Together
Making Love Last
It would be nice to trust the happily-ever-after endings of fairy tales and movies, but life is longer than 20 pages or two hours. Longer, messier and less predictable.
How do certain couples stay together for decades while others crash and burn after only a few intense weeks? The short answer is: maturity. It takes two grown-ups to recognize that love is not only the fluttery feeling you had at the beginning. It takes two grown-ups to work at continuing to like, much less love, each other through years of close quarters, foul moods (and occasionally odors), external forces, disagreements, betrayals, tragedies, aging...oh, and some good stuff too.
You can graph the highs and lows of staying together over time:
passion : compromise : disillusionment : rediscovery : complacency : big scare : renewed effort : commitment
Rinse and repeat.
Making love last takes sticking it out when you don't feel like it and holding back, at least sometimes, when you'd rather lash out.
Love is what makes life worth living, but that doesn't make it easy. The grail is staying together happily through decades, but like Indiana Jones, we must overcome enormous obstacles. "Forever" is a fantasy for all but the most committed. And that commitment means hard work. It means acknowledging that most don't make it. It means staying a little scared, seeing the danger of love's potential death and working to keep it alive.
Ah, but how to keep love alive over years? Here's a formula: GRIMS + F3.
Good sex: Good sex in a long-term relationship is a triumph of letting go over keeping it safe, secure and familiar. Mix it up. Nurture the erotic in your relationship. Keep your imaginations loose. Take turns doing sexual favors for each other. Just don't keep track of whose turn it is.
Romance: Do things that make your partner swoon, even if they don't come naturally. As above, take turns doing favors for each other. If you're not by nature romantic, keep a list. Set alarms in your PDA to remind you to be romantic. Whatever it takes.
Intimacy: No, not the same as sex. It's listening, nurturing, caring, sharing, and it's critical.
Mystery: Despite the big pitch for intimacy, there are times to hold something of yourself back. Couples that only have eyes for each other inevitably disintegrate. Don't always be available to your partner. You're not looking to raise suspicions, just to stay as mysterious as someone who pees with the door open can be.
Spontaneity: How do you plan for spontaneity? Just stop doing what you usually do. Break out of a habit and create a new context for love and desire. Surprise your lover.
Fitness: Stay in shape and care about your looks. Married couples have a tendency to devolve into carb-sucking mouth-breathers with spare tires and outdated grooming habits. Don't let this happen to you. Keep in mind the G above.
Forgiveness: Get over it. So he's not a knight in shining armor. So she's not the perfect princess. Don't be a hardass. Learn to tolerate transgressions as you would want your own to be tolerated. Don't blame, grow as a couple.
Focus: Stay focused on love despite the competing forces of the modern world, like the breakups of every couple you know. Stay focused despite the occasional flashes of hatred and regret. Don't ignore warning signs, just deal with them and stay focused on the end goal.
Not all long-term couples are together because they love each other. There can be complex emotional, financial and familial reasons to stick it, to be roommates rather than lovers. Longevity alone is not the grail, it's a plastic loving cup you don't bother to display.
If you love each other, you can find ways to stay together long-term. Sure, you'll fall in and out of love many times over the years, but most likely not on the same exact schedule. One will usually be more in love than the other, but that's OK. There will be constant shifts in the balance of power, as well as shifts between adventure and security, the exotic and the familiar. Ride those shifts, embrace them and learn from them. They're what give you your fingerprint as a couple, making you unique and providing clues about how to stay together.
by Laura
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