in a world where the man’s career and comfort sit at the centre and his wife and children orbit around him. We inherited it from parents who inherited it too — and I’ve written about how deep those inherited patterns run here.

But the inheritance doesn’t have to be the destination.

What I see in my practice, over and over, is that women are the ones who book the counselling sessions. They are the ones who reach out first, who carry the emotional labour of even trying to fix things. And when repair isn’t possible, they are also far more likely to be the ones who walk away — not because they give up easily, but because, as one client put it with heartbreaking clarity: “I’m done with my life sentence.”

That sentence landed heavily in my office. It should.

What Sharing Actually Says

I want to be careful here — I’m not going to throw numbers at you. But what I will tell you is what I have observed with my own eyes, sitting across from couples for many years: when partners genuinely share the load — the cooking, the cleaning, the invisible mental labour of running a household — the relationship breathes differently. There is less resentment simmering under the surface. There is more warmth, more desire, more goodwill.

Not because laundry is romantic.

Because sharing it says something. It says: your time matters as much as mine. You are not here to orbit around me. You matter.

And when that message is absent — when one partner consistently yields, defers, and disappears into the service of the other — the relationship quietly hollows out. What I see is not dramatic collapse. It is slow erosion. The kind I wrote about in quiet quitting your relationship.

Reverence for one another is not weakness. It is the architecture of partnership.

The Uncomfortable Question

Here it is. I’m going to ask it plainly, because I think you deserve plainness more than comfort:

If your partner were choosing a mate again tomorrow — knowing everything they now know — would they still choose you?

Not because you provide. Not because you stayed. Not out of habit or history.

Because of how it feels to be with you.

The firefly does not glow once and go dark. He glows every night of the season. That is not grand romance — it is steady, deliberate showing up. It is choosing your partner, actively, on an ordinary Tuesday.

That is learnable. I have watched people learn it. But it is genuinely hard to see from inside your own marriage, when you are swimming in the same water you have always swum in.

That is exactly why we do this work together, in a room, with someone who can see what you cannot.

Your partner should never have to wonder whether you would choose them again. And neither should you.