Until a few years ago, the idea that you wouldn’t consider a long-term relationship with someone that you loved, seemed inconceivable to me. After all, if you had strong enough feelings for a person that could be defined as love, surely that spoke to bigger things that would carry over into a partnership? That no matter what difficulties you experienced as a couple, whatever the incompatibilities, all could be smoothed over with love.
It has taken me a very long time to learn that loving someone doesn’t mean you should necessarily enter into a relationship with them. I’ve learned this a few times over the last two decades, but the message properly sunk in a couple of years ago when I had my heart crushed by my then-boyfriend over the phone, while I was parked in a car park.
A few weeks later, again sitting in that same car park and still feeling utterly sad, looking for anything to give me comfort, I found myself listening to therapist Esther Perel on a podcast about break-ups. In it, she said there is a difference between someone who is a part of your love story, and someone who is part of your life story. And while there has to be love in your long-term partnership, love doesn’t automatically lead to a long-term partnership.
That crystallised exactly what had happened, and upon reflection of my past relationships, the expectation that love equalled partnership, was almost certainly the cause of deep heartbreak.
In some way, coming from an Indian family means that I should have already known this, what with arranged marriages being part of our culture. Arranged marriages have no foundation of love at the beginning, and so they prioritise other things; respect, trust, and compatibility of life goals. It’s by no means perfect, and these days there are plenty of them that end in divorce, but witnessing my parents’ 50-year arranged marriage has made me understand exactly what and how much goes into a long-term relationship that has had to include these things from the start.
It isn’t the stuff of romcoms, but love alone cannot sustain what is required in a relationship for it to succeed.
For instance, while I have always been obsessed with the dramatic narrative around love, it wasn’t until I experienced the absolute lowest points in my marriage to my late husband Rob, that I realised love isn’t enough. In Rob’s case, he hid a crippling drug addiction from me, and continued to lie repeatedly about his sobriety, which crumbled the bedrock of trust and respect that was impossible to piece back together. Although I loved him right up to the day he died, and have continued to love him nine years after his death, it is unlikely we would have been able to stay together without something fundamental changing.
We are told that love is also pain, but a crucial learning for me was that while relationships require constant work and a commitment to evolving together as people, pain should not be a default, or something to put up with. Relationships require compromise but they don’t require endless sacrifice of the self and I feel like when this happens, it’s because a loving connection (that should have fizzled out) has been shoehorned into a relationship despite glaring incompatibilities.
Case in point was my last relationship. Although I doubted I would ever fall in love again after Rob died, it was of utmost delight when I finally did. It was quick, intense and made me feel as if a part of me that had been asleep for a very long time, had finally woken up. We talked about everything – travel plans, going to weddings, the kind of sandwiches we liked to eat on a train, the sort of music we liked. He was a bohemian with a career, and his zest for living and open-mindedness brought me out of my post-pandemic shell, encouraging me to be more spontaneous.
But none of this was a proper foundation for a relationship, and we hadn’t properly considered if we were compatible in how we lived our lives. The short answer is that we weren’t.
The superpower of being in your forties, as I am now, is that you have likely experienced different iterations of the same thing enough times to know when something is unlikely to improve. You are also likely to know yourself better and have a firmer grasp of what you want, and your expectations. When you are younger, people will try to drown out your intuition by saying “don’t be fussy” or “give them a chance”, and while it’s important to be open-minded, I know almost immediately when something isn’t right and is unlikely to improve. I also know that I’m far too old to be taking advice from other people about how I run something as intimate as my love life.
It’s also about figuring out what you do want. For instance, I’ve realised loving someone doesn’t automatically mean they are able to meet my needs, and it requires good, honest communication for both of us to share what we want.
An important quality for me is making time for a partner, and showing up for the important things. The last two people I’ve dated missed birthdays, Valentine’s Days, important sporting events I’ve competed at. While I’m a busy person, I’ve worked hard on creating balance in my life, and I realised that someone who is consistently not going to be there, or will talk about things but rarely action them, is not someone I want to be in a relationship with.
Ultimately, partnership is about sharing a life, and creating balance. That takes a lot more than love. It takes respect for the other person’s time, honouring their autonomy and feeling as if someone has your back in everything. For me, saying “I love you” is easy, it’s what comes after that requires consistency and intention, that is a lot harder to do, but necessary in order to sustain anything of longevity, and value.