How Do You Make Love Stay?
A Valentine’s conversation with a male friend centered on how people in relationships stop working to preserve the relationship, stop appreciating each other. He said that after about five years in a relationship, couples tend to take each other for granted. I, ever the romantic, never married, and obviously in denial, said that it doesn’t have to be that way. But then I started examining relationships that I have observed over the years, including my own friendships.
I started thinking about one of my friendships which is hitting its seventh year. It started out as semi-romantic. My buddy was going through a rough patch in his marriage and needed someone to talk to. Really, he needed someone to assure him that he was attractive and worthwhile and not a loser, which was the feedback he was getting in his relationship. Early in the relationship we did a lot of talking, spent a lot of time together, skipped the physical (smart move), and developed a strong buddy relationship.
Over the years our relationship has changed. I went from having a tremendous crush on him to a different kind of love. I got to the point where I could love him without wanting to have him for my own, an almost pure love where I can just accept and appreciate him the way he is without wanting more. He is my friend and I love him and can overlook his flaws and hangups and hope that he overlooks mine.
But I would have to admit that the attention and appreciation between us has fallen off. He has discovered that I am not a genius (I hate that) and I have discovered that he is not “all that and a bag o chips”. Add to that the fact that he has a wife and family who get his first and most immediate attention, which is the way it should be. Maybe having the kids is part of what interfered with the friendship; he has less time, more pressure, whatever. I have been relegated to a secondary rung in his life. There is less time together, less confiding.
I see the same thing happening in my friends’ marriages. Jobs and kids and the day-to-day reality of making a living take our attention. Maybe we know each other too well. Maybe we think there is nothing left to discover. We know each others flaws. We start anticipating the other’s reaction, assume we know what they are feeling and stop asking what they think about things. There are no surprises left; we are attracted to the shiny and new, not the old and known.
A friend wrote about marriage, “I think often it is just one person that stops seeking in a marriage or forgets to wake up one morning and realize that they are more in love AND share that with the person they love.”
Replace the word marriage with friendship and I can understand what it is like to reach out and find nothing there. Gestures that your loved one would gush about if an acquaintance did them don’t get a mention when you do them. Little things you do to please them are taken as something owed to them.
Love is never equal. One always gives more than the other. You are not supposed to count or measure or keep score in a relationship. But when one person is constantly reaching out, appreciating, making the effort and gets no response or is rebuffed by their partner, they stop trying out of self-preservation, embarrassment, hurt. You get tired of being rejected or ignored.
At what point in a relationship do you stop appreciating the things that your partner does for you? At what point do you stop doing things for your partner because you know that the effort won’t be appreciated or even remarked upon?
Dan Fogelberg asked, “How do you make love stay?”
It sounds trite to say you have to fight for a relationship. It takes two people putting in the effort to make a relationship work. But if one side isn’t stepping up to the pump, the other has to at least have the conversation and point it out. That is probably somewhere in year three. There is a lot of suffering in silence by both sides of a relationship and someone has to say something. Left alone, by year five, people realize the futility of pointing it out to the other side, give up, work out their separate peace and lead half-lives. And as an outsider looking in, all I can say is that is a crappy way to live your life. I know a lot of men and women who are in relationships like that because it is still better to have someone, even if it is a half-dead relationship, than to be alone. And maybe a half-life is better than no life.
So how do you fix it? Or do you just accept it as one of life’s realities and let it ride?
I think one of the most overlooked words in wedding vows is the word “cherish”. People are fragile. Life is fragile. Maybe one reason why my parents’ marriage worked was that my dad had serious health issues and we all realized how precious our time was together. We knew he could be taken away at any moment. My parents worked as a team. They had a partnership that was based on shared goals, respect and most importantly, communication. To the end they were considerate of each other and more importantly, showed appreciation for each other.
I don’t know why the politeness and consideration we give to acquaintances, even strangers, gets lost in a relationship. The truth is, you say things to people you know well – especially family — that you would never say to acquaintances or even new friends. You reach a comfort level with friends and loved ones that allows you to be honest. But honesty does not allow you to be cruel, neglectful or inconsiderate.
Unfortunately, day to day proximity allows people to slide into bad habits. It is like the gradual creeping on of pounds. A weight gain of ten pounds over the course of a year may not cause alarm bells. Three years and thirty pounds later, you should take notice. Something can still be done. At five years and fifty pounds, the situation can seem too hard to overcome. Just like losing weight, it is best to take care of the problem when it is small and easy to overcome. Optimally, the conversation about the way you are treating each other should start early in the relationship and be revisited on a regular basis to keep the relationship on track. Also, people have to have a level of honesty to admit that it is happening. If you don’t talk about it, it just feeds on itself and you end up being two people leading separate lives. Which is not what a relationship should be.
The problem is that the longer the situation goes on, the more initiating the conversation seems like just another opportunity to be shot down. So no one is brave enough to start the conversation. But like gaining weight, the situation is not going to stay at the same level. It will get worse. No matter how far along you are in the relationship, it is worth risking the conversation. If it fails, at least you know where you stand and can make your decisions from there. But if it succeeds, you have given your relationship a whole new life and have re-started it at a higher threshold. You took a risk getting into the relationship; you may as well take at least one more risk to save it.