Nietzsche: How Can We Rebuild Our Strength through Suffering?

English translation of the original Chinese essay. Original Chinese illustrations are retained. English reading guide and web presentation updated: 7 October 2026.

For many people entering my office, the question trapping them is not simply whether to divorce. Sometimes the decision has already been made. The marriage has ended, judgment delivered, property divided and arrangements for the children settled.

Yet the person has not truly moved on.

They ask: “Why did this happen to me?” “After all those years of giving, why was betrayal my reward?” “If this marriage failed, has my life failed too?” “Can I start again?”

This brings us to the third of our Ten Questions on Marriage.

The first, Stoicism, asked us to distinguish what we can control from what we cannot.

The second, existentialism, reminded us that no one can choose for us and that freedom carries responsibility.

But when the choice is made and the pain remains, another question needs answering: what should I do with suffering that has already happened and cannot be changed?

This is where Nietzsche's philosophy can begin.

View the original Chinese learning poster

1. Suffering is not necessarily the opposite of life

We usually want life to run smoothly: a happy marriage, an intact family, healthy children and a stable career. When betrayal, divorce, arguments or loss suddenly arrive, it is easy to feel that life has gone “wrong”.

Nietzsche understood life differently. He did not think a powerful life was one without suffering. Pain, failure, conflict and loss are themselves part of being alive.

The real question is not: “Why does my life contain suffering?”

It is: “Now that suffering has happened, what can I do with it?”

The questions sound similar, but point in opposite directions. The first keeps us looking back. The second begins to move us towards the future.

2. Do not rush back to your former self

After a major marital upheaval, people often say: “I just want things to be as they were.” Nietzsche might ask something more radical: why must you go back?

Perhaps the worthwhile aim is not to recover an unhurt former self, but to become someone you had never been before this suffering.

This is an important Nietzschean idea: self-overcoming. It is not defeating an ex-spouse or proving that you are happier after divorce. What needs overcoming is your former self: the self excessively dependent on others' judgments, the self forever compromising from fear of loss, the self whose entire worth rested on marriage, or even the self convinced that happiness requires someone else to change first.

A marriage's collapse may certainly mean loss. But it may also force a person to ask seriously, for the first time: without attachment to my old life, who am I?

3. True strength means creating yourself anew, not controlling others

Another frequently discussed Nietzschean concept is the “will to power”. The phrase is easily misunderstood. It is not simply about controlling or conquering others. More importantly, it concerns life's force of expansion, creation and self-overcoming.

This matters especially within marriage. We often spend enormous energy asking: “Why cannot he change?” “Why cannot she understand me?” “I will make him regret it.” “I will prove she was wrong.” Yet someone else remains at the centre of these concerns.

Nietzsche returns the question to you: if this person never changes, how will you continue your life? Real strength begins to return when we stop devoting all our energy to changing others and start rebuilding our own lives.

4. Revaluing values: what has this marriage actually defined?

After a marriage fails, it is easy to conclude that life has failed. Hidden within that conclusion is an unexamined standard: a successful marriage equals a successful life.

Why must that be so?

Nietzsche repeatedly explored the revaluation of values: reconsidering judgments we have always taken for granted.

Does divorce make a woman a failure?

Does a man's inability to preserve his family make him inadequate?

Is endless endurance for an “intact family” necessarily noble?

Does leaving necessarily mean selfishness?

Does staying necessarily mean weakness?

Often, marriage itself is not the only thing constraining us. So do judgments inherited from family, society and past experience.

An important step in rebuilding life is therefore to ask: which values are truly mine?

5. The deepest acceptance may be amor fati

Another important Nietzschean concept is amor fati: the love of fate. It goes beyond accepting reality. Acceptance might mean only “This is how things are; there is nothing I can do.” Loving fate means no longer imagining that part of one's life can simply be erased.

This does not mean betrayal is right, harm deserves praise, or suffering should be pursued. It means that because these experiences have become part of my life, I will not let them exist only as wounds. I will make them material for understanding myself, choosing again, establishing boundaries and creating a new life.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote the now familiar thought that what does not kill him makes him stronger. The point is not to repeat it as a motivational slogan, but to understand its demand. Pain does not automatically produce growth; some suffering can destroy a person.

Growth comes from how a person reinterprets their experience and begins to act again after suffering.

6. A marriage may end, but life must not stop there

The law can end a marriage. A judgment can confirm divorce, an agreement divide property, and a court arrange children's care. But law cannot rebuild a person's life for them. Family lawyers often see this: a case ending does not mean a life has begun again. The real rebuilding takes place beyond legal proceedings.

A meaningful change begins when someone stops asking every day “Why did they treat me like this?” and starts asking “After all this, how do I intend to live?”

Perhaps Nietzsche's most important insight for those in marital distress is not that you must be strong. It is that suffering need not have the final authority to define your life. A marriage may fail, a relationship may end, and the past cannot be rewritten. Yet one final strength remains: deciding what kind of person these experiences ultimately make you.

Stoicism asks us to accept what we cannot control.

Existentialism asks us to make our own choices amid uncertainty.

Nietzsche goes further: even when life has shattered, we can use its fragments to create ourselves anew.

How can we rebuild our strength through suffering? Three questions from Mingyue Gao

Question 1

If this suffering cannot be erased from my life, what meaning would I hope to give it one day?

Question 2

What has this marriage revealed about issues in myself that I had never seriously faced? Which old values, dependencies or ways of living need reconsideration?

Question 3

Looking back five years from now, would I hope to be someone who merely survived the pain, or someone who recreated themselves through all they experienced?