Welcome to Our Marriage

Julia Dufvenius and Christopher Wollter have just graduated from theater school when they fall in love. They build a life together: two acting careers, children, a house, a marriage, and more than a decade of shared history. They are successful, beautiful, and happy on the surface, but a rift is growing in their relationship.

Christopher works freelance, performing on stages across the country, far from their newly formed family in Stockholm. Evening performances are followed by nightlife with his fellow actors. They have a drink, they chat and then he says good night—but he doesn’t go home to sleep.

In the meantime, Julia holds a permanent position at Sweden’s most prestigious theater in Stockholm. But at home, she manages all the domestic work because Christopher often lives elsewhere. She doesn’t go out after evening performances. She is exhausted, feels disconnected, and gets angry when he comes home. And sometimes, her mind wanders to the thought that he might be unfaithful.

In fact, Christopher hasn’t just been unfaithful once. He is notoriously unfaithful during their first eleven years together. It amounts to between 80 and 90 occasions, which he hides from Julia.

But late one night, he meets three young women, and their encounter is photographed by one of them. On the train home the following day, he catches a glimpse of himself in the camera. Shock, self-disgust, and anxiety now wash over him. And his wedding ring is gone.

He can no longer go on like this. He seeks professional help at a clinic for sex addiction.

The infidelity is not a series of isolated mistakes, but part of a compulsive sexual behavior that he is gradually forced to realize he can no longer control.

One evening, after been seeking help, he decides to tell Julia about his sex addiction, and her world collapses. She is angry, betrayed, heartbroken, and deceived. Yet, she still wants to save her marriage by tackling the problem together with her husband. They do, and now, sixteen years later, they have written a book together about it all—one that leaves no reader unmoved.

Welcome to Our Marriage is a unique and entirely raw, self-revealing depiction of every phase of a marital crisis—educational in many ways. In this three-act drama, we follow Julia and Christopher’s own vulnerable accounts in alternating chapters, a device that works incredibly well. This story, sorrowful in many ways, unfolds into a practical survival manual for couples who refuse to let go of each other. Even though convention and tradition say they should.

“At its core, it is about a traumatic crisis, the kind most people encounter at some point in life. One can be shocked and condemn—or try to understand something about oneself,” writes critic Vesna Prekopic in Dagens Nyheter (DN).