The dizzying pace of modern society poses a threat to love in that timing is often emphasized over time. It is the latter, though, that lends itself to profound love. Our tendency to choose superficial future possibilities can spoil our ability to reach romantic profundity. In consuming ourselves with immediate and ever-changing superficial possibilities, we tend to neglect the more stable and profound aspects of the present and the long-term future. Time is also relevant when considering a return to a past lover. However, the idealization of the past can contribute to a mistaken expectation that things will somehow be different or better than the first time around. Whether it is considering a return to a past lover or establishing a new connection entirely, the quest for profound love requires a patient heart and an awareness of the impact of time.
The role of time in romantic love has both positive and negative aspects. This is so because time is a positive and constitutive factor of profound love, whereas time is either marginal or at worst destructive to intense love. In long-term robust love, there is an overall optimal balance between the various aspects of time.
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The Romantic Connection
I love you—I am at rest with you—I have come home.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
At the heart of romantic love lies the connection between the lovers. What is the nature of this connection? We have seen that both caring and sharing, as well as responsivity and resonance, are central to this bond. Yet there is more. I begin by considering the basic human need for such a connection, or more specifically, the need to belong to someone. Next, I discuss the connection of love to marriage, which is still the prevailing form of long-term, committed relationships. I then examine the possibility of having a “perfect” loving relationship, the replaceability of the beloved, the question of whether cohabitation before marriage leads to more divorces, and the role of inequality and envy in romantic relationships. I also explore relationships in which the one you love doesn’t love you (as much).
The Need to Belong
You belong to me.
JO STAFFORD (AND MORE THAN SEVENTY OTHER SINGERS)
You don’t own me. Don’t say I can’t go with other boys.
LESLEY GORE
Belonging is a main feature of the romantic connection. Despite its political incorrectness, lovers still commonly inform one another, “You belong to me.” Of course, each of us is autonomous, and no one can actually belong to another person. But belonging in a psychological sense is very real. The term “belonging” has to do with “possession” and “being a natural part.” Belonging in its literal sense of possession is obviously inappropriate in any relationship, including a romantic one—possessing your partner implies ownership and control. However, in the sense of being accepted as a natural part, it makes sense. Belongingness here expresses the creation of something from nothing, as it is the result of this unique romantic bond. This belongingness is even felt strongly at the cutting of the connection, sometimes to the extent of an actual feeling of an amputated arm.
Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argue that the need to belong stems from the fundamental human need to form and maintain a minimum number of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships. Satisfying this need requires (a) frequent, positive interactions with the same individuals and (b) engaging in these interactions within a framework of long-term stable care and concern.1
The imperative for stable, caring interactions with a limited number of people can even override the excitement of changing romantic partners. For Baumeister and Leary, people are “naturally driven toward establishing and sustaining belongingness.” Hence, “people should generally be at least as reluctant to break social bonds as they are eager to form them in the first place.” They further argue that we are even hesitant to dissolve destructive relationships. The need to belong goes beyond the need for superficial social ties or sexual interactions; it is a drive for meaningful, profound bonding. Our very well-being seems to hinge on a sense of belongingness. Without it, we are less healthy and happy. People who lack belongingness suffer higher levels of mental and physical illness and are more prone to a broad range of behavioral problems, ranging from traffic accidents to criminality to suicide.2
You Belong to Me, Darling
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
THE BEATLES
As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.
COCO CHANEL
If our health and well-being depend on belonging, then the statement “You belong to me” is more than so much romantic nonsense. Such belongingness is actively created by lovers, through meaningful joint activities. This is the positive side—and there is a negative one as well—to the negative attitude toward a violation of belongingness, often expressed as jealousy. The fear of losing something that in some sense belongs to you is as significant as the hope of gaining some kind of meaningful togetherness.
And belongingness goes further in the journey toward romantic love. According to Baumeister and Leary, it fuels mutuality. People prefer relationships in which both parties give and receive care—mutuality strengthens the romantic relationship. Unequal involvement is a strong predictor of romantic breakup. When both partners are equally involved in the relationship, the likelihood of their future togetherness increases. Studies comparing people who received love without giving it and people who gave love without receiving it found that neither group was happy with the relationship. Baumeister and Leary conclude that apparently “love is highly satisfying and desirable only if it is mutual.” Hence, when love “arises without belongingness, as in unrequited love, the result is typically distress and disappointment.”3
The starring role belongingness plays in romantic love works well with the dialogical model of love. Love, for Krebs, is not about each partner serving as the object of the other; rather, love is what happens between the partners. Loving somebody involves the meaningful enjoyment of their togetherness, which is constituted by the sense of meaningful belongingness.4 Importantly, we are not talking about an unhealthy fusing of the lovers’ identities—quite the contrary. Fusion, a kind of conjoined-twins model, implies not merely a loss of freedom but also a loss of each partner’s identity. Neither loss works well with the meaningful belonging underlying profound love, which provides optimal circumstances for the personal flourishing of two independent individuals.
To sum up, it is not wrong for a lover to feel that the beloved belongs to her, so long as the belonging is limited to the psychological sphere and the sense of belongingness is mutual. Social life and romantic love come with a built-in need to belong, leaving room for jealousy to materialize. Doubts can arise, not about the importance of mutual belonging, but about how it should work itself out in reality. There is no romantic life without a sense of meaningful belonging, but such belonging comes with a price: it limits the number of romantic partners we can have—after all, belongingness involves commitments and the allocation of scarce resources. Profound lovers, however, tend to take this limitation in stride.
Love and Marriage
Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage . . . You can’t have one without the other.
FRANK SINATRA
Romantic love and personal fulfillment are newcomers to the drama of marriage: most marriages looked rather different for most of history. However, once romantic love and personal fulfillment arrived on the scene, they became crucial to both the length and the quality of marriages.
Types of Marriages
Being a couple is not merely about love and sex; it is also about mutual support, which is one of the most sublime expressions of love. Mutual support is not as colorful as flowers, not as mysterious as the glow of a candle, not as exciting as a personal letter and not as awesome as good sex; and yet, it is very distinct. It has a kind of romantic magic. Mutual support is the simple lackluster soldier of love. And the moment this simple
soldier goes AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave), perhaps it is time to consider the bitter end of love.
AVINOAM BEN-ZE’EV
For most of human history, marriage was a practical arrangement designed to enable the couple to meet their basic survival and social needs. Passionate love had precious little to do with it. Stephanie Coontz shows that this ideal emerged only about 200 years ago: “People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply. But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married.” She observes that “in many cultures, love has been seen as a desirable outcome of marriage, but not as a good reason for getting married in the first place.”5 Pascal Bruckner argues aptly that in the past, marriage was sacred, and love, if it existed at all, was a kind of bonus; now, love is sacred and marriage is secondary. Accordingly, the number of marriages has been declining, while divorces, cohabitation, and single-parent families are increasing. It seems that “love has triumphed over marriage, but now it is destroying it from inside.”6
To the aforementioned marriage types—pragmatic and loved-based—Eli Finkel adds a third type: personal fulfillment (“self-expressive”) marriage, which in his view developed in the United States around 1965. Finkel argues that during the pragmatic era, the primary functions of marriage revolved around the fulfillment of lower needs (such as water, food, and physical, psychological, and economic security); during the love-based era, it centered on midlevel needs (such as romantic love), while the self-expressive era emphasized higher needs (such as self-actualization).7
Among the various features that Finkel attributes to self-fulfilling marriages, the following are the most relevant: (a) reciprocal self-fulfillment, (b) authenticity, (c) time, which is crucial for development and survival, and (d) lack of shame about pursuing a good-enough marriage.
In self-fulfilling marriages, we do not merely want our spouses to meet our needs, but we want to meet their needs as well. Mutual support is crucial in love and marriage. In such marriages, our spouses develop deep understanding of our authentic selves. Accordingly, they often perceive us as better than we really are. Indeed, we are happiest when our partner views us with a blend of accuracy and idealization. As emphasized in this book, time plays a crucial role in thriving through marriage (and other committed relationships). Finally, there is no shame in pursuing a “good-enough marriage.” We may aim high in our ideal marriage, but we should have the ability to be satisfied with a less-than-perfect marriage. Constant comparison is lethal to thriving marriages.8
We shall discuss these claims further in the following pages, but one implication is already obvious: thriving committed relationships should enjoy a great deal of flexibility and balance.
Marital Quality over Time
I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.
MAX KAUFFMAN
My husband said it was him or the cat. I miss him sometimes.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Marital quality over the life course has been explained in two main ways: (1) a U-shaped course, with high quality in the early (honeymoon or preparental) years of marriage, declining during the child-rearing phase, and increasing in the later years when children leave the home; (2) a linear course, with marital quality declining over time. These two views of marital quality have been challenged by more recent studies using multiple trajectories over time. The aim of the standard growth curve modeling is to obtain a single average curve describing all married couples while accounting for the variance around the curve. In contrast, a group-based trajectory model considers major differences in marital quality as multiple distinct trajectories instead of a single mean curve.9
There is evidence that early in relationships partners develop attitudes concerning the relationships, and they carry these into the marriage. Similarly, it has been found that husbands and wives fit into distinct marital-happiness trajectory groups, characterized by either high/stable marital happiness over time or moderate-to-low happiness that declined over time. It was also found that most couples report moderate-to-high marital happiness over time. An additional interesting phenomenon, called “the honeymoon-as-ceiling effect,” refers to the findings that marital quality rarely increases beyond its initial point of marriage, or prior to it. This effect does not suggest that marriages cannot improve, but that they normally improve after a marital decline, and they rarely rebound to initial levels.10
The above findings are compatible with Finkel’s views on marriage in contemporary society. Finkel identifies two major trends in our society—the increased emphasis on fulfilling higher-level needs through marriage, and the reduced investment of time and other psychological resources in marriages. The negative consequence of these trends is that the proportion of spouses whose marriages fall short of expectations has grown. The positive result is that the benefits of having a marriage that meets our expectations have grown. Hence, Finkel claims, “as marriage has become both more fragile and more important, its quality—the extent to which we experience it as fulfilling—has become an increasingly important predictor of our overall happiness with life.”11 Such research supports the idea, central to this book, that long-term profound love is not only possible, but also common.
In romantic flourishing, it is not merely the connection between the partners that flourishes, but each partner flourishes as well. Personal flourishing does not contradict marital flourishing, but rather enhances it.
Perfect Love with an Imperfect Person
If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina
What happens when perfection isn’t good enough?
SCOTT WESTERFELD
We dream of finding the “perfect” person with whom to establish a “perfect” romantic relationship. More often than not, however, we are rudely awakened from such dreams. Toward understanding this situation, I shall here introduce some different possible aspects of the lover’s attitude toward the beloved: (a) the beloved can be considered perfect in the sense of being flawless or being the most suitable partner, (b) the lover can discover the beloved’s virtuous properties or bestow them upon the beloved, and (c) the beloved’s most significant properties can be either nonrelational or relational. The comparative approach is central to the attitude that the perfect beloved is flawless and that her perceived major cherished attributes are discovered and nonrelational. The uniqueness approach is central to the attitude that the beloved is the most suitable partner and her significant attributes are mainly relational and bestowed. An awareness of these differences is crucial for building a perfect (i.e., most suitable) relationship with an imperfect partner (i.e., a partner who is not flawless).
The Possibility of Perfect Love
I am far from perfect, so expecting a perfect partner would be unrealistic. Imperfection is perfect for me. Growth comes from imperfection!
JUNE BRADSELL
In romantic ideology, the only acceptable love is the “perfect” one. In a related respect, it has been claimed that love can conquer all, and that all you need is love. All of these notions have in common a disregard for reality, which is often not as good as it is in our brightest dreams. In this view, love is perfect (in the sense of having no faults), uncompromising (as being able to conquer all), and unconditional (as being all you need). This ideology, which insists on our search for the perfect partner and nothing short of it, shares with other ideologies the flaws of being simplistic and one-dimensional. In general, ideology allows little room for the intricacy necessary to cope with the complexities of life.12
Iddo Landau rejects the perfectionist notion that meaningful lives must show some perfection or excellence, some rare or difficult achievement. In this view, to be meaningful, one’s life must transcend the common and the mundane. For Landau, perfectionists are so busy searching for the perfect that they neglect to notice and find satisfaction in the good.13
Land
au’s view can be usefully applied to the romantic realm—but with caution. Let’s begin. Our trusty dictionary defines “perfect” as (a) flawless: being entirely without fault or defect; and (b) most suitable (or optimal): being as good or correct as it is possible to be, and completely appropriate for someone. While the first meaning focuses on the negative aspect, the second meaning centers on the positive one.
The search for the flawless person is an exercise in utter futility. However, looking for the most suitable person in the given circumstances, with whom you can build a “perfect” intimate connection, could yield a flourishing and harmonious partnership.
Discovering and Bestowing
Sometimes I look at my boyfriend and think . . . Damn, he is one lucky man.
UNKNOWN
Do we love our beloved because she is kind, wise, and beautiful? Perhaps we think that she is kind, wise, and beautiful because we love her. The first account claims that love essentially involves discovering (or detecting) the beloved’s objective attributes. In the second account, the value bestowed upon the beloved is the effect of our loving her. These two approaches have been described as the “appraisal account” and the “bestowal account.” But this is confusing, because both accounts involve appraisal. Less confusing, and more accurate, would be to say that the two accounts differ in their view of the main activity: discovering or bestowing.14
A simplistic version of the discovering and bestowing accounts raises doubts about the possibility of long-term romantic love. The first account raises the problem of the replaceability of the beloved. If love is indeed all about discovering the person with the best properties, then there is no reason to stay with your beloved if you can find a person with better properties. As it is easy to compare these properties in different people, in this view, one’s beloved would be in constant peril of being replaced by a person with better properties.
The Arc of Love Page 12