Why so many relationships fail

This week’s video is all about the conflict between the two tribes and how that can lead to heartache:

It’s a sad fact that romantic relationships can fall apart even when both people are trying to make it work.

One of the less obvious reasons why is that there are two profoundly different ways that people experience early love.

And that difference means that they have totally mismatched expectations about what love feels like, and how people in love behave.

In this video, I’ll show you how the two love tribes misunderstand each other, how that can lead to relationship breakdown, and how to avoid that heartache.

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Now, one of the biggest reasons why many promising relationships don’t last is a failure to understand that early love doesn’t feel the same for everyone.

OK, so let’s start at the beginning: what do I mean by “early love”?

Well, obviously, that initial, exciting, sparkly phase of love feels distinct from the warmth and affection of long-term love.

When you’re first getting to know someone, everything is novel, and thrilling and full of romantic potential.

There’s typically a lot of erotic charge, butterflies of excitement, and the delights of mutual bliss… but that “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last forever.

Social psychologists tend to classify this early stage of love as passionate or romantic love, and the later phase as companionate love or affectional bonding.

From the perspective of neuroscience, these phases also have different dominant neural systems – early on the reward and arousal systems are linked very powerfully to bonding, but as time goes on the reward-seeking drive and the exhilaration of arousal habituate and subside.

And it kind of makes sense that we’d have different drives for the different phases of love. So, first urgently forming a pair bond, but then keeping that bond going in the long term.

But that early phase of passionate love can be a profoundly different experience for different people.

And that’s when the problems can start.

1. Limerence

For about half the population of the world, early love is a spectacular, transformative experience.

The beloved becomes the most desirable person imaginable. No one else compares to their romantic potency. Being with them gives an enormous, intoxicating natural high. You feel giddy with euphoria when it seems like your feelings are returned by them, and you want them with a craving that overpowers all other concerns.

It feels like your brain is running in a different operational mode. You feel like you are definitively “in” an altered mental state of intense romantic infatuation.

A state of total mental preoccupation.

So, it’s hard to concentrate on any other tasks, because intrusive thoughts about them keep distracting you, you daydream incessantly, you neglect your other responsibilities, and you direct all your energy into desperately trying to form an ecstatic union with them.

This mental state is known as limerence.

And, limerence was first defined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s and since she first introduced the idea it’s provoked two types of reaction:

Number 1: That’s just love

Number 2: That’s not love, that’s obsession

So, some people are highly sceptical of the idea and think that limerence is just an intense form of passionate love, others—like me—think that limerence captures an important binary distinction.

Not everyone falls into that altered mental state during early love.

Not everyone has this tendency to flip into a state of being “in love”, as a distinct state of mind in which the whole world seems transformed; so, colours are more vibrant, you feel more optimistic, overstimulated, and charged with manic energy.

For the people who don’t experience limerence, early love is far less disruptive and destabilising.

2. The two tribes

So a couple of years ago, I tried to estimate how common limerence is in the general population.

I surveyed 1500 adults in the US and UK and asked them if they felt they had ever experienced that altered state of mind during their own romantic lives.

Over half said yes.

Which means, of course, that a bit less than half of the population said no.

For people who don’t experience limerence, the early phase of love is still a wonderful, exciting experience, but it doesn’t overtake their mind, and their lives, to the same extent.

For them, romantic love adds to life in a positive way. They feel attraction, lust, and desire, but not in a way that overwhelms their self-control and crowds out all other concerns.

In fact, one of the crucial events for Dorothy Tennov in formulating the concept of limerence came when she was explaining her research to a friend, Helen Payne, who had never experienced the state.

So, in Tennov’s words:

Describing the intricacies of romantic attachments to Helen was like try to describe the color red to one blind from birth. “It doesn’t make sense,” she would say, “I simply don’t understand how anyone could feel like that, how anyone could be so important to another person.”

For Helen, media portrayals of romantic love seemed like extravagant exaggerations, and the attentiveness and possessiveness of her potential partners were unsettling.

 “They seemed to care excessively about everything I did… nothing was ever enough for them.”

So that realisation revealed a major source of heartache: the two tribes—limerents and non-limerents—will be going through very different experiences in the early stages of love.

And that can doom promising relationships to failure.

3. How limerence causes relationship trouble

The first obvious problem caused by limerence is the problem that Helen Payne faced: when a limerent and a non-limerent start to fall in love their instincts will clash.

The limerent will be intoxicated; drunk on euphoria and desperate to bond. They will have an insatiable desire for their “limerent object”. No amount of time together will be enough. Even introverts will happily, giddily, spend every waking hour as close to their beloved as they can.

The non-limerent, by contrast, is likely to feel that this is a bit much.

Yes, they really enjoy spending time together, but love shouldn’t feel so needy, urgent and suffocating.

Their rational attempts to try and cool things down a bit will of course provoke the opposite reaction in their limerent partner—who will react in panic at the fear of losing the most wonderful, desirable, and precious person in their world.

Rather like the tragedy of anxious and avoidant attachment styles leading to agonising entanglements, limerents and non-limerents have exactly opposite expectations of how love should feel.

Limerents yearn for total immersion in intimacy; formation of an tight pair bond as fast as possible. They’ll rush into what Arthur and Elaine Aron termed “inclusion of the other in the self.”

Non-limerents want a new, enriching addition to their existing life, not a total transformation of their world. For them, the process of bonding and intertwining lives happens more slowly and deliberately.

Inevitably, if these two tribes meet, what starts as a promising relationship based on mutual attraction falters in the push and pull of mismatched hopes and expectations.

But, limerence isn’t only a cause for relationship heartache when non-limerents are involved.

Even mutual limerence can lead to trouble.

If two limerents bond, it can be fantastic. If you are both free and both limerent, then you get to enjoy the euphoria of ecstatic union together. And it really is great when it happens.

But, it doesn’t last forever.

Limerence inevitably passes once the relationship is consummated and it settles into a routine, and at that point, the thrills and tingles and fireworks fade.

You move into the companionate love phase.

Affection supercedes attraction.

This can cause two types of trouble.

The first is that you discover that the limerence, in all it’s urgent and spectacular excesses, was covering up some serious incompatibilities that can no longer be ignored.

All the flaws, and the irritations, and annoying habits that can be dismissed as charming idiosyncrasies when you’re love drunk start to grate. Limerence can idealise and rationalise away some major sources of conflict, but they will show themselves once the altered mental state has passed.

And that dooms the relationship in the long term if those problems can’t be worked out.

The second major problem is if one or both of the partners develops limerence for someone else.

That can lead to the relationship-wrecking situation captured by that awful phrase:

I love you but I’m not “in love” with you.

What they mean, of course, is I love you but I’m in limerence for someone else.

The long-term bond is damaged because a new short-term limerent episode has struck it.

Some limerents even spend their lives chasing these thrills. So once limerence fades they lose their libido, and their sense of attraction, and their “in love” feelings, and so they abandon the old relationship to chase a new limerent object.

So serial monogamy like this works for some people, but there’s also a Groundhog Day quality to it—repeating the pattern of chasing the fireworks, and hoping that the next limerent object will be the one that finally makes those feelings last.

But eventually, most limerents come to realise that they can’t have everything.

Early love just can’t last forever.

OK, so, that’s a bit depressing. How can you avoid falling into these emotional traps?

4. How to fix it

Well, the good news is, you are already a lot of the way there.

The most important step in avoiding these relationship problems is becoming aware of your own romantic tendencies.

Are you a limerent or a non-limerent?

That affects how you should approach romantic scenarios.

So, if you are dating, is your potential new love interest showing signs of limerence?

Now if you do come from the opposite tribes, realise that your own emotional response will not be the same as theirs—don’t just wing it on instinct and intuition, as that is likely to push you apart.

Be aware of how they are likely to react to your romantic overtures.

Now if you are a limerent, try and you see through the fog of love intoxication and identify any potential incompatibilities before you rush to commit.

If you are in a long-term relationship, but begin to feel the glimmer or limerent attraction for someone else, do not indulge it, unless you really do want to leave the existing relationship.

Really, in every case, just knowing what limerence is, and how it affects people in their romantic choices, means you can make much better informed decisions about romantic life.

The two tribes aren’t incompatible, or in conflict.

You don’t need to abandon half the population as potential partners.

You just need to be aware of how different peoples expectations are when it comes to what love feels like.