Love is one of the most profound emotions known to human beings. There are many kinds of love, but many people seek its expression in a romantic relationship with a compatible partner (or partners). For these individuals, romantic relationships comprise one of the most meaningful aspects of life and are a source of deep fulfillment.
While the need for human connection appears to be innate, the ability to form healthy, loving relationships is learned. Some evidence suggests that the ability to form a stable relationship starts to form in infancy, in a child's earliest experiences with a caregiver who reliably meets the infant's needs for food, care, warmth, protection, stimulation, and social contact. Such relationships are not destiny, but they are theorized to establish deeply ingrained patterns of relating to others. The end of a relationship, however, is often a source of great psychological anguish.
How to Build a Healthy Relationship
Maintaining a strong relationship requires constant care and communication, and certain traits are especially important for fostering healthy relationships. Each individual should, for starters, feel confident that their partner is willing to devote time and attention to the other. They must both also be committed to accommodating their differences, even as those change over time.
In the 21st century, good relationships are generally marked by emotional and physical fairness, particularly in the distribution of chores necessary to maintain a household. Partners in strong relationships also feel grateful for one another, openly provide and receive affection, and engage in honest discussions about sex.
In good relationships, partners try to afford their partner the benefit of the doubt, which creates a sense of being on the same team. This feeling, maintained over the long term, can help couples overcome the challenges they will inevitably face together.
How to Find Love
Finding a partner with whom to share a life is a wonderful but frequently difficult process. Whether it's conducted online or in person, the search will likely push an individual into unfamiliar settings to encounter potential partners. To be successful, it is often necessary to go outside of one's comfort zone.
Determining whether a particular person is suitable as a potential mate, and whether a connection reflects temporary infatuation or true love, can be challenging, but research suggests that there are revealing clues in behavior.
One possibly counterintuitive indicator of a potential match is one's sense of self. Someone who would make a good partner may push an individual to discover new activities or beliefs that expand their own self-concept. Another early signifier may be stress: Repeatedly interacting with someone whose impression matters deeply to us can fuel anxiety. Other positive indicators include being highly motivated to see the person and investing a significant amount of time, emotion, and energy into the budding relationship.
How Relationships Fail
Every relationship represents a leap of faith for at least one partner, and even in the happiest couples, the very traits that once attracted them to each other can eventually become annoyances that drive them apart. Acquiring the skills to make a connection last is hard work, and threats may spring up without notice. In short-term, casual relationships, neither partner may see a truly viable long-term future together, but often only one takes action, in some cases, ghosting the other, walking out of their lives with no communication, not even a text.
For some couples, infidelity is both the first and last straw, but a surprising number of relationships survive betrayal, some only to have their connection upended by everyday threats such as a loss of interest in physical intimacy, or a waning of positive feeling in the wake of constant criticism, contempt, or defensiveness. Even staying together for decades is no guarantee that a couple will remain connected: The divorce rate for couples over 50 has doubled since 1990.
Some people can walk away from years of marriage and instantly feel unburdened. For others, the end of a relationship that lasted just a few dates can trigger emotional trauma that lingers for years. However, a breakup plays out, it can be a major stressor with an effect on ego and self-esteem that cannot be ignored.
How People Find Love
Finding a partner with whom to share your life can be a hopeful, difficult, invigorating, and challenging process. Seeking an appropriate mate is considered one of the primary responsibilities of adulthood, and whether their approach is to flirt in line at a coffee shop, peruse hundreds of online profiles, or ask friends or family to arrange dates, people devote enormous amounts of thought and energy to the task. To find someone you’ll be comfortable with for the rest of your life, though, it may be necessary to go far outside your comfort zone.
What attracts people to each other?
Evolutionary psychology posits that there are some universal human attractors: Heterosexual men, for example, tend to be attracted to women with physical markers of youth and health, presumably because they seem the most fertile. But in reality, you need not be exceptionally attractive to find a mate—only attractive enough to entice your mate. The theory of assortative mating holds that people who couple up tend to have similar levels of attractiveness: We seek, with some exceptions, people like ourselves.
How quickly do we decide that we’re attracted to someone?
Research finds that people make a snap judgment about whether a potential partner is attractive in a fraction of a second. In studies in which people meet each other in a speed-dating scenario (which historically have focused primarily on heterosexual relationships), men were more likely than women to find their potential partners attractive and were more likely to base their verdict on looks.
Finding the Right Partner
Even people who date often and remain open to new people may not have an easy time finding long-term love. Research finds that the most successful couples meet through shared social networks or while pursuing a common interest, and couples with weaker social ties outside of each other may take longer to commit to marriage. Novelty can also be an important factor in relationship success: Someone who pushes you to consider new activities or beliefs that expand your self-concept may be a partner with whom you can have a relationship that stays fresh for decades.
Finding the right partner may begin with physical attraction, but it's personality that tends to keep couples together. People who reveal themselves to be emotionally stable and agreeable tend to be more likely to have satisfying long-term relationships. In the thrilling early days of a relationship, we tend to ignore less-favorable traits, which is why experts suggest that we not rush into long-term commitment and not delay discussing potential conflicts.