Psychological flexibility, which is essential to a flourishing life, is also crucial in the romantic realm. In no small measure, this is so because romantic flourishing presupposes general flourishing. And romantic flexibility echoes psychological flexibility: adapting to situational demands, shifting priorities, and maintaining a delicate balance between life, love, and sexual needs. Regarding romantic stability as well, flexibility, which involves bending some rigid rules, can prevent romantic relationships from breaking.
It is easier to draw clear romantic (and other) boundaries than to keep them. Although normative boundaries are supposed to guide our behavior, reality is rather complicated. In this regard, the distinction between guiding and specific rules is relevant. Guiding principles provide general directions, such as “Drive safely,” rather than specific rules, like “Don’t exceed 100 miles per hour.” What constitutes safe driving can vary considerably, depending on different factors, such as driver competence and road conditions.17 Similarly, what constitutes romantic flourishing varies considerably, depending on personal and contextual features. People use specific rules to help them cope with their chaotic romantic environment, but there is no golden rule to tell us what constitutes a flourishing, lasting romantic relationship.
Our romantic life is made more complicated by the many alternatives available to us. As we have discussed, these alternatives concern not merely finding a new partner, but also reunion with a former one. This widespread state, which prevails more among young adults, can be described as not together, but not completely broken up; it reflects the presence of dynamic trajectories involving “a heterogeneous and multidirectional array of transitions.”18 Since ex-lovers have a privileged place in our heart, and as it has become simpler to find them, their contribution to the flexible nature of our romantic environment is significant.
Extreme romantic flexibility, in which we try every such alternative, is contrary to the values relating to who we are. However, extreme rigidity is likely to break us. Bending, which is a kind of compromise, is the flexibility that enables what is less than ideal to be maintained and enhanced for a long time. People who refuse to compromise their ideals often end up abandoning them. It is indeed better to bend than to break. But too much bending can break us as well.
Friendship and Love: Is the Difference Worth the Effort?
Strong-ties make the world smaller, weak-ties make it bigger.
MARK GRANOVETTER
Love degrades the world from significant people, while friendship can fill it with such people.
AVINOAM BEN-ZE’EV
Love is a friendship set to music.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
No two ways about it: enduring romantic love is hard to achieve. This fact has resulted in the suggestion that friendship is more valuable than romantic love since (a) romantic love is more costly and risky than friendship, and (b) friendship is more profound than romantic love. Do we really want to “waste” our time and energy on uncertain and risky romantic love when we can more easily aim for profound friendship?
As we have seen, romantic love, as well as its basics, friendship and sexual interaction, contribute to our flourishing and happiness. Achieving friendship or sexual satisfaction is obviously easier than achieving lasting profound love, which depends upon a subtle balance between these relations and so much more. We might, indeed, have a greater chance of being happy if we seek merely friendship or sexual satisfaction rather than lasting romantic love. This would also allow us to avoid the frequent failures and unhappiness associated with attaining enduring romantic love.
It can also be argued that the major elements responsible for long-term love are those related to friendship and not to romantic love.19 Moreover, exclusivity, which is central in romantic love (mainly because of its sexual aspect), but not in friendship, is a superficial demand, limiting our diversity and complexity.
There is a grain of truth in these ideas. Sometimes, we need to minimize losses and maximize sure gains. It is important to remember, though, that romantic love is one of the most sublime of human experiences. Moreover, others’ success in achieving romantic love can create in us a yearning for it and sadness about lacking it. It is very difficult to exclude ourselves from the romantic realm, as the desire to achieve such love is built into the human system.
Sometimes, we are forced to give up certain precious experiences. However, we should not make our second-best our first choice. We should think hard before making such surrender permanent policy. Indeed, people who have given up romantic love would gladly embrace it if it walked through their door. While they have given up hope of achieving it, they have not abandoned it as an ideal. Nonetheless, these individuals may not actively search for this love, as such a search has a price and risks they are not willing to take.
There is also some truth to the idea that exclusivity is superficial in nature, as it prevents diversity and decreases the level of complexity. Once again, the dilemma boils down to the issue of optimal balance. No doubt, romantic profundity requires a certain preferential attitude. Like other emotions, romantic love is by nature discriminative; hence, we need to restrict our flexibility. This is also the case in friendship—we cannot have, as people claim concerning Facebook, thousands of close friends. Some sense of restriction applies here as well. Since romantic love is a more comprehensive and complex attitude than friendship, involving a greater investment of effort, time, and other resources, exclusiveness should be even more restricted.
We do not have to choose between love and friendship. Rather, we should choose between the mere experience of friendship and an experience that includes both friendship and romance. Love is indeed the music, or the dance, added to profound friendship.
Is achieving profound love worth the heartache? Well, since it can make life more meaningful, and often more blissful, the answer is yes. Giving up music is a too painful surrender. As Nietzsche said, “Without music life would be a mistake.” So, I believe, with love.
Concluding Remarks
True happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers, in establishing a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will. Then only, when all its forces are employed, will the soul be at rest and man will find himself in his true position.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, Emile, or On Education
We have reached our destination: we have arrived at long-term profound love. And, as any traveler will tell you, the glance backward makes everything clearer. In our own trip, we saw many phenomena whose coexistence in romantic relationships seems nothing short of paradoxical: mild and wild intensity, sensitivity and indifference, distance and closeness, calmness and excitement, nurturing and preventing, as well as flexibility and stability. These apparent paradoxes stem from our desire to draw one comprehensive, consistent, intellectual picture for all people, all of the time. However, we now know better: the dynamism and partiality of the emotional and romantic realms mean that emotional and romantic experiences can be radically mixed. And, along with Joni Mitchell, we can “look at love from both sides now,” and profound love can look like passion over time.
To flourish in life, we need to know what we are dealing with. Flourishing in love is no different. Intense love expresses the passion and excitement that we find at the beginning of romantic relationships, but it is time that ultimately allows for the blossoming of profound love. Over time, we can cultivate our romantic responsivity and make space in the garden for romantic compromise, which tends to feel less compromising as profound love grows.
Identity fusion in the context of love is courting disaster. Healthy romantic relationships leave lots of room for growth. Intrinsic activities are essential to the good life, and it is important to find a partner who supports your personal fulfillment. Excitement feels fabulous, but to focus only on excitement is to lose out on the benefits of a deeper, dynamic calmness that lends itself to profound love.
As we have learned, the “ideal” romantic
relationship is one that helps both partners flourish. Different people and different circumstances call for different decisions to make that happen. If there is any recipe at all, it would start with an optimal balance. Today’s romantic reality combines great diversity and restricted flexibility. While we cannot romantically indulge in everything we want and still stay healthy, we also do not need to go on a hunger strike. Adopting a moderate diet never killed anyone.
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Afterword: Fresh Eggs, Aging Wine, and Profound Love
I will raise a glass to both fresh and profound love tonight!
A MARRIED WOMAN
Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye; that’s all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The beneficial role of wine in creating romantic atmosphere is obvious. Does this make aging wine and aging love similar?
Aging Wine and Aging Love
While I want to have wine in small doses, leaving the yearning for more, in love I am more demanding, wishing for it in big doses.
A DIVORCED WOMAN
My heart says chocolate and wine, but my jeans say, for the love of God, woman, eat a salad.
UNKNOWN
Love and wine. That sounds better than love and eggs, right? Especially considering the common notion that wine gets better with time. The reader will not be surprised, having by now come full circle in our trek, that things are just not that simple.
I believe that love and wine have a similar potential to get better over time. Unlike most other consumable goods, wine has the potential to improve in quality over time. The ratio of sugars, acids, and phenolics (most notably tannins) to water is pivotal to how well a wine will age. The less water in the grapes prior to harvesting, the more likely the resulting wine will have some aging potential. Grape variety, climate, vintage, viticultural practice, storage, and bottling factors are relevant as well.1
So many variables go into wine improving with age. Likewise, and more so, many variables go into love improving with age. Lasting, enduring love is forged and shaped by personal and contextual factors, and especially those relating to the interactions between the lovers. We have learned that neither wine nor romance is a closed system: both are influenced by a multitude of factors that can either enhance or degrade their quality. In the case of love, greater weight is attributed to factors that are under the individual’s control; hence, time can be kinder to love than to wine. Thus, while experts estimate that merely 5–10 percent of wine improves after one year, and only 1 percent improves after five to ten years, the success rate of romantic aging is much higher—according to one study, about one-third of married couples are still in love after thirty years.2 It seems that wine, more than profound love, is susceptible to the polluting impact of external factors—a major reason being our ability to develop intrinsically meaningful activities, which decrease the weight of external polluting factors.
Wine and romantic love might well go together like the “horse and carriage” of song fame. Thus, Madeline Puckette suggests that we love wine because it’s an acquired taste, it has zillions of aromas and flavors, and no matter how deep you go, there’s more to know.3 These claims are even truer in the case of romantic love: we love loving because it provides an extra, acquired taste, it has zillions of aromas and flavors, and no matter how deep you go, there’s more to experience and acquire. And as life is too short to drink bad wine (it is said), so too is life too short to waste on meaningless, bad romantic relationships.
To paraphrase Napoleon Bonaparte, who said that “nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin,” we can say that nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through profound love.
If You Like Piña Coladas
Wine, love, and sex are natural bedfellows. The offer of a glass of wine is frequently a prologue to a sexual or romantic relationship that can break everyday boredom. In the amusing song “Escape,” by Rupert Holmes, the protagonist says that he was tired of his long-beloved lady; together they both were like a worn-out recording of a favorite song. One night he saw in the personal column of a newspaper a letter from a woman inviting a man who likes Piña Coladas, getting caught in the rain, and making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape to meet her.4 The man replies to the ad, sets up a meeting place, and prepares to escape. And . . . lo and behold! Who should enter the bar but his very own lady, who seeks just what he desires—to make love at midnight in the dunes of the cape.
This wonderful song perfectly expresses the message of this book—we tire of our beloved partner, been together too long, like a worn-out recording, of a favorite song; however, it is still our favorite song, which we are ready to listen to again and again. True, the song is not as thrilling as it was on first hearing. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t want to make love with her or him at midnight in the dunes of the cape. And making such an escape with your very own partner can yield a surprisingly rich bouquet of romantic fragrance.
Back to Eggs
Love and eggs taste best when they are fresh.
RUSSIAN PROVERB (REVISED)
When it comes to eggs, we look for two things—taste and nutritional value. And it is when eggs are fresh that these are at their peak. Life gets more complicated when love is at stake. The intensity of excitement (the “taste”) is strongest when love is fresh, but the profundity of the connection (the “nutritional value”) is often best when love is mature. While the old saying has it that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” I believe that romantic love should never be cold. It does not need to be served at the boiling point, however; warm is very good as well.
In this book, we have traversed the highways and byways of love. The journey has cast doubt on the prevailing popular attempts to make love as fresh as it was at its very beginning. When freshness is foremost, we are setting ourselves up to lose the battle for long-lasting profound love before the war has begun, as there will always be fresher and tastier occasional romantic affairs than the present one.
I am not the kind of romantic nutritionist who advises giving up enjoyable but non-nutritious food while promising that, ultimately, we will feel better without it. I do not recommend giving up intense, wild love—on the contrary, in my view, we are witnessing a renaissance of romantic intensity and excitement, and this is a positive development. However, these new circumstances have disturbed the balance between intensity and profundity to the extent that romantic profundity is becoming harder and harder to achieve.
When the bond between partners is nourishing, and lovers bring out the best in each other, they become calmer, happier, and healthier. In this way, they discover new tastes in their ongoing romantic relationships. People who live in a romantic environment that helps them flourish continue to surprise themselves and their partners, making each other the sunshine of their life.
Acknowledgments
Many people helped to bring this book to its present form. I am profoundly grateful to each of them. Naturally, I can mention here only a few of them. For her profound insights, I am especially thankful to Angelika Krebs, with whom I coauthored an article on the role of time in love that laid the groundwork for this book. I am also thankful to Luke Brunning, with whom I wrote an article on emotional complexity, a section of which is featured in this book. Mollie Teitelbaum, Talia Morag, and Daniel Arel read the whole manuscript and raised many thought-provoking issues, which considerably improved the book’s quality. Glendyr Sacks, Sara Tropper, and Marian Rogers, my superb linguistic editors, transformed my thoughts not merely into proper English but into powerful and elegant prose. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Branch Dyson, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, for continuous support and advice. I had conversations that significantly advanced my ideas with Tom Angier, Ruth Ben-Ze’ev, Dikla Falk, Rick Furtak, Inbar Gazit, Amihud Gilead, Jacob Gray, Lirit Gruber, Masha Halevi, Avraham Kenan, Iddo Landau, Shira Lightsdorf-Shkedy, Ari
el Meirav, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Orit Shavit, Saul Smilansky, and Daniel Statman, to note a few among many. Two anonymous reviewers of University of Chicago Press provided exceptionally helpful comments. Last, but by no means least, I wish to thank the many individuals who have generously shared with me their own personal romantic experiences. Excerpts from some of these conversations are included in this book.
Some discussions in the book were previously published in a somewhat different manner in my blog on love in Psychology Today.
All of the stories, anecdotes, and quotations from anonymous people are genuine; I did not invent any of them (of course, some of these individuals have received fictional names). While I tend to use heteronormative language out of convention, I believe that important components of romantic relationships are universal. Understanding what is essential for love to flourish is relevant for any couple. I sometimes discuss perspectives in love that are more common for men, or for women, so in relation to these aspects, I expect that there are some unique considerations for lesbian, gay, and queer relationships that I do not cover in this book. However, I mostly consider the complexity and uniqueness of human beings and the profound, loving connections they can develop together. Specific sexual orientation is not at the center of this endeavor.
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