What Kind of Love Makes a Relationship Last?

Susan Brink of the Los Angeles Times decided to look past the initial period of infatuation to see what characteristics were consistent with a long-term relationship. It turns out a key to success is a state called "companionate" love. If you think of a relationship as having varying degrees of three components--intimacy, commitment, and passion--then companionate love is one that possesses strong intimacy and commitment but where the passion as dissipated. Notwithstanding the self-help books and coaches who promise to get passion back into your relationship, research shows that strong long-term relationships can exist without it.

Another interesting factoid is that when couples aren't on the path to developing something they think will last in the long-term they call it quits rather quickly. Brink noted that about a third of failed marriages happen after just four years of marriage.

Here were her observations on relationships that endured:

• Couples who stay together kid themselves a bit. For example, they typically underestimate their partners' interest in others. "If you show people pictures of attractive men and women and ask how their partner will look at this person, they underestimate the person's attractiveness to their partner," says Gian Gonzaga, senior research scientist at eHarmony Labs. "It turns out that's actually good because we're not constantly worrying and obsessing."

• Long-term couples don't update their images of each other. "People stick with their initial view," Gonzaga says. "As people get older, they get less attractive, but we don't update." It's why Katharine Hepburn's character in "On Golden Pond" could look at the aging, crabby character played by Henry Fonda and declare: "He's my knight in shining armor."

• Those who endure have a story, and they stick to it. Robert Sternberg, dean of the school of arts and science at Tufts University, has researched this and has come up with about two dozen relationship stories, some good, some bad. The "fairy tale story" has a prince and a princess; the "visionist story" is a business model, accumulating homes, goods and successful children; the "travel story" says that life is a journey; the "police story" divides the partners' roles into cop and perp, with the former constantly monitoring the latter; the "war story" means that two people expect constant fights. "What our research shows is that couples tend to be more satisfied if they have matching story profiles," Sternberg says. Pair a fairy tale believer with a war story believer and "it won't work," he says.

• Anxiety or depression is relationship poison. "Do everything you can to make yourself less anxious and depressed," says Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Readers in long-term relationships will almost certainly be nodding their heads as they read these and for many LifeTwo readers it's the last bullet point that will resonate. If you read either of these discussion topics (men whose spouses are suffering from a midlife crisis or women whose husbands are suffering from midlife crisis) you know how difficult it is when one of you is suffering.

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