We've asked romantic love to do something it was never designed to do: sustain a lifelong partnership through financial stress, child-rearing, career changes, and the slow erosion of novelty. For most of human history, marriage was a practical arrangement. Romance, when it bloomed, was a pleasant bonus. Now we've flipped the script entirely, and we're surprised when relationships buckle under expectations that would have seemed absurd to our great-grandparents.
Marriage Was an Economic Alliance, Not a Love Story
Stephanie Coontz's research in "Marriage, a History" reveals that marrying for love didn't become widespread in Western culture until the late 18th century. Before that, marriage was about forming alliances between families, securing labor for farms, and producing legitimate heirs. The ancient Greeks had a word for the kind of love between spouses—pragma—which translates roughly to practical love or longstanding duty.
Medieval families arranged marriages like modern corporations negotiate mergers. Love might grow over time, sure, but most people didn't expect the butterflies to come first.
We've Piled Every Emotional Need onto One Person
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We expect our spouse to be our best friend, our most passionate lover, our career counselor, our co-parent, our travel companion, our emotional therapist, and our intellectual equal. That's a lot. In earlier generations, these needs were distributed across extended family, close-knit communities, and social institutions that barely exist anymore.
Your grandmother probably didn't expect your grandfather to fulfill her need for deep friendship or interesting conversation; she had sisters, neighbors, and a church group for that. The marriage just needed to be stable and functional. Psychologist Eli Finkel describes this as the "all-or-nothing marriage" in his research on contemporary relationships.
Passion Fades Because Biology Designed It That Way
Anthropologist Helen Fisher's research on the brain chemistry of love shows that the intense, obsessive feelings of early romance typically last 12 to 18 months, maybe extending to three years max. Those elevated dopamine and norepinephrine levels eventually drop, and that’s completely normal.
That chemical dip is biology doing exactly what it was designed to do: get humans together long enough to reproduce, then calm down so we can actually focus on keeping offspring alive. We've mistaken this temporary neurochemical state for the standard that a marriage should maintain for decades. When it doesn't—and it can't—we assume something's broken.
What Actually Sustains Marriage Has Nothing to Do with Romance
Relationship researcher John Gottman spent decades studying couples in his lab, tracking which ones stayed together. He found that successful marriages weren't the most passionate. They were the ones where partners treated each other with respect during conflicts, maintained friendship and fondness, and turned toward each other instead of away during small daily moments.
The things that actually matter are surprisingly small, like remembering that your spouse likes their coffee with cream or asking about their stressful meeting. Laughing at the same dumb joke you've shared for twenty years isn’t particularly romantic, but it acts as a glue that keeps you together.
The Pursuit of Romance Actually Damages Partnership
When we believe marriage should feel like courtship forever, we interpret normal partnership dynamics as signs of failure. The comfortable silence becomes "we have nothing to talk about anymore." The predictable routine becomes "we're stuck in a rut." The shift from constant physical affection to occasional, scheduled intimacy becomes "the spark is gone."
We've medicalized ordinary relationship development, treating the natural progression from limerence to companionate love as if it's an affliction requiring intervention. Sometimes the relationship isn't dying; you're just married.
