Ask someone who has been married for thirty or forty years if they are still in love and most will pause before answering. Not because the answer is no. But because that word has evolved into something a little different along the way – and they’re not entirely sure the version they’re using matches the version you’re asking about.
The assumption that most people carry into marriage—an assumption that a culture actively reinforces—is that love is something you either have or lose. The original version is a benchmark with its relevance and special electrical insistence. Everything that follows is measured by it. When this initial version inevitably changes, it tends to register as a loss. The fire went out. Something has been resolved. The question that quietly haunts many long marriages is whether dimmer equals death.
Research shows it doesn’t. But understanding why requires being honest about what the two versions actually are.
The love that started it all
Psychologist Elaine HatfieldHis research on love, spanning decades and thousands of couples, distinguishes between passionate love—characterized by intensity, obsession, and physical urgency—and companionate love, characterized by deep affection, familiarity, and mutual commitment. The initial version of most romantic relationships is almost entirely of the first type. It’s what most people mean when they say, “I’m in love.” And by design and definition, it’s not built to last forever.
“Passionate love provides a high like drugs,” Hatfield said, “and you can’t stay high forever.” His study of nearly 1,000 people, from couples dating psychologist Jane Traupmann to women who had been married an average of 33 years, found that passionate love steadily declined over time. Longer marriages were different: quieter, more stable and harder to name from the outside.
This is not a surprising finding for people who have been married for a long time. It tends to surprise people who haven’t been there.
Dip in the middle
One of the things that makes long marriages difficult is that the transition from one type of love to another is not seamless. There is a period in the middle when both are a bit regressed—passionate love has cooled and companionate love has not yet established itself—and marriages feel precarious. Most of them are finished.
A A meta-analysis of 165 independent samples Research of more than 165,000 people, led by Janina Larissa Bühler at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, found that relationship satisfaction typically declines during the first decade of marriage and increases over the next two decades. The low point—the roughly seven-to-ten-year mark—is real and well-documented. But so is what comes next.
“I think we have to accept that relationship satisfaction fluctuates, and it’s perfectly normal for it to fluctuate,” Buhler said. “It’s okay to be less than satisfied at some point in a relationship, and that doesn’t mean giving up or doing nothing more for the relationship.”
Her research shows that couples who go through a slump often come out on the other side with something they didn’t have at the beginning: a unique sense of resilience and togetherness—not because they were forced to, but because they continued to choose.
Saving version
It is more difficult to express what long marriages describe from the inside than the original version. It involves getting to know someone so well that conversation isn’t always necessary. Completing each other’s sentences not as a trick, but as a true completion of a shared thought. Custom comfort that requires nothing of you – no need for performance, no maintenance, no need to look your best.
John GottmanA psychologist who has followed thousands of couples for decades — measuring everything from their conflict patterns to their body language — has come to a deceptively simple conclusion: “Happy married people love each other.” The word “like” does a lot of work there. This is not passion. It is not necessary. It’s more common, and it turns out, more durable.
Gottman also found that successful long-term relationships are built not on big gestures, but on small gestures—”small words, small gestures, and small actions.” The accumulation of turning your back on someone over and over, over the years, creates something that passionate love by its very nature is exhausting and can’t produce wholes because it doesn’t have time.
I’m only four years into my marriage and I can’t tell what it will look like at thirty. But both sets of our parents have been married for decades, and watching them together isn’t the same as watching two people out of inertia. There is a distinct quality to how they act around each other – not indifference. This is the opposite of indifference. It’s like two people who spend years learning about each other and decide over and over again that the other person is worth continuing to learn.
Psychologist Robert SternbergTriangular love theory, which defines passion, intimacy and commitment as three components, observes that the relationships we call the most complete are not the ones that burn forever. They are components in which all three components exist – in whatever form each one takes years after someone chooses them.
I am not a relationship counselor and none of this is advice about any specific relationship. It’s about the people in it, and a therapist who works with couples is in a better position than an article to help you think.
Here’s what the research goes on: love that lasts decades doesn’t look nearly as good as it did when it first started. It’s slower, less electric, less prone to detonation. But it is more stable. For many people, it was always worth getting.
