You pray for your marriage. You have been doing it, consistently, honestly, sometimes desperately, and your spouse hasn't been there beside you in it. Not necessarily because they don't care about the marriage. But for whatever reason, the act of bringing it to God has fallen to you alone, and you have been carrying that weight without anyone to share it with.
There is a specific question that lives underneath this experience, and it deserves to be addressed directly: does it count? Does prayer for a marriage mean anything when only one person is doing it? Is there something incomplete about interceding for someone who hasn't asked you to, for a relationship that the other person isn't bringing to God themselves?
The answer is yes, it counts. But the more important thing to say is why, because the why changes how you carry it.
Intercessory prayer has never required the consent or participation of the person being prayed for. It has never depended on the other person knowing it is happening, agreeing with it, or joining in. The act of bringing someone you love before God is its own complete thing, not a half-measure waiting to become whole when the other person shows up. You are not doing less than prayer. You are doing prayer, for two, with what you have, from where you are. That is not a diminished version of something. It is one of the fuller expressions of love available inside a marriage.
What makes this hard is not that it doesn't work. What makes it hard is the loneliness of it. Prayer is meant to be something a marriage shares, a common language for the deepest things, a place where two people bring what they cannot carry alone. When that isn't available, when you kneel or sit or lie awake and bring this marriage to God by yourself, there is an ache in the absence of the person who should be there beside you. You feel it. It is real. And feeling it does not mean you are doing this wrong. If what lies beneath the absence is that your spouse has stepped away from faith entirely, not just from praying together but from belief itself, the prayer for when one of you has walked away from faith speaks to that deeper shift.
If you want to bring your marriage to God right now, for both of you, from wherever you are, you can request a prayer for your marriage. You don't need your spouse present for it to reach.
Scripture speaks of love in marriage as something that moves toward the other person regardless of what is returned, a love that gives without waiting for the giving to be matched. Intercession is that love in its prayer form. You are not praying for your spouse because they have earned it or because they are participating. You are praying for them because you love them and the marriage, and that love has to go somewhere, and prayer is where love goes when it has nowhere else to put itself.
The spiritual weight you are carrying for two is real and it is heavy. It was not designed to be carried by one person indefinitely. But the fact that you are carrying it, that you keep showing up in prayer for a marriage that your spouse may not even know you're fighting for, is not invisible. It is seen. And the God who receives that prayer is not confused about what you are doing or why, even when you are uncertain yourself. If the praying has gone on long enough that you have started to wonder whether there is any point in continuing, whether anything is actually reaching, the prayer for strength to keep praying when it feels pointless is an honest place to bring that question.
You don't have to have the theology of this perfectly sorted. You don't have to know exactly what to ask for on your spouse's behalf or how to pray for something as complex as another person's heart. You just have to keep bringing it, imperfectly, incompletely, with whatever words you have, and trust that what you bring is received and held by someone who understands the full weight of what you're carrying far better than you do.
Keep praying. For both of you. It reaches further than you know. The marriage prayers gathered here are for exactly this, for the one holding the marriage in prayer when no one else is.