The Hard Work of Successful Love
Romantic relationships are most satisfying and stand a greater chance of surviving when you and your partner view your bond without illusions and embellishments. When you do this, when you look love square in the face, you’ll find that it isn’t one simple, clear, obvious thing. Instead, love is complex. Love is triumph and heartache. It is passion and peaceful companionship. It is joy and grief. And keeping love alive is hard work. Some days, your love for your partner will take your breath away. On others, everything he or she does will annoy you. Most days, it will fall somewhere in between.
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Romantic relationships endure because partners choose to communicate in ways that maintain their relationship. It’s the everyday communication and effort that you and your partner invest that will most enable you to build a satisfying, intimate bond—and sustain it if that’s what you choose to do. Enduring couples succeed at love by working at it day in and day out—helping each other with studying or the dishes, cheering each other with kind words following disheartening days at school or work, nursing each other through illness, and even holding each other close as one partner lets go of life.
POSTSCRIPT
We began this chapter with the dying words of a doomed explorer. As Sir Robert Falcon Scott huddled inside his tent, awaiting death, he penned a last letter to his “widow.” Of all the possible things he could have said during those final moments—the limitless selection of topics and words available to sum up his life—what did he choose to focus on? Love.
When the impassable storms of your life rage around you, what shelter does love provide? If you had but a few hours to live and were going to craft a final statement, what view of love would you elaborate?
Scott’s letter reminds us that love is not one thing but many. To experience romantic love means to feel passion, practicality, commitment, respect, sentiment, and selflessness—all at the same time. Although no two people ever experience love in exactly the same way, we do share this in common: romantic love may not be essential to life, but it may be essential to joy.