Modern love: why relationships are so hard today
We have never had so much freedom in love. We decide for ourselves whom we love, how we live together and when we leave.
And yet many people, young people in particular, find relationships surprisingly hard.
Why is that?
One person is supposed to be everything
Perhaps modern love is so difficult precisely because we have become ever more individualistic – while at the same time expecting ever more from our relationships.
In the past, many of our needs were carried by family, friends, neighbours or community. Today, a single person is often expected to be everything: lover, best friend, confidant, emotional anchor, intellectual counterpart, sexual partner, companion in adventure and safe home, all at once.
We expect stability and reliability – but also excitement, surprise and passion. That is an enormous demand.
Couples therapist Esther Perel puts it roughly like this: today we expect one person to give us what a whole village once provided.
Someone better might be out there
In Marry Him, Lori Gottlieb describes very aptly how the search for the perfect partner – and the idea that someone «better» might always be waiting somewhere – shapes our relationships.
Dating apps reinforce this feeling. With every swipe, another option seems to be waiting. If you constantly have alternatives in view, you may invest less in what you have.
And on Instagram we see couples who never argue, are never bored and always appear in the best light. Next to them, every real relationship looks a little lacking.
Love needs staying power
Yet love is not only about feelings, compatibility and self-fulfilment. It also needs staying power. The willingness to endure difficult phases together, not to see every conflict immediately as a sign of failure, and not to interpret every discomfort as a loss of self.
At the same time, a relationship should not carry our entire identity. We need our own friendships, interests and social networks. Precisely this allows closeness to grow without two people overloading each other with expectations.
Perhaps we have gained many freedoms – but lost some of our ability to commit when things get uncomfortable.
Stay or go? Where couples therapy can help
This is exactly where couples therapy can help. Not to save a relationship at any cost, but to learn to tell the difference.
Is this a normal dry spell? A phase in which things have simply become dull, closeness has been lost or disappointments have piled up – and in which patience, humility and persevering together might make sense?
Or has something become fundamentally destructive – marked by fear, contempt, control, violence or a lasting lack of safety and respect? Then the insight may be that leaving is necessary.
John Jay Osborn shows beautifully how valuable this third party can be in Listen to the Marriage: almost the entire novel takes place in a couples therapist's office and revolves around a separated couple who must learn to truly see and listen to each other again.
Sometimes it is worth staying longer than the first impulse suggests. Sometimes leaving is the healthier decision. Good couples therapy does not make this decision for you. It helps you see more clearly what is still alive, what can be changed – and what perhaps should no longer be carried.
An old question
Anyone who wants to see that these questions did not begin with Tinder and Instagram can read George Eliot's Middlemarch: an astonishingly modern novel about projections, false expectations, marriage, disappointment – and how hard it is to stop loving our idea of the other person and start loving the real one.
Perhaps mature love begins exactly there: where we stop looking for the perfect person and start seeing the real one.
Literature
- Lori Gottlieb: Marry Him. The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, 2010
- John Jay Osborn: Listen to the Marriage, 2018
- George Eliot: Middlemarch, 1871/72
- Esther Perel: Mating in Captivity