Relationship Longevity: A Quirk of a Bygone Age?

Sometimes it feels like no one stays together these days. Not like people used to, at least. Not like previous generations did. Maybe, despite all the modern noise about “romance” and “destiny” and “love”, people just aren’t as romantic as they used to be.

Not all that long ago, once you were married, that was *it*. For better, for worse, till death do us part.

Couples—routinely—would celebrate their silver anniversary, their golden, their diamond, sometimes even their platinum.

It meant marrying young, but still — what an achievement! What grace and good will in order to make such longevity come to pass. It doesn’t just happen. Everyone knows it takes work. Seventy years together as a married couple? Now that’s what I call stickability, and staying the course.

Except, people don’t say that now. People, a good number of people at least, view such lengthy domestic arrangements with a degree of suspicion, perceiving they were held together not really by love but by economic and social circumstances. “Those people were trapped,” such people tend to say. “They were creatures of their time.” “They were products of their generation.” “They were — victims!”

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Something very interesting is going on.

When people criticise others, often they do so in order to shore up their own position. In the criticism, there is — more often than not — an expression of vulnerability.

Let’s face it, it’s not as if our modern approach is demonstrably better. For all the talk of “conscious uncoupling” and “divorced to” (as opposed to “divorced from”), divorce is a trauma, and it does terrible things to people and to their families. No one survives it completely unscathed.

Given the (almost decadent) speed with which so many relationships fall apart, as we hop from partner to partner in the hope of an ever brighter future, we are — as a culture — surprisingly ill-equipped to navigate heartbreak and relationship breakdowns.

We are all each other’s collateral damage.

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What are the secrets that tie people together, happily, for the long term? What exactly does it take? And are those values compatible with modern sensibilities about choice and free will and individual autonomy?

When listing the ingredients of the long-term relationship secret sauce, people usually reach for noble words like “compromise” and “respect” and “commitment” and “forgiveness”. “Communication” is usually lurking in there somewhere, too (although goodness knows why; knowing the value of holding one’s tongue seems just as important).

As an answer, it feels surprisingly flimsy. Not least because you’d be hard pressed to find anyone actually against those things.

Granted, these are not the easiest of virtues to practice, at least not consistently. They look good on paper, they sound good in theory. But they are difficult, and perhaps that is why they are valorised as sacrosanct.

But is it only people who stay married for the very long term who can claim membership of this haloed community?

Aren’t these virtues which know many expressions? Don’t the ways we choose to articulate those values change with the seasons?

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Some people think of matrimony as slightly old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, a relic of a previous era which has outlived its usefulness, a concept which did more harm than good which we have sensibly outgrown.

There shouldn’t, in principle, be a downturn in relationship long-termism just because marriage has fallen out out of favour. A desire to connect is encoded into our DNA.

But that is what’s happened.

We’re much more inclined, these days, to change horses mid-stream. It suggests we need a structure to help nudge us along in the right direction when the going gets especially tough.

Our perceptions of love have changed, and it has changed the way we *do* relationships.

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It’s an interesting pincer movement which makes seriously long-term arrangements much less likely.

On the one hand, the code of conduct has become highly prescriptive, and the emphasis is on personal integrity (“This is behaviour up with which I am not prepared to put, so I’m off!”) at the expense of figuring stuff out together. On the other hand, “falling in love” — over and over again and possibly with lots of different people — is the golden ticket, the new birthright.

Can a seventy year relationship compete with the thrill of early-day infatuations? Is it even possible to be “in love” for seventy years? Can love compete with the thrill of its pursuit?

It’s slightly unpalatable to admit, but perhaps not all of us have the same capacity for long-term connection.

Maybe staying together forever just isn’t that important to some people. Maybe a number of our number have *always* felt that way, but the prevailing social sentiments made it difficult for them to say so.

Maybe there’s two types of matrimonial mate: those who think marriage is forever, and those who think marriage is a seven year contract with an option to renew.

It’s possible, of course, that future generations will think we were quite mad.

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That we got bored of standing by each other and taking care of each other. That we foolishly chose to replace rather than to repair. That we were seduced by an illusion of dating apps and the giddying possibility of infinite choice.

German psychiatrist Adelheid Kastner argues in her book Tatort Trennung (2016) that, given the terrible destruction they oftentimes cause, breakups are tantamount to a crime scene. There is a growing disconnect, she argues, between romantic reality and our romantic ideals and fantasies. Many breakups are eminently avoidable, she says, and many of the people who leave one relationship to start something with someone else end up no demonstrably happier after the honeymoon period than they were in the first place.

We have to ask ourselves: is it worth it?

And she makes the point that, if you change your partner every decade or so, it will be hard to feel at home with anybody.

It conjures a fascinating image of us all just spinning around, dancing a righteous rumba, violently asserting our selfhood but in fact condemned by modern sensibilities to making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

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Every age has its contradictions. We have whole industries focused on relationship management and relationship best practice — in many ways, we value relationships like never before, if only because we spend quite a lot of time educating ourselves how to do it — but, bit by bit, are we losing the true essence of authentic relationships? Are we losing what joined our grandparents and our parents and so many other couples in the world?

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that when people walk away, nowadays we use the language of empowerment. That is a relatively recent phenomenon.

What happened to asking ourselves (and those we love) how we can improve and then knuckling down to work? Isn’t that a lifelong endeavour, anyway? Isn’t that something that takes serious amounts of effort and time?

Are we lazier, more impatient, less comfortable with compromise, less able to tolerate occasional flashes of hatred from those we love most deeply? As Jonathan Franzen memorably said:

“Don’t talk to me about hatred until you’ve been married.”

When you’re building a skyscraper, it’s building sufficiently strong foundations underground which takes the bulk of the construction time. The flashy, glitzy bits go on at the end.

Maybe it’s not compromise. Maybe it’s sacrifice. Is it sacrifice that is the ultimate lost art? Sacrificing some of our own dreams and goals in order to stand by some of the dreams and goals of another.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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