Modern Romance (24 page)

One is at the apex of the passionate love phase. We’ve all seen this in action. People get all excited and dive in headfirst. A new couple, weeks or months into a relationship, high off passionate love, go bonkers and move in and get married way too quickly.

This is like when you do a bunch of cocaine and decide you have a great life plan that you’re ready to put into action.

“I figured it out, bro! I gotta melt old VCRs and mold the melted plastic to make action figures. I’ll sell those and then I’ll use the profit to fund my business that sells reversible clothes! I’ll call them ‘Inside Out Pajamas.’ Think about it! One side is regular street clothes, then at night you turn ’em inside out and BOOM, PAJAMAS! Hey, is my nose bleeding?”

Sometimes these couples are able to transition from the passionate stage to companionate love. Other times, though, they transition into a crazy, toxic relationship and they get divorced and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

“Shit, so apparently the pajama side gets real dirty and gross during the day. Maybe you wear the pajama side the night before you wear the clothes side? Ah, fuck, what am I doing?! Stupid! Stupid! Fuck. I probably shouldn’t have hacked into my parents’ bank account and cleaned out their retirement fund. I’m going to need
way
more cocaine to figure this out . . .”

The second danger point is when passionate love starts wearing off. This is when you start coming down off of that initial high and you start worrying about whether this is really the right person. A couple weeks ago you were giddy and obsessed. All the new quirks and facts you learned about your lover felt like wonderful little surprises, like coming home and finding a chocolate on your pillow. Now you’re like,
Okay, I
get it
. You like sewing historically accurate Civil War uniforms!!

Your texts used to be so loving:

Now your texts are like:

or:

You conclude there’s something wrong with the person or the relationship since it isn’t as exciting as before. So you break up, without ever giving companionate love a chance to bloom.

But Haidt argues that when you hit this stage, you should just be patient. With luck, if you allow yourself to invest more in the other person, you will find a beautiful life companion.

I had a rather weird firsthand experience with this. When I first started dating my girlfriend, a few months in, I went to a friend’s wedding in Big Sur. I went alone, because my friend did me a huge solid and declined to give me a plus one. Which, of course, is the best. You get to sit by yourself and be a third wheel. Plus you get to constantly squeeze your head in between the heads of various couples and cutely go, “Whatchu guys talkin’ ’bout?” It’s GREAT!

The vows in this wedding were powerful. They were saying the most remarkable, loving things about each other. Things like “You are a prism that takes the light of life and turns it into a rainbow” or “You are a lotion that moisturizes my heart. Without you, my soul has eczema.” It was the noncheesy, heartfelt version of stuff like that.

After the wedding four different couples broke up, supposedly because they didn’t feel like they had the love that was expressed in those vows.

Did they call it off too early, at their danger point? I don’t know, but I too felt scared hearing that stuff. Did I have what those people had? At that point, no. But for some reason I felt deep down that I should keep investing in my relationship and that eventually that level of love would show itself. And, so far, it has.

DO YOU NEED TO GET MARRIED?

In relationships, there’s commitment and COMMITMENT, the kind that involves a license, usually some kind of religious blessing, and a ceremony in which every one of your close friends and relatives watches you and your partner promise to stay together until one of you dies.

What happens to people’s graphs of love once they get past the initial phases of love and power through their danger points?

This graph, which we got from Jonathan Haidt, measures the intensity of love over the course of a marriage.

In the beginning, when you first get married, you get a shot of passionate love. This boost lasts about two years. Then the passion fades and you have various ups and downs. You go through the experiences of living together and raising a family. When the kids finally flee the coop—at about the twenty-five-year mark in the second chart—you and your mate get a rush of loving intensity. You can bask in the romance and maybe even rekindle some of the passion that brought you together in the first place. Then, soon after that, you’re dead.

Whenever I’m at a wedding watching a beautiful couple exchange vows under a tree or at a mountain or a rainbow or whatever, I start thinking about this graph.

The brutal truth is that no matter how much they love each other, how beautiful the ceremony, how poetic and loving the vows, once they finish their wedding, you know their love is going to get less passionate and their life is going to get more complicated, and not in the most fun ways.

The romantic part of the relationship has peaked.

After the rings, the priest should just say, “Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain’s tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won’t feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where’s the pigs in a blanket? I’m outta here.”

So why get married at all?

In recent decades, and in most developed nations, marriage rates have dropped precipitously, leading some to wonder whether it is a dying institution. Philip Cohen, one of the leading demographers of the family, has documented the steep and widespread decline in global marriage rates since the 1970s. According to his calculations, 89 percent of the global population lives in a country with a falling marriage rate, and those who live in Europe and Japan are experiencing something more like a plummet.
2

In the United States marriage rates are now at historic lows. In 1970, for instance, there were about seventy-four marriages for every thousand unmarried women in the population. By 2012 that had fallen to thirty-one per thousand single women—a drop of almost 60 percent. Americans are also joining the international trend of marrying later. In 1960, 68 percent of all people in their twenties were married, compared with just 26 percent in 2008.
3

For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married.

What are people doing instead of getting married?

As Eric wrote in his book
Going Solo
, we are living in a time of incredible experimentation with different ways of settling down. Long-term cohabitation with a romantic partner is on the rise, especially in Europe. Living alone has skyrocketed almost everywhere, and in many major cities—from Paris to Tokyo, Washington, D.C., to Berlin—nearly half of all households have just one resident.

But marriage is not an altogether undesirable institution. After all, reams of social-science research show that successful marriages can make people live longer and be happier and healthier than single people. (Admittedly, a great many marriages aren’t successful, and those who divorce or become widows or widowers may not get all these benefits.)

Good marriages also bring people more financial security, and these days one of the things that sociologists worry about is that better-off people are marrying more—and more successfully—than poor people, which increases inequality overall. In the United States, sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes, “marriage has become a status symbol—a highly regarded marker of a successful personal life.”
4

When I saw this graph (p. 219), I had a thought. Might it make more sense to forgo marriage and, instead, set out to experience a lifetime’s worth of, say, one- to two-year, intensely passionate relationships? Wouldn’t that be better than toiling through the doldrums of decades of waiting for your rise in companionate love?

Then your graph would look like this, right?

I contacted Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who drew the passionate/companionate love graphs, and asked what he thought about the hypothetical graph. Here was his response:

There are two ways of thinking of satisfaction. One is the passionate/companionate love hedonic view, that the best life would be the one with the most passion in it. The other is a narrative view, that the best life is about building a story.