A Love For Life
There are couples that demand admiration, know how to fall even more in love and continue to get along with each other. They seem able to overcome changes and problems without separating and, above all, fully maintain their love.
These are rare examples in a society where relationships rarely exceed seven years. In most cases, love erodes and the relationship culminates in conflicts or separation.
“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, and always with the same person”
What’s the secret of couples that last a lifetime?
When we start a new love story, we want it to be “the one” that lasts us a lifetime. But often, shortly after, we wonder how and why the love ends, despite all our efforts.
To understand why a couple does not stand the test of time, it is more useful to focus on how a relationship works when it is stable, satisfactory and lasting, rather than to go looking for the causes of separation.
There is no one-size-fits-all model for a lifelong love. But what lasting couples have in common is the ability to cope with changes in the other person, as well as critical events that inevitably mark the life of a couple.
A critical event can be, for example, the difficulties in finding a job or the death of an important person. E ven a positive event can be change the couple’s dynamic: professional success, getting married or having a child.
In these cases, our mind tries to resist change and struggles to adapt to new circumstances. In this way, we can determine that a lasting couple is characterized by a quality that distinguishes it from the others: the couple’s resilience.
What is a resilient couple?
If a person’s resilience is their ability to overcome and draw strength against adverse or stressful circumstances, then the couple’s resilience is defined as the shared competence to react to changes flexibly and dynamically.
It is an emergent quality of the couple, not the individual person, and comes from the particular way in which they interact.
Sometimes people who are not very resilient can have very lasting relationships or vice versa. Resilient people can become extremely fragile in a romantic relationship.
Features of lasting couples
- They share values: A resilient couple has a strong rapport to begin with. They agree with the priority given to sex, money, work, family, friendship, etc.
- They are willing to accept their differences without turning them into public affairs.
- Untarnished couples rarely build limitations and rules that restrict the individual freedom of their partner.
- Resilient couples grants a wide range of freedoms, encouraging and promoting the personal development of both members.
- High family independence: Resilient couples form a family and limit the interference of parents and relatives while remaining fully integrated into the family. In comparison, unstable couples, tend to maintain an unhealthy bond with their parents.
- Sex and passion: Resilient couples improve their sex life with the passage of time and know how to manage the periods when, physiologically, there may be a loss of libido. A resilient couple has sex. A declining couple does it without passion or even enjoying the moment. Although age tends to reduce sexual activity, the lasting couple reacts by reducing the frequency of intercourse for its intensity and quality in terms of mutual satisfaction.
Resilience, the elixir of lifelong love, is not a pill that can be taken as needed, nor is it a remedy for couples in crisis. It is the result of a genuine and continuous commitment, based on mutual respect and the awareness that being together is a choice that is renewed every day.
