Recent compact card games and conversation starter books like “We’re Not Really Strangers” and “Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love,” intend to foster something universal: a real connection. One partner asks emotionally-bare questions, while the other listens. Then, they share their responses, sometimes starting or concluding with maintained eye contact for a few minutes. The belief is that to know someone more intimately is to connect with them— or fall in love with them.

In 1997, psychologist Dr. Arthur Aron composed a seemingly arbitrary list of 36 questions (three sets of twelve questions) estimated to take about 45 minutes to build intimacy between partners. He chose participants to take this survey for his study titled “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness.” The questions range in sensitivity from who they would want as a dinner guest, to the last time they cried in front of someone. The modern card games resemble Aron’s studies by emphasizing the importance of honest expression. 

These card games demonstrate that falling in love is shockingly easy. For instance, in an interview, actor Andrew Garfield claimed that he believed in love at first sight and the potential to love anybody.

While many see Valentine’s Day as a way to embrace the vulnerability of falling in love, a way to celebrate newer traditions like Galentine’s Day, or a time to reignite self-love, others grimace at its impending presence and its gaudy, consumerist spirit. Falling in love can make people giddy  for more of those feel-good dopamine rushes. In the same vein, researchers detail that the pain of heartbreak is so impactful that it is comparable to physical pain. There is no doubt that romantic love can cause intense and often conflicting feelings of affection and aversion. 

Falling in love or loving someone sounds straightforward, but staying in love is often more uncertain. A sense of fulfillment is not guaranteed, and passion ebbs and flows in ways that signal an end or regrowth. Conversation starters become of little use when they’ve become rote.

“It’s impossible to keep up that kind of level of impressing and going and doing and being involved in each other’s lives that you did during the honeymoon period,” Jane Greer, a marriage and family therapist, told Women’s Health.

Limerence (a.k.a. the honeymoon phase) is the initial period of a few months to a couple of years when a relationship feels fun and lively. 

The struggle of staying in love can easily shatter the most idealistic of people and have them question the longevity of connections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2020, 2.3 people out of 1,000 got divorced — almost half of the marriage rate of that year. But even this statistic does not take into account all the individuals who stay in unhappy marriages or relationships.

Audiences on TikTok celebrate couples for sustaining long-term relationships that seem to exemplify a “successful” union. Still, those in long-term relationships make jabs at how monotonous and quiet their conversations over dinner with one another have become. 

Even Elaine Aron, author and clinical psychologist (who married Arthur Aron), states that the 36-question list was not made to help people fall in love because participants in the study did not come with the expectation of falling in love with their partner (in the study by Aron, individuals were strangers who were randomly assigned and variables controlled in a lab setting). Further, she states that if the experiment’s purpose was to examine love, they would have to follow the study to see if the relationship lasts — which is costly. 

And these concepts that Aron introduces raise other questions regarding the reasons behind a relationship’s success or failure. These concepts also bring into question whether stagnancy indicates the end of a relationship or an opportunity for growth.

When considering relationships like marriage, the biggest reasons behind divorces are a lack of commitment and conflict, which can stem from boredom or dissonance in a relationship. 

While falling for someone can feel intense and exciting, the novelty will wear off unless it is consistently rediscovered.

For instance, there are striking studies that detail how women tire of monogamy before men. This perspective rejects the often held notion that women want to latch onto their partner for life while men just focus on the physical — rather than emotional — components of a relationship. According to the studies, marital, familial, and social pressures on women (such as when the couple has children) can stifle their autonomy, even though women can be sexual. On the same note, the studies exhibit how men have emotional depth, despite the commonly held belief that they are  more concerned with visual appearances or physical gratification.

Psychologist Wijnand A.P. Van Tilburg stated that those perceived to be boring were avoided and seen as disinterested and not competent. In relationships, then, boredom was a lack of interest in their partner, lack of communication, and the satisfying things that characterized the relationship at the start now running dry. But the authors note that boredom’s linkage to negative qualities seems to be more damaging than boredom itself. If anything, stagnancy is a way to assess disconnection and create changes.

Elaine Aron even suggests changing up some of the 36 questions or eliminating some of them. That way, asking questions doesn’t feel monotonous. 

Additionally, following the honeymoon phase, consistent communication is a great aid to making a relationship last. John Gottman, a psychological researcher and clinician, researched bids for attention and the power of maintained hugs and kisses that release oxytocin. Bids for attention are ways to communicate and turn to an individual, feel responded to, and thus acknowledged in a positive way. One can positively remember these bids when conflict arises.

There can also be merit in the “boring” things that are necessary for connection such as shared chores, bills, or sitting quietly together. 

On another note, though, despite individuals in the U.S. increasingly straying from the nuclear family of a heterosexual couple and two children, the concepts of polyamory and polygamy still remain hush-hush and often dismissed. 

However, the rates of polyamory are increasing. In the 2020 “moral acceptability” section of Gallup’s Values and Beliefs Poll, 20% of Americans deemed polygamy acceptable, which is a stark contrast to the 5% acceptance rate in 2006. Unmarried rather than married people were more likely to accept polygamy as well.

Polyamorous relationships chisel away at monogamy being the only route to romantic intimacy and challenge the concept of having a “soulmate” for life. This kind of love may not be for everyone, but for some, if it is consensual, it is a way to add ethical novelty to a relationship. 

In other words, romantic love will not always be a consistent flame that certainly signals an end when the fire goes out. Perhaps romantic love doesn’t need to be defined as perpetually lit or unlit. Conversations — not just intimate conversation starters — might still culminate in the end of a romantic connection or a chance to address ebb and flow in a new or deeper direction.

Photo Courtesy of Annie Spratt of Unsplash