Love in the Long Term
An essay on the underrated, mundane miracle of romantic love several years in
In celebration of a day dedicated to the showier, blowsier kind of romantic love, here’s a short essay from the Peak Notions archive on the merits and miraculousness of long-term love. Because new love is certainly exciting, but there is another sort of romance to being with someone for a long time and knowing that not only do you still love them, you really like them too.
You’ll find the audio version of this article here.
“ I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex’, that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.””
Joni Mitchell
Seven years is a long time; enough to transform out of one self and into another. Seven years is not ten, or fifty, but it is enough to put substantial roots down in a relationship. It is sufficient to know what you’ve signed up for, and who you are within its boundaries. This week, himself and I celebrated our seventh anniversary. We made a roast beef dinner and we ate it together. It is only the latest one in a series of roast beef dinners and we talked about the things we usually discuss over meals – whether the beef was overdone, happenings at work, and what we are reading at the moment.
It is seven years away from our first dinner together, which bristled with the tension of a burgeoning mutual attraction and the insecurity of each wondering whether the other felt the same. The unsaid blurred the air around us during that dinner, so that while we were together, nothing seemed to fully exist outside it. Since then, our relationship has changed and reformed itself several times over. Each evolution is interesting, and each teaches me something new about this person I sometimes complacently presume to know utterly. He has moved from someone I found merely scintillating when I met him to someone much more important – my relationship with him is certainly the most valuable in my life.
Ayishat Akanbi is one of my favourite social media follows. If you don’t follow her, you might enjoy her honest, curious approach to usually emotion-laden ideas, as well as her generally refreshing defiance of categorisation of almost any sort. In a world that urges us from every direction that it is in our best interest to conform, she is a genuine individual. She shared an excerpt of writing by singer songwriter Joni Mitchell to her Instagram stories. I’ve always liked Mitchell, who I think deserves a place among musicians like Leonard Cohen to whom music itself seems almost incidental, or perhaps secondary – at least to my enjoyment of their work. That may seem like a treasonous expostulation to people who deeply appreciate music but holster your weapon. What I mean to say is that Mitchell always struck me as a poet before all else – a person whose poems happened to be put to music but could generally stand confidently on their own.
The excerpt of writing that Akanbi shared was from a wider piece detailing Mitchell’s thoughts on romantic love, particularly love in the long term. The songwriter correctly notes that the rituals of early love and courtship have a special status in our culture. “…this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity – the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.” Reading it transported me back to that first dinner J and I had together.
We have all experienced the frenzy and flattery of early-stage romantic relationships; the revelation of a person we admire unfolding before us like a foreign language effortlessly translating itself. It makes us feel powerful and the image of oneself reflected by them is utterly intoxicating. In the first flurry of lust and early love, we feel more like the idealised version of ourselves that they see than the less interesting, less perfect, less worthy and less beautiful person we have always been in our own company. A relationship at this stage is all potential, and consequently it is perfect and untouchable. We know enough of one another to feel the electric miracle of sexual and emotional compatibility, and not enough to temper the almost hubristic sense of our own cosmic good luck. It comes to us as a revealed truth, and so we are not equipped to dissect or argue with it. We wouldn’t want to anyway.
It is hardly surprising then, that at some point in our lives, or indeed pathologically, many of us have a tendency to repeat this pattern or to think that love stops when the energy of complex infatuation does. There is nothing wrong at all with enjoying the early stages of a relationship and the way they impart a sharpness and shimmer on everything and everyone we encounter. It is one of the deep joys of human experience – a brief and thrillingly intense lacuna from the ultimate solitude of our existence. The problem occurs when we serially seek this experience for its own sake, as though that sense of holding a great and wonderful secret can ever represent substantial meaning in itself rather than mere potentiality.
Mitchell describes the ultimate narcissism of serially seeking this amorphous connection beautifully – “What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories – and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over… You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth rekindles the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you – it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”
I have thought about this since first reading it. The grandiosity of first feelings is certainly all-encompassing, but there is something about the deep, honest acceptance to be found in a good long-term relationship that should really be appreciated more for the miracle and the romance it truly is. To say to someone, years in, after deaths and losses and house moves and money worries, crushes and cat sick and a thousand roast beef dinners ‘I love you’ is an offering of such purity that I’m disappointed it isn’t a film genre. To know someone and love them. To be loved by them and to work to maintain a vulnerability toward them in the long term, once they have seen you as you truly are, and fully accept you as you outgrow that and become someone else entirely over time, must surely be the stuff of a great love story.
Joni Mitchell was a contemporary voice for me growing up. It was difficult to parse all of her poetry in song, but that’s such a good quote. I believe that, if you get past around 6 months of physical attraction (maybe 7 if you prolong it with an SSRI), then you’ll begin to see through the veil - this can be a great thing and companionate love makes the world a better, bigger place. (37yrs of it to date). Good Valentine’s Day essay, Laura. Thank you.
What you wrote below is really wise and true. First love is all about the image of yourself. A mature relationship is about the two of you as a team.
"We have all experienced the frenzy and flattery of early-stage romantic relationships; the revelation of a person we admire unfolding before us like a foreign language effortlessly translating itself. It makes us feel powerful and the image of oneself reflected by them is utterly intoxicating."