Why Modern Love Relationships Are So Hard

Blame it on habits.

Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano

Key points

• The biology that brings us together doesn’t keep us together.
• The decline of the extended family in close proximity puts unforeseen strain on modern couples.
• Love tends to fade as relationships devolve into routine, where habits dominate.
• Soaring love transcends the limits of emotional habits.

Maintaining love relationships is so hard because falling in love is so easy. Powerful hormones and neurotransmitters heighten our senses, activate primal drives, and lower our defenses; to a large extent they make us fall in love. Despite the enormous complications of modern relationships, the human brain really wants to love.

Alas, the biology that brings us together doesn’t keep us together. In fact, biology makes it difficult to live together in happiness for more than a few years. That’s probably because the biology of emotional bonding developed at a time when humans were tribal, not pair-bonded. Maintaining communal connection was more important to survival than sustaining intimate connection. The focus of two individuals on each other was to reproduce, not to build a life together as we now desire.

What's more, emotions are stimulated by change, either in the environment or internally—thoughts, imagination, or sensations. When everything is the same—that is, familiar—emotion subsides. That’s how the bad gets bearable: People adjust to prison, deprivation, and discomfort once those horrific conditions become the norm. But it’s also how the good gets boring, once it becomes the norm.

Of course biology is only part of the story. Social and cultural factors that at one time helped sustain long-term relationships have become a hindrance to them. For instance, marrying for love is relatively recent in human history. Up until a couple hundred years ago, marriage was entirely a political, social, or familial arrangement. A higher authority would commit you to a union with a person you hardly knew. Sometimes you wouldn’t even see your betrothed until the wedding ceremony. (“Lifting the veil” was often the first time the partners were face to face. Many people retain that tradition, along with not allowing the groom to see the bride on their wedding day, even when they’ve been living together for a few years.) So in the past, two people with very low levels of interest, trust, compassion, and love for each other agreed to form a union and build a life together. From such a low emotional starting point, there’s nowhere to go but up.

In modern times, we start from very high levels of interest, trust, compassion, and love—unsustainable levels given the focus and emotional energy they consume. For us, there’s nowhere to go but down.

As the bond between them fades, the modern couple begins to experience guilt, shame, and anxiety. The loss of infatuation is typically the first crisis of love relationships, occurring by the second year of living together. If couples do not cope with this crisis in the more profound areas of their brains—the adult brain—their guilt, shame, and anxiety turn into resentment, anger, and, eventually, contempt, and disgust.

Devastating pressure on long-term love relationships emerged from the precipitous decline of the extended family. As recently as a couple generations ago, the nuclear family—two parents and children living alone together—was a rarity. Typically, grandma was upstairs, Aunt Sally was in the basement, and Uncle Fred was in the spare room. If they weren’t under the same roof, they were next door or across the street. Extended families afforded couples much needed support with children and finances. Nearly as important, members of the extended family were often emotional confidants for beleaguered spouses. Unlike their predecessors, couples trying to maintain intimate relationships now are quite on their own.

Habit vs. Love

Habits get in the way of love. The brain strings together a series of conditioned responses to forge habits, which are behaviors that run on autopilot—things we do without thinking. Much of what we do, we do by habit. More pointedly, habits rule under stress, when the mental resources required for consciously decided behaviors are taxed. The extensive training for stressful jobs—from military service to air traffic control—is necessary to overcome the dominance of conditioned responses and habits under stress.

The brain’s default to past habits when things get tough presents a major problem in sustaining feelings of love, interest, compassion, and trust. Most of our emotional responses have been conditioned and shaped into habits before the profound part of the brain—the upper prefrontal cortex—is fully myelinated (on line). Without the hormones and neurotransmitters of love overriding those habits (as they do when falling in love), we make the same self-centered mistakes again and again. Under stress, the less sophisticated part of the brain overrides the ability to invoke most of what we’ve learned about love and life.

Many of the habits activated under stress—blaming, yelling, stonewalling, devaluing loved ones—violate our deeper values­­. To escape the guilt, shame, and anxiety that are unavoidable in violating deeper values, we employ the prefrontal cortex to justify, rather than regulate toddler-like responses. Experience tells us that justified behavior is likely to be repeated. When partners justify devaluing each other, the relationship can only degenerate over time.

Soaring Love

Soaring love transcends the limits of emotional habits and helps us become the most empowered and humane partners we can be. Soaring love builds a relationship based on desire rather than emotional need, on support rather than demands, on enduring values, rather than temporary feelings.

Soaring love nurtures individual growth and relationship harmony, much as musicians help each other in a duet. They practice their own instruments as much as necessary to perform well as a unit. Only then do they fit their individual resonances together to accomplish something greater than they can on their own—harmony. Amid the sometimes raucous noise of modern living, soaring love reveals an ever so faint echo of what it means to be humane.