A successful long-term relationship requires more than just liking each other or enjoying each other’s company. While these feelings are important, especially during the dating phase, deeper emotions and a greater sense of commitment are needed to sustain a relationship in the long run. When difficulties and hardships arise, liking alone is not enough to endure and overcome them.
True love involves accepting your partner’s vulnerabilities and being there to provide care and support. How you treat each other during hard times is a key indicator of whether you have real love and a future together.
Liking and enjoyment are feelings that are pleasurable in the moment but fleeting. They revolve around having fun together, sharing joyful experiences, and being in an idealized state of perpetual happiness. But these moments are just highlights, or we say just a part of real life. Real life also consists of challenges, hardships, sickness, stress, etc. All of these test a relationship.
If a couple is not prepared to face adversity together with care and compassion, their fairytale dream of being together will eventually shatter against the harshness of reality.
A story from my friend who just divorced. She recalls how hurt and saddened she felt when her husband showed impatience and indifference toward her after she gave birth. Despite sharing many happy memories together when dating and being newly married, the experience of not having his support during a difficult time in her life left deep scars. It made her feel like a burden, and this lack of empathy highlighted that he did not truly love her. While she tried to excuse his behavior due to tiredness, she realized that true love means being there for each other especially when times are hard. Their relationship did not last eventually, as it seriously expose the lack of real commitment and cares there.
Maintaining a relationship requires far more than enjoying lively conversations over candlelight dinners or surprising each other with gifts on special occasions.
Rather, it is about accepting each other’s faults and vulnerabilities; facing problems together with a sense of shared responsibility, and providing comfort and support when anyone of you two is struggling or sick. How you are there for each other through failures and hardships speaks louder than romantic gestures. A couple needs to have realistic expectations about what a long-term relationship entails, not just sights set on an idealized state of perpetual happiness. Both of the two in a relationship must be willing to tackle less glamorous aspects of life as a team and find deeper meaning in simple acts of care and empathy.
While every relationship experiences ups and downs, how a couple navigates conflicts and difficulties is key to whether it will go the distance. For example, do they turn towards or away from each other when faced with problems? Do they collapse into frustration and blame, or do they come together with acceptance and understanding?
The hardest times often reveal the strength and depth of a relationship. If it is built on liking alone, it is more prone to falling apart in the face of challenges. However, if it is fueled by true love and long-term commitment, a couple can emerge from adversity even stronger. All in all, a long-lasting relationship is not the absence of hard times, but having a partner who makes the hard times more bearable. Someone who accepts you as you are, in sickness and in health, weakness and in strength.
And that is what makes marriage so sacred and irreplaceable.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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