Will You Always Love Me? Making Love Last

One of the most difficult questions facing couples when they consider the idea of a lifelong commitment to their partner is “Will I always be loved the way I am now?” and “Will I always love this person with whom I am presently in love?” People’s hesitancy to commit is understandable. What could be worse than committing yourself to a partner for life only to find that after a while, you no longer love them or vice versa. If we could be sure that the answer to both questions was “Yes,” committing to another would be fairly easy. The problem is that we all have experienced the ephemeral nature of love. Sometimes we feel tremendous love for a person and at other times, we can feel the opposite. And sometimes, we may feel almost nothing for them, a kind of indifference. These changes can happen quickly, too. When love is synonymous with a feeling, then the idea that we would always feel a certain way towards someone seems unrealistic. No one feels exactly the same way all the time about anybody, do they? You feel what you feel when you feel it. So what can anyone promise their partner if not that they will always love them?

It helps if you think of love as a way of being and something you do, not just something you feel. While you can’t promise your partner that you will always feel love for them, you can promise your partner that you will always be loving. Your behavior is one of the things that you do have control over.

A remarkable thing happens when you decide to be loving and begin to do loving things for your partner. You end up feeling love for them and you most likely will like them more, too. I’m not exactly sure why this happens. It may have something to do with a theory called, cognitive dissonance which states that human beings have a hard time holding two or more contradictory thoughts or beliefs in their head at the same time. For instance, if you think, “I feel don’t very loving towards my partner” combined with “I just did something particularly loving for them,” you will experience cognitive dissonance. The mind tends to resolve the dissonance by either changing the behavior or the contradictory belief. What usually happens is that you will change your thinking about your partner. Having just done something kind for them, you will change your belief to, “Actually, I do love them.”

Early in the morning, before I leave the bedroom, even if I’m in a hurry, I walk over to my sleeping wife and kiss her gently on the lips. She smiles. I whisper, “I love you” and then I leave for work. I know she likes this but I also know that doing it (being loving) puts me in touch with how much I love her. As I say this to her, I can feel that these words are true for me. It is not just a perfunctory gesture. That loving behavior, that way of being is something I can always achieve if I want to and it does a lot to alleviate any concerns I might have had about losing that loving feeling.