What Really Makes or Breaks Romantic Partnerships?

If you’re looking for the key to sustainable partnerships, you'll find lots of answers, but here's one that often gets overlooked, perhaps because it’s a little unromantic:

Relationships work when both parties want or need them. They fail when they don't. When we want or need them – for benefits gained or costs avoided – we do what it takes to make them work. It’s not magic. It’s practical. It’s even practical to be romantic when you need to be.

The world has changed a lot in recent decades. The hormonal/social/moral/economic imperative to date and partner is getting the update but perhaps not fast enough to keep pace. Here are a few changes:

• So many new and exciting things to do with our free time.
• So much greater potential for partners’ interests to diverge over time.
• So much easy free access to porn and virtual romance (e.g., romantic movies).
• So much more freedom to try and quit relationships.
• So many more people are still or back on the dating scene late in life.

This may be a time of scarcity of devoted, dependable partners, but it’s not a time of scarcity.

I may be weird, broken, unmanly, or jaded – but here's what happened to me. I ran through a lifetime or two's supply of appetite for and experience with sex-love-romance.

I don’t think I was that exceptional. In my generation, sex-love-romance was widely available. I was deep into it. I was an avid dater and partner until I wasn’t.

It's possible to run out of enthusiasm for anything thrilling. Just imagine anything else you crave – steak, ice cream, drugs, blockbuster movies. Imagine how enthusiastic you'd be about them after enjoying an unlimited supply of any of these spectacular treats. If you didn't die from them first, your lust would taper off. You might not notice or admit that you're tired of them. There are habits of enthusiasm that outlast the enthusiasm.

What I'm saying here is irrelevant for anyone in a working, sustainable relationship or anyone at any age who really hasn't had their fill. I know a few 80+-year-olds who still show great enthusiasm for sex-love-romance. To you, I say Mazel Tov! Partnership is a perfectly wonderful use of one’s discretionary time if one chooses it.

But I also meet people who don't seem to realize that they’ve had enough, have become more interested in other things, and are just going through the motions. They don't really want or need a relationship anymore, but they're still seeking one by force of habit.

I was like that, and in retrospect, it was neither wise nor kind. I'd enter into partnerships that wouldn’t work. Why? Many detailed reasons, plenty of them my fault, but I’d say my biggest fault was that I didn’t admit to myself that I neither wanted nor needed a relationship enough to make it work.

It’s wasteful and unkind to be out looking for that special one when you’re done and don’t really want or need one. Indeed, I think keeping up appearances is a lot of what drove me to it. It wasn't fair to do.

If you are still looking for a partner, don’t date people like I was, acting hungry when I wasn’t. Relationships with folks like I was don’t work.

Folks like me make decent friends. Less titillation but no distracting sex-love-romance agendas. Without those agendas hanging over us, we can afford to be honest pals.

When I mention my retirement from sex-love-romance, some people offer this 65-year-old author encouragement. They say, “It's never too late to fall in love.” That’s true. It’s never too late if one wants or needs it. It’s not even too late to start wanting or needing it again.

Still, I think it's also important to remember how late it is by traditional standards. Picture our great grandparents chasing sex-love-romance when they were 65. They weren't. This business of perpetuating the flame past 50 is relatively new. When I declare that I'm retired, a reasonable response is, "We assumed as much, old codger. TMI!"

Relationships Essential Reads

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5 Ways to Tell if You, and Your Relationship, Will Grow Over Time

Whatever your age, if you're having trouble finding the one or staying in relationships, it may be worth reflecting on how strong your drive really is to be partnered and what's behind that drive. Is it a genuine desire or need, or a force of habit and social pressure? You might find that you say you want and need partnership more than you really do.

I suspect some people feel like they need a partner because they haven't yet gotten comfortable with solitude. There's fear of intimacy, but there's also fear of solitude. If you can overcome both, you expand your options and become freer to decide which option really suits you in your current state.