Last update: December 10, 2015
"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person"
– Mignon McLaughlin –
There are couples who arouse admiration, they know how to fall in love more every day and stay together. They seem able to overcome changes and crises without separating and, above all, keeping their love intact.
These are rare cases in a society where relationships are unlikely to last more than 7 years and one is often the victim of a process of erosion of love which usually results in conflicts and separations.
What is the secret of couples that last a lifetime?
When we start a new love story, we always hope it's "the definitive one", which lasts a lifetime, just as dictated by the modern stereotype.
Often, however, after a while, we begin to wonder how it is possible that, even if we try our best, love ends.
Emotional suffering and problems in the couple are one of the most frequent reasons for existential malaise.
However, to understand why a couple does not stand the test of time, it is easier to focus on how the relationship works when it is stable, satisfying and lasting, rather than looking for the causes of the separation.
There is no common pattern of love that lasts a lifetime. However, lasting couples share the ability to deal with each other's changes and critical events which, inevitably, mark the existence of one or both members of the couple.
A critical event can be, for example, the difficulties of entering the world of work or the death of a very dear person, but even positive events can be decisive for the balance of the couple: professional success, marriage or children.
In all these cases, our mind tries to resist the changes and struggles to adapt to the new circumstances.
It is for this reason that we can say with certainty that couples that last have in common a quality that distinguishes them from others: couple resilience.
What is couple resilience?
If a person's resilience is their ability to overcome and draw strength from hostile or stressful circumstances, couple resilience is defined as the shared ability to react to changes with flexibility and dynamism.
It is an emerging quality of the couple, not of the individual, and derives from the specific way in which the individual interacts.
Sometimes, low resilient people can have very long lasting relationships and, conversely, resilient people become extremely fragile within a couple relationship.
Characteristics of couples that last
- They share values: a resilient couple possesses, first of all, a strong "interpenetration", agrees on the priority to be given to sex, money, work, family, friendships, etc.
One is willing to accept the different opinions of the other without turning them into a matter of state.
It is rare that "stainless couples" set limits and rules to put a stop to the individual freedom of the partner.
- Freedom and personal development: the resilient couple it allows itself ample room for freedom, stimulating and supporting personal development of both partners.
What is striking about stable couples is the clear division of roles which is not a consequence of a unilateral decision, but rather spontaneous, agreed and, above all, flexible.
- High family independence: Resilient couples form a family and limit the interference of parents and relatives, while always keeping them an integral part of the family.
Unstable couples, on the other hand, tend to maintain a union with their parents that touches the limit of symbiosis.
- Sex and passion: Resilient couples improve their sex life over time and know how to manage the moments in which, physiologically, there can be a loss of libido.
In a resilient couple, there is always room for sex. In a declining couple, on the other hand, sex is done badly and without passion, even without pleasure for the moment.
Although sexual activity tends to decrease with age, lasting couples react by reducing the frequency of intercourse, but favoring their intensity and quality in terms of mutual satisfaction.
Passion is a fundamental ingredient, even if not sufficient, of the couple's resilience: the desire, the sensation of beauty, of epidermal “feeling” that persists despite the crisis and the passing years.
Resilience, love's long life elixir, it is not a pill that can be swallowed whenever needed, nor a remedy for couples in crisis.
It is the result of a genuine and persistent compromise based on mutual respect and being aware of the fact that being together is an option that is renewed every day.
