You have not given up. That matters, and it needs to be said first, because everything that follows is written for someone who is still in this, still trying, still praying, still showing up, even though the person they married has not been fully present for a long time.
You have done the reading and the counseling and the hard conversations. You have changed things about yourself that needed changing, looked honestly at your own contribution, tried approaches you found in books and heard from friends and brought home from sessions with people who were supposed to help. And your spouse has not matched that effort. Not because you haven't done enough, not because you've failed to inspire it, but because you cannot want this for two people. You can only want it for yourself and hope that the wanting becomes contagious, and so far it hasn't.
The loneliness of this particular situation is one of the harder things to explain to someone who hasn't lived it. It is possible to be lonelier inside a marriage than outside one, to share a home and a bed and a life with someone and still feel profoundly, structurally alone, because the person you built this with has withdrawn to somewhere you can't reach. You grieve the marriage while still inside it. You miss the person who is still in the room. There is no clean category for this kind of loss because nothing has officially ended, and that ambiguity makes it harder, not easier, to know what you're allowed to feel.
What you are allowed to feel is everything you're feeling. The love and the resentment. The hope and the exhaustion. The commitment and the moments when you wonder how much longer you can sustain something this one-sided. All of it is honest. All of it belongs to the reality of your situation, and none of it disqualifies you from grace or makes you a lesser person for having it. If part of what you are carrying alone is the prayer itself, if you have been the only one bringing this marriage before God, with no one beside you in it, the prayer for when you're praying alone for both of you speaks directly to that weight.
You have been carrying this quietly for long enough. If you need somewhere to bring it, the whole weight of it, not just the presentable parts, you can request a prayer for your marriage. Not for a formula or an outcome, just to not be the only one holding this for one more day.
Scripture speaks to the one who continues faithfully when the other hasn't, not as a burden but as a kind of quiet, costly witness. What's rarely said alongside that is how much it costs. The person doing that work is spending something real, day after day, with no guarantee of return, on the strength of a love and a commitment that the other person is not currently meeting. That is not a small thing. It is one of the harder expressions of faithfulness that exists, and it deserves to be named as such rather than simply assigned as the expected posture of the one who still believes in the marriage.
You are not failing this marriage by being tired. You are not failing your spouse by having limits. You are not failing God by wondering whether what you are doing is sustainable. These are honest responses to a genuinely hard situation, and the God who sees the effort you have been making sees the cost of it too, not just the visible faithfulness, but what it has taken from you to keep choosing it. The sustained effort of being the one who holds everything together in a marriage has a way of bleeding into every other area of life, if you find that the weight of being everyone's anchor has extended beyond the marriage itself, the prayer for when everyone is depending on you names that broader exhaustion.
Lament is the honest prayer for this season. Not the prayer of someone who has given up, but the prayer of someone who is still here and needs to say plainly: this is hard, I am tired, I cannot carry this alone indefinitely, and I need something from outside myself to keep going. That is a complete and honest prayer. It does not require resolution or optimism or the performance of a faith that is stronger than the one you actually have right now.
Bring what you have. The love and the exhaustion together. The commitment and the question of how long. All of it is welcome. None of it has to be cleaned up before it's brought.
You have not given up. That still matters, even on the days it doesn't feel like enough. The marriage prayers gathered here are for exactly this season, for the one who is still in it, still trying, still believing it matters even when it costs everything.