We’ve got very good at talking about leaving. The exit, the boundary, the ‘I deserve better.’ What we’ve got less good at is the quieter, more complicated practice of deciding, again, to stay.
My parents have been married for fifty three years. I asked my mother recently, not in a meaningful-conversation way but in a washing-up way, whether she had ever thought seriously about leaving. She thought about it for a moment. ‘Probably twice a week for the first twenty years,’ she said. ‘Then it settled down.’
The exit narrative dominates contemporary relationship culture in a way that would have been almost unrecognisable a generation ago. We have, as a culture, become very fluent in the language of leaving. The red flags. The icks. The ‘I outgrew him.’ The ‘I was doing all the emotional labour.’ These are not trivial concerns, they are often accurate diagnoses of genuinely bad situations, but they have also, I think, crowded out a different and harder conversation: the one about what it means to choose, actively, repeatedly, to stay.
The difficulty is that staying has become associated with settling. With the woman who doesn’t value herself enough to leave. With a kind of passive acceptance that the culture has decided is the opposite of self-actualisation. This is partly a corrective to decades of women being encouraged to endure things they shouldn’t have endured, and so it comes from a real and important place. But I think it has also made it very difficult to talk honestly about the ordinary texture of long-term love, which involves, regularly, deciding that the person you are with is imperfect in ways that matter and choosing them anyway.
Staying has become culturally associated with settling. This makes it very hard to talk honestly about the ordinary texture of long-term love.
The therapist Esther Perel, who has spent thirty years talks about desire as something that needs to be generated actively in long-term relationships. That the feelings don’t maintain themselves. That choosing someone again, deliberately and with full knowledge of who they are, is a fundamentally different act than the initial falling. ‘The same partner,’ she has said, ‘can be a very different relationship.’ It is a line I come back to often.
What I’ve noticed, in conversations with people in long relationships who seem genuinely happy and by happy I don’t mean uncomplicated, I mean alive and present and connected to the person they’re with, is that they don’t talk about their relationship as something that happened to them. They talk about it as something they are, continuously, doing. A friend who has been with her partner for fifteen years said something once that has stayed with me: ‘I fall for him again about once a year. Not in a dramatic way. Just a moment where I look at him and think: yes. You. Still.’
The ‘still’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It contains the passage of time and the deliberateness and the slightly defiant quality of any commitment made in full knowledge of its costs. It is not romantic in the way that early love is romantic. It is something better and more durable and much harder to put in an Instagram caption.
My mother, at the sink, rinsing glasses. Forty-one years. Twice a week for the first twenty, she said, and then it settled down. I asked her what settling down felt like. She handed me a glass to dry. ‘Like choosing,’ she said. ‘It just gets easier.’
