Love

We spend so much time thinking about how to find love. Far less about what it takes to keep it.

We are given an extraordinary number of ideas about love before we have much experience of it. Find the one. Trust your feelings. When it's right, you'll know. We grow up on stories in which getting together is the ending, when in real life it is really only the beginning. Falling in love can feel wonderfully easy. Staying in love with another complicated human being through work, children, money, sex, family, disappointment, ageing and the general relentlessness of ordinary life is something else altogether. The person who once made your heart race can, ten years later, make you furious simply by loading the dishwasher ‘incorrectly’. That doesn't necessarily mean the love has gone. Often it has become buried beneath all the other things that have happened between you.

How did we get here?

Most couples don't wake up one morning suddenly disconnected. It happens slowly. There are conversations that don't quite get resolved, disappointments that aren't talked about and small hurts that accumulate. Perhaps one person feels they are always asking for more and the other feels that whatever they do is never enough. Sex can become less frequent. Affection may become less natural. You stop being curious about each other because you think you already know what the other person is going to say.

Eventually, you can find yourselves having an argument about something completely ordinary that somehow contains the weight of the entire relationship. It isn't really about whose turn it was to empty the dishwasher. It is about whether you notice me. Whether I matter to you. Whether I can rely on you. Whether you still want me.

This is one of the things I find so interesting about relationships. Underneath a lot of conflict are very human questions and anxieties about whether we are loved, valued, safe and important to the person we have chosen.

The person you love isn't actually the enemy

When couples become stuck in conflict, they can begin to experience each other as the problem. You become defensive before your partner has finished speaking because you already know where this is going. They become louder because they don't feel heard. You withdraw because the conversation feels impossible. They follow because your withdrawal feels like rejection. Before long, both people are reacting to the other's reaction and neither feels understood. The pattern becomes the problem, but from inside it, it can feel very personal.

Couples therapy can slow this down enough for us to see what is actually happening. The criticism may be an attempt to say I miss you. The anger may be covering hurt. The person who shuts down may not be indifferent at all, but overwhelmed and unsure how to respond without making things worse.

This doesn't mean excusing behaviour that hurts us. It means becoming curious about what sits underneath it. When we can begin to see the vulnerability behind some of our partner's more frustrating ways of communicating, they can start to look less like the opposition and more like the person we fell in love with who is also struggling to get something important across.

We bring much more than ourselves into a relationship

None of us arrives in love as a blank page. We bring everything that came before us. We bring the families we grew up in, the relationships we watched, the affection we received or didn't receive and everything we learnt about arguments, closeness, trust and vulnerability. We bring old heartbreaks, insecurities and ways of protecting ourselves that may have made perfect sense once but cause problems now. One person may have learnt that when things become difficult you talk until they are resolved. The other may have grown up in a family where conflict meant danger and the safest thing was to disappear until everybody calmed down. Put those two people together and you have the beginnings of a very familiar dance. The more one pursues, the more the other retreats. The more they retreat, the harder the first person tries to reach them. Both can end up feeling unloved when, in fact, both may be trying desperately to protect the relationship in the only way they know how. Understanding where these responses come from doesn't magically stop them, but it can soften something. Instead of asking what is wrong with you? we can begin to wonder what happens to you here? That is a very different conversation.

Love needs two whole people

There is a romantic idea that finding the right person will somehow complete us. It sounds lovely, but it puts an enormous amount of pressure on another human being. A partner cannot permanently reassure us that we are good enough, make us feel worthwhile or take responsibility for every uncomfortable feeling we have. Healthy relationships need closeness, but they also need two people who can increasingly understand themselves, communicate what they need and soothe some of their own fears rather than asking the relationship to do all of it for them.

Self worth matters enormously in love. When we don't feel secure in ourselves, an unanswered message can feel like rejection, a partner wanting time alone can feel like abandonment and criticism can feel like proof that we aren't lovable. We may need constant reassurance or, conversely, avoid showing how much we need anybody at all. Knowing yourself better doesn't make you completely self sufficient, nor should it. We all need reassurance, affection and care. It simply means you can come to the relationship more fully as yourself, rather than asking your partner to continually tell you who you are.

What happens to sex and affection?

For many couples, the loss of physical closeness is the moment they begin to realise something has changed. Sex becomes infrequent or disappears altogether. Kissing becomes a quick goodbye in the morning. You can't remember the last time you touched each other without it being a prelude to something else. It can be tempting to treat sex as a separate problem, but intimacy rarely exists in isolation from the rest of the relationship. Resentment doesn't disappear when you get into bed, neither does exhaustion, feeling unappreciated, parenthood, menopause, stress or the experience of spending all day managing a household together.

Sometimes couples still love each other deeply but have stopped feeling like lovers. Reconnecting isn't necessarily about scheduling more sex. It can begin much earlier, with warmth, interest, affection, humour and feeling seen again. Desire tends to struggle when every interaction has become practical or loaded with tension. Making room for the couple underneath the administration of life can matter more than we realise.

Couples therapy doesn't sound very romantic

Admittedly, booking couples therapy isn't most people's idea of romance. It can sound like hard work, awkward conversations and an hour spent discussing all the things you've become extremely skilled at avoiding. But there is something hopeful about two people saying this matters enough to us to look at it.

Couples therapy isn't about deciding who is right or appointing somebody to referee the argument. It is about understanding what happens between you and what each of you brings to that dynamic. It gives both people the opportunity to speak and, perhaps more importantly, to hear each other differently. Sometimes the work is about repairing trust after infidelity or betrayal. Sometimes it is about communication, sex, parenting, resentment or simply finding each other again after years of putting everything else first. And sometimes couples come because they aren't sure whether they should remain together at all. The shared goal doesn't always have to be staying together at any cost. It is about understanding the relationship more clearly and working towards what is right for the people in it.

Perhaps lasting love looks different

Love at twenty years together probably shouldn't feel exactly like love at six months. Something would be rather strange if it did. Relationships change because we change and the challenge is allowing the relationship to change with us rather than assuming that difference means something has gone wrong.

Lasting love may be less about maintaining that first rush of falling in love and more about continuing to find each other as life changes around you. It is being able to repair after you've hurt each other, to laugh together, to remain curious and to say what you need before resentment has to say it for you. It also requires us to look at ourselves, which is perhaps the less glamorous part. To recognise the ways we can be difficult. To notice when an old wound is speaking. To admit when we are wrong. To risk saying that hurt me rather than finding a cleverer way to hurt the other person back. There is vulnerability in allowing another person to really know us, including the bits we don't particularly like ourselves. But there can also be enormous intimacy in discovering that we can be known imperfectly and loved anyway.

Perhaps true love isn't finding somebody with whom everything is effortless. It is two imperfect people learning how to listen, repair, grow and keep turning towards one another, even after they have discovered exactly how annoying the other one can be.