Which Long-term Relationships Will Survive and Which Won't

From the outside, it seems impossible to predict whether a couple will break up or stay together...unless we fathom the fundamental reason why all breakups occur.

It can seem very confusing why certain long-term relationships survive and some don’t. It can — from afar — look as if it’s the most cruel and alarming sort of lottery.

Trying to explain love to a child or a visitor from another planet promises to be a perplexing matter indeed: all couples on their wedding day are united in wanting to make things work. Then, for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension, some of them simply seem to dissolve and others don’t.

To remove some of the terrifying element of apparent chance (and encourage us to work on the right aspects of our own couples), it may be helpful to become deliberately reductive about the real reasons why breakups occur.

We need, in this regard, first to discount certain causes that gain far too much airtime relative to their actual likelihoods.

Sometimes, people sometimes break up because one party wants a younger partner. Or because they want better sex. Or because they are seeking a more exciting companion. Or because their hobbies or political views have drifted apart. Or because- somehow- things have gone "stale".

There are few factors to bring up a break-up:

1. The costs of massive break-ups and investments that people make in being together
2. The cost and investment if there are children involved, one party would be more engaged than their companion.
3. The sense of one's or both spouses/companion's that they are not heard or misunderstood., especially that something very important to them has been disregarded. OR, that their point of view has not, in a fundamental level been acknowledged and honored.

There is a big difference between a partner not doing what we want and a partner not hearing what we want. It's entirely possible that one would remain with someone who doesn't share most of our interests so long as they happen to accept and signal an understanding of how much these interests matter to us.

In conclusion: The long-term relationship that will Survive needs to rely on chance, the partners need to learn to listen and most importantly when one partner has something very important to say they need to empathize with the other partner, or so to say, get across to their bridge.

One sentence that always works: "I can see this matters a lot to you, and I will try my hardest to think about it and see what I can do about it. "