Dating : The Art of Staying in Love

As with everything, there’s a knack

It was the high green-gold of summer.

My older sibling, Lucy, and I, with our sister-same faces, were fretting.

“I’m worried I’m a fickle person. What if I never hold down a long-term relationship?” I dipped a half spoon of sugar into my coffee cup and stirred.

“A fickle person” my sister repeated. A wasp landed on her plate, and ambled casually toward her half-eaten muffin, dripping with jam. “Me too”, she said, frowning and swatting at the wasp, who lifted momentarily in the air, then landed right back in the same place.

I wasn’t surprised. Of all people, I expected Lucy to feel the same way. For a long time, I wondered whether there was something wrong with us. We’d watched friends settle down all around us, and we were both still single.

We were both excellent at falling in love. But staying in love? Not so much.

That morning outside the cafe, I thought it was just us. And yet, as the years passed, I started to notice that “falling out of love” was a recurrent theme, even among our seemingly settled friends.

They’d once been full of hope, but over time their relationships had frayed around the edges. There were multiple incidents of cheating, sudden breakups and even divorces—and all before I reached 30.

As with everything, I took the geeks approach: I researched. I was surprised to find my cultural starting point of “you just need to find the right person and you’ll love them forever” was outmoded, even a little ridiculous.

I’d also misunderstood why people fall out of love.

I’d thought it was complicated and there are a number of reasons; these days, I disagree. The “reasons”—cheating, lying growing apart, emotional unavailability etc.—are ordinarily all symptoms of the same thing: a change in attitude.

Over time, the generosity with which we interpreted our partner’s behaviour, personality and even looks, shifts. We become slowly more irritable about them, the qualities we once loved souring like old milk.

But here’s the thing. Our partner is (normally) more-or-less the same as they always were. It’s our attitude to them that’s chipped and worn over time.

I decided to flip the script. What if it wasn’t me, or my sister or our friends that were the problem? What if we just didn’t know how to stay in love?