Chapter Excerpt

This book is organized around two simple principles:

First, if we are to get better as we grow older we will need to find growth and meaning through the very hardships and limitations that we often seek to avoid and deny.

Second, more than any other means available to us, our long-term intimate relationships can help us with this critical life task. By opening ourselves to intimately knowing, and intimately being known by, someone different and separate from ourselves, we can uncover the world of untapped possibility that lies unexplored within our own selves.

By now it is probably obvious that we’re not talking about a quick fix. If our relationships are to be all that they can be, if they are to become opportunities for meaningful change and growth, we will need to give them time. And in this age of fast and easy gratification giving things time is becoming a lost art.

This is particularly true when it comes to love.

Kurt and Felicia, a haggard-looking couple who appeared to be in their early forties, arrived at my office after eight years of marriage, two children, countless fights, and, more recently, months of numbed indifference to each other. “We both think it’s pretty much over,” Felicia said, by way of introduction, “but we decided we owe it to the kids to give it one last try.” I found sitting with Kurt and Felicia quite unnerving; they rarely looked at each other, they never touched, and they rarely smiled. I felt like I imagine an oncologist feels on meeting a patient who has neglected a malignancy for too long: I suspected that I could do little but ease the couple’s pain as their marriage died.

Still, we tried. Initially Kurt and Felicia’s relationship had been quite passionate. “We spent the first year in bed together,” Kurt said. “But as time went on we started fighting. Then we thought maybe having kids would help, but, no surprise, that didn’t work. Now it’s like our relationship isn’t even important enough to fight about. What’s so hard to understand, though, is that we were so into each other early on. Doesn’t that mean we loved each other? Shouldn’t there still be something there?”

For six months I tried to help Kurt and Felicia find out whether something was still there. Each session they would recount their efforts to recapture their early passion. I would suggest, at first gently, and over time more firmly, that these efforts weren’t going to get them very far; they needed to accept the fact that their relationship had changed, and they needed to get to know one another in a more intimate and honest way. Each session they would dutifully concur, but they would return the next week to tell me about how their latest attempt to rekindle romance had flopped. Whether it was that they’d tried a romantic weekend but had argued, or that they’d tried Tan-tric sex but had gotten bored, they couldn’t seem to move away from the notion that the solution lay in returning to the beginning. Finally they decided to stop trying. “We’re not angry at each other,” Felicia said. “We just don’t love each other anymore. We’re going to call it quits.”

And so they did.

In the beginning of a relationship it’s pretty easy to say what love is. As the fairy tales and love stories tell us, love begins with the shiny, exhilarating, heart-pounding experience of romance and passion. As Dr. Luce, the fictional expert on human sexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, puts it, falling in love is a “drugged and happy time where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running.”¹

But then, as Kurt, Felicia, and the rest of us have learned, comes the well-known rub. The intoxicating timelessness of early passion does, inevitably and without fail, end, and with this the real-world living begins. Can this post-romance time also be called love? Is struggling with conflict, difference, and disillusionment part of love, or is it only love when we are sniffing each other like scented poppies?

In this chapter, I will argue that love is a long-lasting phenomenon that changes and evolves across our life spans. Assuming this mind-set won’t be easy: these days the addictive, heightened excitement of falling in love is a better fit for our feel-good culture than are the more tempered rewards that can come from loving over the long haul. But doing so will be worth the effort: by expanding our understanding of what love can be, we will improve our relationships, and our lives, in surprising and powerful ways.

Embrace a longer-lasting vision of love. This is the first of eight intimate resolutions we’ll examine in these pages. By rejecting the self-help snake oil sold by the most egregious of the marriage books, the ones that promise to “bring never-ending passion to your relationship,” we will arm ourselves with the understanding that the time that follows romance is not an unfortunate, if necessary, compromise, but an opportunity for real and enduring growth and change. And by expanding our vision of love beyond the heightened but transient excitement of early passion, we will give ourselves what Kurt and Felicia were missing: a reason to accompany each other through the daunting but potentially life-enhancing challenges of growing older.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I don’t want to be here,” Michael Smithson began. “We’ve been married thirty years—by the way, how old are you? You look like you could almost be one of our kids.” Michael’s tone was more playful than challenging, and I answered with a simple smile.

Michael smiled back, and then continued, his voice softening. “Anyway, like I said, we’ve been married thirty years, and we have a good relationship. But something has come up that we’re having trouble dealing with.” Michael turned to his wife, and then, with a sly wink, added: “Or maybe I should say something hasn’t come up.”

“You are so bad,” Susan interjected, waving her husband away in mock disgust. Then, turning toward me, she said: “But this is already good. I think that’s the first time he’s made a joke about it since the surgery.”

Michael and Susan appeared to be in their early sixties. He was trim and wiry, with thinning hair that was neatly gelled into place, and piercing brown eyes. He had dressed casually in jeans and a sport shirt. She seemed more elegant. Her gray hair was tied back in a bun, and she had dressed in a skirt, blouse, and tastefully matching scarf.

Michael took the lead in telling their story. “Two years ago I had surgery for prostate cancer, and even though my surgeon—who by the way is at the top of my hit list—told me he could do a nerve-sparing operation, I haven’t been able to get an erection since. I know I’m not supposed to feel this, but I don’t feel like much of a man.” Michael, who had been leaning forward, now sat back in his chair, relaxed a bit, and turned to Susan with a relieved smile that seemed to say: “There, I said it.”

Michael’s sense of masculinity wasn’t the only casualty of the surgery. Susan, too, was suffering: “The doctors say that there isn’t much chance that the cancer has spread,” she said. “I tell myself that’s what really matters. But it’s hard for me too. I know this isn’t exactly politically correct, but I felt like more of a woman when I could have him inside me.”

Over the past two years Michael and Susan had devoted themselves to reviving their sexual life. They’d tried Viagra, but despite the surgeon’s reassurances Michael had suffered extensive nerve damage, and the medicine wasn’t effective. They had tried sex therapy, but, as Michael put it, “The problem is with the plumbing, not the technique.” They had even tried acupuncture, but that hadn’t worked. What had once come easily now felt like hard work. Even worse, they avoided anything remotely erotic—kissing, snuggling, and even hugging—because merely touching each other reminded them of what they had lost.

“I’m thinking of having another surgery,” Michael said. “My urologist said he could put an inflatable tube in the shaft of my penis, and I could have erections by pumping some device embedded beneath my skin. The guy told me: ‘All you have to do is pump yourself up.’ He sounded like one of those guys on Saturday Night Live, what were their names? Hans and Franz? ‘Vee are going to pump you up!’ Michael paused, and then added softly: “But I don’t want a balloon in my dick, so I guess I have—we have—a decision to make.”

Time and time again, both in our individual lives and in our intimate relationships, we face the same core dilemmas. They reemerge with each life phase, always in slightly altered guise. Each time we solve them, usually by way of partial and temporary solutions, we grow and develop. We are all, in a sense, the sum of our imperfect solutions.

Michael’s parents had worked blue-collar jobs until retiring with small pensions. He had two younger brothers and two younger sisters, none of whom had finished college. Michael, in contrast, had worked his way through college and law school, and when he first met Susan he was a hard-charging guy two years short of making partner at his law firm. Beneath his meteoric success, however, he was also an insecure young man who felt he had a lot to prove.

Susan, on the other hand, was a child of privilege. Her mother and father had both come from generations of wealth, and their sole form of work involved managing the family trust. She had attended the best schools, and when she met Michael she was teaching at a private elementary school for a salary that she didn’t need.

Early on these differences in background made for a good fit. Susan’s interest in Michael served as an antidote for his simmering insecurity: “I remember the first time I brought her home all my old buddies were totally tongue-tied. The idea that a woman like her would be interested in me meant that I had made it.”

Michael’s rough-hewn competitiveness and disdain for those who didn’t work hard, meanwhile, fit neatly with a kind of reverse snobbery that Susan had developed. In one of our first sessions she told the following story: “Just after I met Michael I went hiking in the White Mountains with some friends. The trail ended at this campsite, and all these families were there with their trailers and their tents. The air was full of barbecue smoke and the sound of kids playing, and I thought about how my parents, with their fancy country-club parties, would never be caught dead doing something like that. But it seemed to me that those kids were the luckiest kids in the world. I know this sounds condescending, but Michael reminded me of that world.”

Michael and Susan complemented each other in many of their most vulnerable and uncertain places, and during the first several months of their relationship they did each other a world of good. Far more than his success in college, law school, and work, Susan’s desire for Michael made him feel like he had made it as a man. Susan, meanwhile, found similar benefit in Michael’s attraction to her. “My mother is the real-life version of that frigid WASP that Mary Tyler Moore played in Ordinary People. She has no sense of herself as a woman, and she never made me feel the least bit feminine either. I could feel how much Michael wanted me. When we got together I replaced this cold, tight picture I had of myself with something more womanly and alive.”

As was the case for Jack and Felicia, Michael and Susan’s relationship began with a powerful early chemistry. But alas, as was the case for Jack and Felicia, indeed as is the case for all of us, the intoxicating timelessness of early passion did end. What was more, as is also often the case, when this end came the same differences that catalyzed the couple’s early chemistry were precisely those that began to chafe. The trouble first appeared over money. Even though Michael was becoming a successful lawyer, Susan’s trust fund earned the couple far more each year than did Michael. This apparent piece of good fortune touched on Michael’s still-present feelings of insecurity, and he began to prop himself up by demeaning his wife. Susan, in turn, felt hurt by Michael’s criticisms, and, taking a page out of her mother’s book, she retreated into a state of cold aloofness.

A few years passed and two children arrived, a boy and a girl. By this time Michael was working virtually nonstop during the week, and on weekends he often returned to his old neighborhood to hang out at the bar with his childhood friends. Susan left her teaching job, and she began to take the children to her parents’ country club, spending afternoons watching them swim in the pool while she and her mother drank wine and gossiped. The distance increased even further, as did a spiral of hurt and hurting, and eventually Michael and Susan found themselves looking at one another across an uneasy divide.

Where Kurt and Felicia failed, however, Michael and Susan succeeded.

Perhaps ten years after Michael and Susan had married, Michael’s father died of cirrhosis. “I remember his funeral,” Michael told us, his voice turning wistful as he remembered back twenty years. “I was sitting next to my mother in the front row of the church, and all that I could remember were those Saturday nights when my mother would send me down to the bar to tell him to come home. Then all of a sudden it hit me that the only reason my family looked any different from the family that I grew up in was that we had money. Deep down, things weren’t different at all.”

After his father’s death, Michael resolved to change. He stopped hanging out in his old neighborhood, and he began to spend more time with his family. Susan was deeply moved. “That was a real turning point in our relationship,” she noted. “My father gave us these big presents, but he had so much money it never really meant anything. That Michael was willing to make sacrifices for our family meant the world to me. And it made me do my own reality check. One of the reasons my father spent his life at the country-club bar was that my mother was so cold to him. I had to ask myself—was I any different?”

“We never got our relationship back to those first few months when we were so in love,” Susan continued, “but that wasn’t the point. And we really haven’t had any major troubles since, at least not until now.”

That, essentially, was Michael and Susan’s story. Over the years the couple had had their share of squabbles and disagreements, but overall their relationship had been a good one. Their children had both graduated from college, and their older son had married. Michael still worked full-time as a senior partner at his law firm, while Susan, who had returned to work, had recently retired from teaching. The couple continued to benefit from Susan’s money, but Michael’s success, and the strength of their relationship, had made the presence of that wealth feel less onerous over the years. Thus far theirs had been a good life.

Now, however, they faced another challenge: they had to come to terms with the consequences of Michael’s cancer.

Michael and Susan’s relationship had been anything but a compromise. By the time they came to talk with me, they considered themselves best friends, they felt a deep sense of gratitude for their shared lives, and over time each had come to know his or her self through the reliable, sustained reflection of the other.

These benefits, which are the sort that can make a world of difference in the quality of our lives, can come to all of us. But they can only do so when our relationships are able to grow and evolve over many years.

Embrace a longer-lasting vision of love: by committing ourselves to this resolution we will not only make our relationships better, we will build relationships that help us to change, to grow, and to grow older with courage, purpose, and conviction.

To pursue this resolution, however, we will have to go against the grain of today’s “everything-is-possible-now” culture. We will have to choose deeper but slower satisfactions over the intoxicating and addictive experiences of passion and romance.

We may find some support for our iconoclasm if we understand that by choosing this path we are being true to our brains and our bodies: as it turns out, we are endowed with an embedded biological code that allows, even encourages, love to unfold and grow over the course of our life spans.

Let’s take a look at this code, beginning with what happens when we first fall in love.

An elegant bit of physiological software shapes the early days of romantic passion. This software governs two separate but related systems: desire and attraction. Makes sense, given that successful evolution depends on our having both the drive to procreate as well as the ability to focus that drive in the direction of someone who has good genes.

On the drive side of things we’re largely talking about testosterone, or, as biologist Helen Fisher calls it, “the hormone of desire.”² For both men and women, the more testosterone one has the more sexual desire one feels, the more sexual thoughts and fantasies one has, and the more sexual activity one engages in.³ If we were asked to choose one aspect of our physiologies most likely to be related to early passion, testosterone would get a lot of votes, and indeed women who are in the early stages of love do exhibit increased levels of testosterone.

Of course things are rarely straightforward when it comes to the relationship between minds and bodies.⁴ While women in love do demonstrate increased levels of testosterone,⁵ men who have recently fallen in love, somewhat surprisingly, evidence decreased levels of the hormone.⁶ Why might this be?

Because there’s more to falling in love than sex, a fact that takes us from the drive side of the early love equation to the attraction side. Consider an experiment in which subjects who had recently fallen in love underwent brain scans while being shown photographs of their beloveds.^{7, 8} These scans were compared to those of subjects who were scanned while watching pornographic videos. The brains of the in-love subjects showed significantly more activity in their reward and pleasure centers. Not surprisingly, these areas are associated with feelings of exhilaration, increased energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, ecstasy, loss of appetite, addiction, a pounding heart, and accelerated breathing—all traits associated with being passionately in love.⁹

No surprises yet in this admittedly cursory examination of the biology of love: the days of early romance and passion are governed by potent changes in our physiologies. It’s even the case that the brain pathways that govern our falling in love appear to be the same as those that are involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction.^{10, 11} It seems to be the literal truth that when we fall in love we become “lovesick,” or, to borrow from the musician Robert Palmer, “addicted to love.”¹² To quote Mr. Palmer’s views on the subject: “You can’t sleep, you can’t eat . . . You’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to love.”

If we stopped here we might buy into the vision of intimacy articulated by the singer Meat Loaf in his anthem for unhappily married baby boomers, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” The song’s protagonist, desperate to convince his girlfriend to have sex with him, finally gives in to her demand that he promise to “love her to the end of time.” Alas, things don’t work out so well, and by the song’s end we find him praying for that “end of time to hurry up and arrive.”

Certainly Meat Loaf’s perspective¹³ is a familiar one: we have long believed that early passion inevitably gives way to disappointment, boredom, and acrimony. But the fact is, if love really is destined to turn sour after the thrill is gone, it’s not the fault of biology. In fact, the opposite is true. Love, according to the vision put forward by science, is not a fleeting, transient experience, one more easily captured and preserved by poets than by real-life couples. Rather it involves complementary and sequential processes that can last a lifetime.¹⁴

Recently scientists at University College in London gave MRIs to subjects who had been in relationships that had lasted slightly beyond the early months of romance and passion (the couples studied had been together an average of 2.3 years).¹⁵ As with earlier studies of subjects who were in love, they found increased activity in the brain’s reward centers. But they also found something else: increased activity in areas that regulate emotion, attention, and working memory.¹⁶ Biologist Helen Fisher postulates that somewhere in between the first half-year and the first two years of a relationship, the brain may begin to lay down and consolidate the kind of cognitive and emotional experience necessary for longer-term attachment.

And then there is that ubiquitous and influential hormone mentioned earlier: testosterone.

Testosterone, it turns out, shapes more than just lust. When men are teenagers testosterone levels are at their highest, and then as men age these levels drop.¹⁷ It follows that as men grow older, and as their relationships move forward in time, biology favors attachment over ardor. What’s more, local variations in testosterone levels occur over the course of our life spans. When marriages become less stable testosterone levels rise. Same for when men divorce. On the other hand, when marriages are more stable testosterone levels decrease, as they do, interestingly enough, when men become fathers and when they hold a baby. It appears that testosterone levels shift in response to circumstance in order to support the kind of tempered, enduring relatedness that is conducive to longer-term intimacy and to family life.

Finally there is the matter of oxytocin and vasopressin, or, as Fisher calls them, the “cuddle chemicals.”¹⁸ If testosterone is the chemical of desire, then oxytocin and vasopressin appear to be the hormones of long-term attachment.¹⁹ Human mothers secrete oxytocin when they give birth, thus facilitating bonding with their newborns.²⁰ Furthermore, oxytocin and vasopressin (both of which generate a pleasurable sense of well-being) are associated with trust:when we believe that we are trusted, our brains release oxytocin, and the more oxytocin our brains release the more trustworthy we become.²¹ Finally, oxytocin is released by women during intercourse, while vasopressin is secreted by men.²² These hormones generate a postcoital sense of security and contentment, one that is more moderate, more socializing, and, importantly, more enduring than the heated but fleeting excitement of sexual passion.

In sum, these “cuddle chemicals” appear to serve as renewable glue for the bonding and attachment that are the cornerstones of long-term intimacy.²³

We are who we are because of an infinitely complex confluence of biology, evolution, culture, and psychology, and love may be the most complex, most impenetrable, and most ineffable of all human experiences. Nevertheless, the biology of human relationships over time holds a message of great importance when it comes to love: love evolves.²⁴ Long-term attachment is as much a part of the overall puzzle of love as those relatively fleeting, addictive experiences of early lust and attraction.

Now let’s leave the laboratory and return to real life. Let’s see how staying in love helped Michael and Susan to grow in ways that neither had imagined possible.

On several occasions—not only around that difficult time when their children were young but at several other points in their relationship—Michael and Susan had trusted in the same core strengths: they both had highly developed capacities for being honest about their own shortcomings, for accepting and then tackling the specific challenges brought on by different life phases, and, perhaps above all, for regaining their bearings when they began to veer away from their core values and beliefs. Now they leaned on these strengths once again, as they struggled with the difficult decision as to whether or not Michael would have the penile implant surgery.

We began by identifying an old pattern. Michael’s impotence had caused an upsurge in his feelings of inadequacy, and he was managing his insecurity in a familiar and problematic way: he had broken out the old jokes about Susan’s wealth. She didn’t find his references to her work having been “just a hobby” or to her having been a “country-club debutante” particularly funny, but in her sensitivity to Michael’s illness she had been slow to call him on his jabs. He criticized and she withdrew: Michael and Susan had danced this dance before, and once they became aware that they had settled into an old and fruitless pattern Michael stopped his teasing, and Susan became more available.

Then Michael and Susan took the next step: they used the reservoir of trust and understanding that they had accrued over the years to talk about whether or not to go forward with the surgery. This meant sorting through what sex really meant to them. As Susan put it: “Why, exactly, would we have the operation? Is it only so that Michael can come inside me? If that’s really what we’re after, fine, but sex is a pretty complicated thing. It seems to me that before we decide what to do we have to figure out what it is we really want.”

Sex in long-term intimate relationships is indeed complicated. Michael and Susan did miss being able to have intercourse, but it was more than the sex itself that they missed. “There’s more to sex than sex,” said Susan, smiling a wry smile. “I miss having Michael inside me, but more than that, sex has always been a way that we’ve expressed ourselves. A way that we’ve been able to feel ourselves through each other. That’s what I want to have back.”

The notion that sex involved mutual self-expression and trust seemed hopeful. The purely physical side of Michael and Susan’s sex life would never be the same, but their minds had the potential for a great deal of flexibility. If the problem and the solution lay as much in the mental realm as the physical, there was a good chance that things could get quite a bit better.

So we went to work on the mental side of things. In the first session Michael and Susan had spoken of how anything even remotely erotic reminded them of the cancer, the surgery, and the loss of their sexual relationship. Now, some three months into our work, we began to focus on the trouble they had living with this awareness. Michael explained:

“Lately I’ve been trying to be physically closer to Susan, but when I get in bed, roll over to her, and put my hand on her breast like I used to do just about every night, all I can think about is that nothing is happening down there. I just want to roll away because of how much I miss what I used to feel, and because I feel like such a failure. I know you’re going to say I’m not a failure, and Susan tells me the same thing. On one level I know that’s true, but hey, I’m a guy, my brain is only my second most important organ.”

To use the familiar language of the marriage manuals, Michael and Susan “worked hard” at learning to deal with their pain. Anticipating an important theme, I believe that it would be more true to say that they “played” hard at making a shared place for their most vulnerable and authentic selves.

Over the next several months Michael and Susan committed themselves to touching each other, even though this often caused them pain. They began to develop connected and playful ways to make love that did not involve intercourse. And they learned how to talk, to laugh, to cry with each other through the fear and sorrow that accompanied every moment of physical closeness and pleasure. In these ways they not only found their way back into each other’s arms, they found their way back into each other’s minds.

“I can still have an orgasm even without having an erection,” Michael noted. “It feels good, not as good as it used to, but still good, especially if I don’t obsess about how it isn’t what it used to be. Same with Susan, sex can still feel really good to her too, but we have to make sure that we stay in touch with each other. You know what else? It feels a little scary to be so open to each other, but it’s also kind of exciting. We’ve gotten a lot more creative about what we do with each other. And no, the specifics are none of your business. Like I told you in that first meeting, you look pretty young to me, and I wouldn’t want to shock you.”

Certainly Michael and Susan’s decision to pass on the implant surgery would not have been right for everyone. They, however, decided that restoring their ability to have intercourse by mechanical means wouldn’t have been right for them. “He had cancer, he had the surgery, he got better, and there are some scars,” Susan said. “Like the saying goes, ‘It is what it is.’ I can accept all that, as long as we can find ways to be together that feel personal and real.”

Michael and Susan built their sexual relationship into one that helped them to live creatively with a difficult truth. That truth went beyond Michael’s cancer; Michael and Susan were both encountering the bodily changes that come with getting older. These changes included not only the physical and psychological assault of serious illness (one in seven men between the ages of sixty and seventy-nine develops prostate cancer,²⁵ while one in fourteen women develops breast cancer by age seventy); they also included the simple, everyday changes that take place in all of us as our bodies age. These changes are hard in themselves, and they are made all the harder because they cause us to feel inadequate in comparison to today’s unrealistic, airbrushed vision of physical health and attractiveness.

Michael and Susan’s playful, loving interplay, however, helped them to remain alive and vital even as they faced these later-life challenges. By finding ways to be sexual and real with each other they were able not only to tolerate the ravages of illness and the diminishments of aging, they were able, as they had at numerous preceding life stages, to grow through adversity.

Love is obviously shaped by many forces. In addition to biology, our psychologies, our culture, and the unique dynamics of each relationship come into play. My point in this chapter is not that biology is the only, or even the most important, force behind the intricacies of human love and intimacy. My point is that the biology of love offers us a user-friendly template for understanding that love does last beyond those early months when euphoria-inducing chemicals are being released into the pleasure and addiction centers of our brains. The fact is, love can and does last and evolve across our life spans.

This understanding gives us two gifts:

First, we grow merely by making love last. One reason that the early days of passion and romance are a source of such unbridled joy is that they are perhaps the only phase of adulthood in which it is healthy to live largely in the pleasure of our illusions. At the same time, our ability to evolve out of this phase into a relationship in which we get to know each other as we really are can bring us equally valuable, if more sober, gratifications. A long-term intimate relationship is perhaps the ultimate classroom for learning how to find meaning and satisfaction in a world that is, ultimately and much to our consternation, not going to yield to our omnipotence.

Second, by making love last, by remaining in real and intimate contact with one another over the long haul, we create a space in which several growth-promoting processes can take place. These processes, which I have endeavored to capture through the resolutions spelled out in this book, all require the safety and intensity of a long-term relationship.

Some of the nuts and bolts of creating and sustaining a longer-lasting vision of love are:

• Create a hopeful, even ambitious vision of what your relationship can be over time. And then try to live toward that image.

• Remind each other of the value of your accumulated years. Appreciate all that you have built, and make certain that your partner knows that you appreciate his or her contribution to those accomplishments. Recognize what you have. Talk about it together. Thank each other for it.

• Don’t try to rekindle early passion. The pleasure of romantic love can, in moments, be recaptured, but the harder you try to get back to the beginning, the less likely you are to be successful (a simple truth that the “bring back your passion” marriage books just don’t get). Consider those moments when you are transported back to that earlier time an unexpected gift.

• Do try to hold on to your beginnings by remembering together, and, more formally, by observing the ritual of anniversaries and other important dates. Remembering the past is not the same as trying to relive it; remembering the past is essential for living fully in the present, and on into the future.

• Above all, reject the societal message that we are all entitled to perfect bodies, great sex, and endless romance. This “we can have it all without paying a price” mind-set can cause us to feel that the greater part of our lives together is a booby prize, an unfortunate compromise that comes after the “real” love of early romance. And it causes us to overlook the more grounded, more substantive rewards that come with staying together over time.

Perhaps many readers are now saying, “These suggestions are all well and good, but they assume that my husband/wife and I are already on the same page about this stuff. If that were the case the battle would be more than half won. How do I get him/her to sign on?”

This is an important question. The fact is, it is more the norm than the exception that one member of a couple must take the emotional lead. We tend to assume that this means an emotionally aware woman leading a less emotionally mature man by the nose, but I have learned to be wary of this stereotype. Indeed, in my experience there is much more equality in these matters than is generally assumed.

So what can you do to get your reluctant partner to sign on?

• For starters, think positively. If it is up to you to take the lead, consider the apparent inequity an opportunity for your own growth.

• Speak positively to your partner. “There is a lot of good that can come from knowing each other for so long” and “I think that there is still a lot that we can learn from each other” can go a long way. “You’re so emotionally dim that you only think it’s love when you’re screwing three times a day” is less likely to be helpful.

• Lead by example. This is true for each of the eight resolutions. Your most powerful means of changing your partner is to first change yourself, and then to ask, often implicitly, that your partner join you. So hold on to your own longer-lasting vision of love, believe in it resolutely, and model it for your partner.

• Finally, trust in the power of time. Persevere when you get frustrated. Meaningful changes are slow and hard-earned. Be willing to go out on a limb with your beliefs, and, equally important, be willing to stay out on that limb for a long time.

Robert Solomon wisely notes: “We define love in such a way that it could only be a transient experience, and then we wonder—sometimes bitterly—why love doesn’t last.”²⁶ Well, here’s this chapter’s take-home message: we need a new definition of love.

We need a definition of love that serves as an antidote to our modern belief that life is as it should be only when feel-good chemicals are coursing through the pleasure centers of our brains. We need a definition of love that embraces romance and passion (indeed one would have to be a real curmudgeon to begrudge these wonderful experiences), yet still encourages us to appreciate the way in which love can help us to evolve and grow, through the early months of romance, through more tempered attachment, through building a life together, through aging, and, inevitably, through loss—through all of the seasons of a married life. We need a definition of love that doesn’t encourage us to devote our relationships to the single-minded pursuit of keeping romance alive, because the more actively we pursue passion the more elusive it becomes.

And we need, above all, a definition of love that can help us to live and love with, rather than against, the natural course of time and human nature.

First Weekend

An early September morning on the coast of Maine. There was a touch of cool in the air, noticeably more so than the day before. Jessica smelled a hint of smoke, maybe from a distant woodstove, and the light was just a little more angled, a little less direct, than it had been. It was her favorite kind of day.

She and David were marking their twentieth anniversary. The idea was his; in a surprisingly romantic move, he had suggested a reprise of their first weekend getaway. And he had been talking about that weekend since they arrived, about the wonderful and idyllic time he recalled. Strange, she thought, but her memories were very different from his. For her the weekend was more complicated.

“‘Complicated’? How come whenever I think things are good you think they’re ‘complicated’?” David had teased. But that was how she remembered it.

Sure, Jessica also remembered the feelings that her husband had been talking about. They had been together for five months—the happiest five months of her life, she had giddily told her best friend just before they had left. “He’s sensitive but he’s still a guy,” she had said. “Knock on wood, but I think this just might be it.” She remembered how startled she had been to hear her own words. Relieved, too. She had begun to fear that she wouldn’t be swept into marriage by love, rather she, like her own parents, would have to settle for the best available option.

But the weekend hadn’t gone as she’d expected. The trouble had started Sunday morning, a few hours before heading home. They had gotten up early to run on the beach, but instead of going stride for stride like they usually did their paces had been at odds. David had kept edging ahead, telling her she could run faster. On the surface it seemed complimentary, this “you’re faster than you think” stuff that guys liked to do, but, as it had with other guys, it felt more controlling than encouraging. “Go on ahead,” she had said, “I’ll meet you back at the inn.” That really would have been okay with her, but he didn’t seem to want that, and after the run she had felt a tension that she had not felt with him before.

Later, walking into town for breakfast, there had been an uneasy silence. This was new too; usually the talk just bubbled from both of them. She had taken his hand, but she couldn’t seem to find that comfortable place that she had always been able to find. At the restaurant the sense that they had a special secret was missing, that “I bet those people don’t know what we were doing with each other an hour ago” feeling that made it so much fun to be out in public.

Now they were sitting across from one another in that very same breakfast place that they had sat in twenty years previously—two almost fifty-year-olds whose children were finally old enough to let them be alone. Jessica had enjoyed the weekend; she had enjoyed coming back here, and she had liked having time alone with David. But she also felt distant from him. She wanted them to remember the weekend together, but his memories were so different from hers that reminiscing left her feeling at odds with him.

She decided to try again.

“You know what my favorite moment of that weekend was?” she asked.

“The fifth time we had sex?” David answered. She knew that he was trying to be playful, but it felt as if he were trying to force her memories into his, and she sensed herself pushing back from him, wanting to hold on to her own mind.

“No.” Her voice was gentle but resolved. “The drive home.”

“What, you were happy to get away from me?” David was still kidding, but she could tell that he was starting to feel hurt that she didn’t remember the same romantic getaway that he did.

“Not at all.” Her voice was still serious, but she short-circuited her husband’s hurt by taking his hand, and by looking directly into his eyes. “It was a complicated weekend, David. But for me that wasn’t a bad thing. We were starting to get to know each other. To really get to know each other. It was the first time we had to deal with some of the same stuff we’ve had to deal with over the past twenty years. What I remember is that when we were driving home I tried to talk to you about it, and you didn’t get defensive. I still remember what you said: ‘Maybe it can’t always be like the movies. Maybe we have to get through the harder times too.’ ”

“I do remember that,” David answered softly, returning her gaze. Jessica felt herself relax. All weekend David had wanted to make love, and she hadn’t quite been into it. Now she felt herself open to him. “I’ll always remember that moment,” she continued. “I remember when you dropped me off at my place that night I felt kind of sad, like I’d lost something, but I felt good, too. A different kind of good. That was when I trusted that it was going to work.”

Copyright © 2008 by Mark O’Connell, PhD