Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [89]
The problem with relying on our passion to guide us is that a marriage has to stand the test of time to be successful. Some people may feel relieved when they get divorced, but I don’t think anyone has ever counted it as a success. To base a long-term relationship on short-term chemistry alone is a little like buying a car based on how it’s going to run for the first one hundred miles.
This isn’t a marital problem. It’s a human problem. We all experience this waning of desire in countless ways. The excitement of anticipation gives way to the dullness of routine. If you have ever bought a new car or started a new job, you have experienced this sensation. This isn’t such a big deal when it comes to a car purchase. If you have the money, it’s a relatively simple matter to get a new car. But it is a huge deal when it comes to marriage. The funny thing about the waning of our desires is that even though all of us have gone through this multiple times, studies show that we forget about it each and every time. We also do a terrible job of predicting how we will feel in the future, always expecting that it will be more like that present than it is. You can imagine how potentially destructive these habits of mind are for a couple who marries while still infatuated with each other.
If you are one of those people who simply refuse to accept this and want your passion to burn as brightly after forty years as it does after one day, there is one possible solution—more sex. According to several experiments, animals show less habituation to positive feelings when given oxytocin, which is released during sex. It’s not clear how much sexual activity it will take to hold habituation at bay, but I invite any energetic readers to give it their best shot. For the rest of us, it’s time to come to terms once again with the cost of the romantic story line.
BEWARE EXPECTATIONS, PART II
Perhaps the biggest single problem for many married couples today is the enormous expectations that are routinely loaded onto marriage by both the culture at large and the couples themselves. Just think of the various social roles that have been conflated into the marital relationship—best friend, closest kin relationship, sexual playmate, and economic partner to name just a few. So many extravagant hopes are now built into marriage that some researchers have dubbed it “the cult of the couple”—a cult that can even prove fatal. According to research, men who murder their wives are especially strong believers in the idea of finding a soul mate and practicing strict monogamy. Traditionally, though, this was not the case. Your wife or husband was just that, and people did not expect their partners to perform numerous other roles, such as best friend.
Of course, traditionally, marriage itself was based on a number of considerations of which love was only one. A whole array of forces—economic, religious, and societal—buttressed the commitment between a man and a woman, but that has changed. Today, for example, fewer women are having children, and more women are economically independent than ever before. In many ways, that’s a wonderful development. But it means that even the economic and parental bonds that used to tie a husband and wife together are disappearing. As these traditional ties disappear, the only thing left holding the relationship together is love, and that is a very fragile reed on which to rest so much weight. With all of those other bonds stripped away, marriage is dependent solely on personal fulfillment—or, to put a fig leaf on it, love. But this shift has only worsened the problem. The more committed we become to the narrow idea that marriage should be the source of most of our happiness, the more dissatisfied we inevitably become with the relationship itself. In the early 1970s, the percentage of men who described their marriage as “very happy” was 70 percent. By the mid-1990s, that number had fallen to 64 percent. Women have experienced the same drop, the number of “very happy” falling