To stay in love for years, even decades, is less a matter of luck than of craft. It asks for patience, humour, resilience and a surprising amount of maintenance. The romance of long-term partnership isn’t found in constant intensity, but in the quieter work of building a life side by side.
The people who study relationships tend to agree on one thing: love isn’t something you secure once and protect from change. It’s something you keep making, shaped through attention, repair, generosity and the willingness to meet each other again and again as new versions of yourselves. Taken together, their work offers a grounded vision of what allows love not just to begin, but to last.
Build intimacy in small moments
John and Julie Gottman
For researchers John and Julie Gottman, love is measurable. Over four decades, they observed thousands of couples in real time, tracking which relationships endured and which quietly collapsed.
Their findings challenge the idea that longevity depends on compatibility or avoiding conflict. Instead, stability rests on everyday interaction. One of their most-cited conclusions is the “magic ratio”. “There is a very specific ratio that makes love last,” John Gottman has said. “That ratio is five to one. For every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five or more positive interactions.”
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Those positives are rarely dramatic. They’re humour, affection, curiosity, validation and simple warmth. The Gottmans also identified what they call “bids for connection”, the small attempts to engage that happen constantly: a comment about the weather, a shared article, a sigh from across the room. Couples who stayed together turned toward these bids about 86 per cent of the time. Couples who later divorced responded only about a third of the time.
A recent TikTok trend playfully tested this idea, with partners saying “I saw a bird today” and noticing whether the other person leaned in or tuned out. The point is deceptively simple: responsiveness matters.
“The success of a relationship,” Gottman writes, “has very little to do with how often you fight and much more to do with how you repair and how emotionally responsive you are when it matters.” Over years, those small gestures determine whether conflict lands on solid ground or emotional emptiness.
Understand your sexual desire
Emily Nagoski
In long-term relationships, sexual desire ebbs and flows. Many couples panic when it dips, treating frequency as a barometer of the relationship’s health. Sex educator Emily Nagoski urges a different approach: understand how desire actually works.
In Come As You Are, she challenges the idea that libido is something you either “have” or “don’t have”. “There’s no such thing as a sex drive,” she argues, at least not in the gas-tank sense we often imagine. Instead, arousal works like a system of accelerators and brakes. Many men experience spontaneous desire, a spark that seems to appear out of nowhere. Many women experience “responsive desire”, which emerges only after feeling safe, connected and relaxed. When the day has been filled with stress, resentment or invisible labour, the brakes are pressed hard and desire simply doesn’t show up.
“Context is everything,” Nagoski writes – and so the context must be tended to. For long-term couples, the advice is practical as much as romantic: don’t chase sparks, build conditions. Reduce stress, share the load, create warmth, repair small hurts. As one therapist in the book puts it, the goal is not to fix your partner’s libido, but to “create a world where desire has room to emerge”.
Share the invisible work
Eve Rodsky
If the Gottmans show how intimacy is built emotionally, Eve Rodsky shows how it’s eroded practically. In Fair Play, she argues that many relationships break down not over betrayals, but over the slow grind of invisible labour: the planning, remembering and anticipating that keeps a household running.
“The she-fault stops here,” Rodsky writes, naming the way women are often blamed for domestic shortfalls while quietly carrying the cognitive load of everything from birthday presents to dental appointments. The issue isn’t simply who does more chores, but who holds the responsibility in their head all the time.
Her system asks couples to treat home life like a shared enterprise. Together, you inventory every task, then assign each one fully, from conception to planning to execution. No half-helping. No one acting as manager while the other “assists”. She also distinguishes between episodic jobs and relentless, ongoing work, the dishes, laundry, childcare logistics and forms that quietly consume time and mental bandwidth. When one person is always on call, patience and desire tend to drain away with it.
[ Love for life: ‘That evening, my life changed. The rest is history’Opens in new window ]
Rodsky’s focus isn’t perfect equality but ownership and fairness. When both partners feel supported in the mundane details of daily life, resentment softens. In long-term love, that redistribution isn’t just practical. It’s intimate.
Stop trying to remodel your partner
Orna Guralnik
Psychoanalytic couples therapist Orna Guralnik, known to many through the documentary series Couples Therapy, sees the same pattern repeatedly. Couples arrive hoping for change, but, almost always, the change they want is in the other person.
“When people come to therapy to see a couples therapist, often their hidden agenda is, ‘Here’s my partner. Help me change them’,” she observes. “And one of the main things I have to do in couples therapy is to reverse that assumption that really what needs to happen is your partner needs to change, because that is not how it works for couples to live well together. Each person needs to take responsibility for themselves and see what they can change within themselves, and how can they learn to accept and love their partner for who they are.”
Much conflict, she argues, stems less from cruelty than from resistance: the refusal to accept a partner’s temperament, history or limits. Instead of relating to the person in front of them, couples end up chasing a projected, improved version. Her goal isn’t to excuse harmful behaviour, but to help partners distinguish between what truly needs addressing and what simply reflects difference. Love falters when everything becomes a fix-it job.
In her work, she returns often to generosity. “Knowing the conditions where you can get in touch with a feeling of generosity,” she has said, “is a good feeling to have in your muscle memory.” Long-term intimacy depends less on agreement than on staying emotionally open when disappointment arises.
Intimacy and eroticism needs distance
Esther Perel
Few thinkers have reshaped conversations about desire as profoundly as Esther Perel. Her premise is deceptively simple: the very structures that make us feel secure can undermine erotic vitality if left unquestioned. “Modern love seeks to reconcile two fundamental human needs,” she writes. “Our need for security and our need for adventure.” The tension between them isn’t a flaw but a condition of intimacy.
In Mating in Captivity, Perel argues that as couples grow closer, they often slide into emotional fusion. Domestic familiarity and caretaking eclipse mystery. “When intimacy collapses into fusion,” she writes, “it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire.”
Desire, in her view, thrives on separateness, and “is rooted in absence and longing”. It requires space and individuality, the sense that the other person remains partly unknown. Rather than treating independence as a threat, she frames it as oxygen. “We are often most drawn to our partner,” she writes, “when we see them in their element, doing something that brings them alive.” And, perhaps most famously, she encourages couples to make space for how each person will grow and change over time, and allow the relationship to evolve with them. “You will probably have several great loves in your life,” Perel says. “If you are lucky, they will all be with the same person.”
So, what lasts?
Across disciplines and styles, these thinkers converge on the same quiet truth: long-term love isn’t sustained through constant happiness or perfect alignment. It survives through attention, fairness, acceptance, generosity, honesty, space and repair. Love endures not because we never change, but because we remain willing to meet each other again and again, as the people we’ve become.
