Some couples arouse admiration because they know how to advance over the years more and more in love and cohesion and seem capable of overcoming changes and crises unscathed without separating and, above all, continuing to love each other.
The duration of relationships
Rare examples, in a panorama in which the duration of relationships rarely exceeds seven years without undergoing a process of erosion of the loving feeling which, when it does not change into mutual tolerance, leads to conflict and separation.
Yet at the beginning of a love story, both partners would like it to be “the right one”, which lasts a lifetime, as the current stereotype dictates. We often wonder why, despite the commitment of partners, love affairs end, also because sentimental suffering and relational disorders are among the most frequent reasons for existential distress. But to understand the reasons why a couple cannot stand the passage of time, it is more useful to focus on how a relationship works when it is stable, satisfying, and long-lasting, rather than looking for the causes of breakup in the specific case.
How to manage a relationship
As far as I know, discovering the “causes” of marital distress has never saved a marriage, on the contrary, it has fueled the sense of frustration and inevitability regarding the “faults” of one or the other or of their respective families of origin. Better to take inspiration from those solid and stainless couples, who have a lot to teach about how to manage a relationship if you want to keep your romantic relationship intact and full of satisfaction for a long time.
Given that no general, legitimate, and sovereign model of love lasts and is renewed over time, long-lived couples seem to have in common the ability to cope with the transformations related to the change of the individuals that compose them and the critical events that, inevitably, punctuate the existence of one or both. A critical event, for example, is difficulty entering the world of work or establishing oneself professionally, or the death of a significant person; but positive events such as study success, career advancement and even getting married and having a child can also be critical to the balance of the couple. For the individual and couple’s psyche, any emotional stress, whether negative or positive, can trigger disruptive responses.
Couple resilience
Every psychological system resists change and struggles to adapt to new conditions once it has established some form of equilibrium. Thus the stable and satisfying couple is characterized by a quality that distinguishes it from others: couple resilience. If the individual’s psychological resilience is the individual ability to overcome and draw strength from adverse or stressful circumstances, couple resilience can be defined as the shared competence to react to changes with flexibility and dynamism.
This ability is the result of a combination, always original and different from case to case, between the partners: that is, it is a quality emerging from the couple, something that the individuals may not possess and which derives from the particular way in which they interact. It happens that poorly resilient individuals can become very resistant and positively reactive through the experience of a couple or, vice versa, that very resilient individuals become extremely fragile within a love relationship.
Sharing of values
A resilient couple is first and foremost based on the strong (generally implicit) sharing of values. The partners who live in an unbreakable partnership agree on what priorities to assign to sex, money, work, family of origin, friendship, etc., and prove mutually willing to accept differences of views without transforming them into matters of state. Rarely, for example, do resilient couples formulate rules that limit the individual freedom of partners regarding friendships or experience relationships outside the relationship that are not shared with frustration and destructiveness. On the contrary, a classic of couples that sooner or later explode or implode is the construction of bonds and rules almost at a legal level which would serve to protect the relationship from betrayal and avoid the stress of jealousy. Punctually, the rigidity of the menage between partners corresponds to some form of infidelity which will act as a detonator in the face of the first concomitant critical event.
Freedom and personal affirmation
The resilient couple is such if they allow ample space for freedom and personal affirmation if they stimulate and promote them. This does not mean that partners perceive each other as “equal”. What is striking in couples that have been satisfying and stable for many years is the clear division of roles and the valorization of each person’s differences. A bit like saying, when talking about resilient heterosexual couples, that “the man is the man and the woman is the woman”. It sounds retrograde and the opposite is also valid: a man in the kitchen and a woman manager can be perfectly resilient, as long as the division of roles is shared and certainly not the consequence of unilateral decisions, but spontaneous, in agreement, and above all flexible.
Low entanglement, high independence
Other secrets of the couple that resist the passage of time and overcome life’s difficulties are the low degree of entanglement with their families of origin and their mutual independence. Regarding the first point, resilient couples are all similar: they build a family unit of their own and manage to limit the interference of parents and closest relatives while remaining overall integrated into the parental network. In comparison, couples who break up tend to maintain bonds bordering on symbiosis with their families of origin, bonds which over time almost invariably become a recurring source of discord. However, as regards independence between partners, the relationship seems all the more resilient the less the members of the couple perceive themselves as indispensable to each other. For this reason, beyond scenarios from a serial novel or old Hollywood, phrases like “I can’t do without you”, “I can’t live without you”, and “You are everything to me” certainly do not hope for a great loving future.
Sex and passion
If in couples in decline sexual attraction tends towards a downward curve, marked by repetitiveness, boredom, and progressive disinterest of one and sometimes both partners, resilient couples improve their sexual life as time passes and manage the periods in which Physiologically, there may be a decline in desire and understanding. A resilient couple has sex, but one amid a crisis doesn’t, or does it badly and in any case without passion. If advancing age and the transformation of bodies resulting from maturation are often related to a reduction in sexual activity, the resilient couple reacts by reducing the frequency of intercourse in favor of their intensity and quality in terms of mutual satisfaction. Passion is the key word, even if it is complex to define it, and where even poets and writers struggle it is difficult for psychology to excel. However, we can arrive at the idea of passion, a necessary but not sufficient ingredient of a couple’s resilience, by talking about desire, a sensation of beauty, an epidermal feeling that continues despite the crises and the years that pass.