After a few months of love, the first emotions sometimes change into first arguments: the passion then fades to give way to separation. In this sense, some years would be more difficult for lovers to overcome than others. What are the years when the couple is most in crisis? Response from specialists.
There couple life is far from being a long calm river. If the love we feel can be as big as the ocean, just like it, it has its ups and downs, its high tides and its low tides. According to the period of the relationship to which one refers, like the waves, conflicts abound and the heart wanders. Thus, in the context of a long-term relationship, some years would be harder to pass than others : presented as “caps”, these are those where the couple is in crisis, on the verge of breaking up, where disagreements are more frequent and where lovers quarrel very often.*
Kim Polinder, a marriage counselor who advises on tiktok, explains that there are 4 very specific years which are more difficult for the couple to go through: the year of 3 years, 7 years, 11 years, and finally 15 years. So why these years in particular? What explains why these are the ones where the couple is in the most difficulty? Psychologists, specialists in romantic relationships, and couple therapists give us an idea.
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The year of 3 years: first couple crisis
It’s well known : “love lasts 3 years”. This adage, widely spread through Frédéric Beigbeder’s book, also owes its popularity to its veracity. Many couples have come close to breaking up after (only) 3 years. But how is it that after so little time, the couple is already floundering? The fault at the end of the “Honeymoon”...
In the romantic relationship, this phase is when everything is beautiful, everything is rosy, where the lovebirds see each other with hearts in their eyes and are blinded by the overflowing feelings they have for their lover. So when the honeymoon ends, “passionate love” fades, idealization leaves more room for reality, and we now see the other as he is; with its qualities… but also its faults (see Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love). According to psychologists, it lasts between 6 and 18 months : so this explains it. It is thus our new interpretation of things, this change of prism internally that pushes us to question the relationship. Lovers then have two options:
– either they adapt, find ways to rekindle the flame, design solutions to make the relationship last => their partner does not necessarily suit them in all respects but they choose to stay and the couple holds. Passionate love then consciously gives way to other forms of love**, involving more commitment on the part of the spouses.
– either disagreements are too strongthe differences too divisive, the two partners camp on their positions, fail to overcome this crisis and end up breaking up.
In addition to this “disillusionment”, marriage and family counselor Kim Polinder explains that couples who do not survive the “3 year old crisis” have not learned well how to resolve conflicts and that some buried resentments, caused by said conflicts, end up resurfacing. It is precisely in this that the psychiatrist Albert Eiguer advances that “Small barely perceptible movements, considered negligible next to much more significant phenomena, can cause great consequences some time later.”*
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The year of 7 years: a stagnation difficult to overcome
In the seventh year of their love story, it’s stagnation that puts life partners in difficulty. The couple can no longer move in the same direction: life projects that were once compatible are now irreconcilable, encouraging each to take separate and distinct paths. More generally, the vision of love and/or of life is no longer necessarily the same: lovers have changed and can no longer plan.
Everything that brought loved ones together in the past, which allowed them to bridge and compensate for the differences that separated them, no longer works: the common points shared are no longer enough to erase the points of divergence. A bit as if the old love binders had reached “stagnation”, at maturity: “for all couples in crisis, the common mechanisms that usually have a structuring role (fantasies, myths, ideals, specific modes of play, humor, sharing intimate secrets, decision-making) are affected”explains the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Alberto Eiguer.*
Paradoxically, it is often the entity of the couple in itself which has awakened these unsuspected parts in one or other of the partners, and which has triggered these latent personal changes which end up posing a problem… “During the course of life together, one helps the other to discover himself, in other words to express aspects which may have remained fallow in his unconscious, even in an embryonic state, and which could henceforth generate behaviors and unsuspected achievements before the establishment of the relationship”*, still details Eiguer.
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The year of 11 years: the test to evaluate the efforts of the past
Marriage counselor Kim Polinder says the 11 or 12 year is strategic in solving couple problems – whether past, present, or future. Indeed, it makes it possible to verify that the lovebirds have secured their achievements, that they have correctly learned to settle their differences, that they have established a communication that works, that they have overcome the stagnation of 7 years and that they finally managed to overcome most of the difficulties caused by the previous caps.
The year of 15 years: from passionate love to companion love
At the end of 15 years together, another ordeal presents itself to lovers who have already made efforts to save their marriage or their relationship. To overcome this course, Kim Pollinder argues that the couple must then succeed in moving from the status of “darling” to that of “friend”. This step is essential to maintain a semblance of a relationship despite the disappearance of passion: in fact, by being “lovers”, the two partners preserve the other pillars essential to the solidity of a couple according to Sternberg; to know, commitment And intimacy.
If they have failed to transform “infatuated love” into “complicit love”**, then passionate former lovers can become true strangers, “mere roommates” who are physically close but mentally distant. . If applicable, the communication is broken for a long time or even, never existed, which engendered theaccumulation of things left unsaid and hindered conflict resolution: “They never really learned how to resolve conflict, but instead of breaking up, they just learned how to disengage”says the couple therapist.
In addition, faced with such a long relationship, both spouses are submissive and together experience more life events that jeopardize the romantic relationship. These disturb the balance of the couple and thus threaten its durability. These may be “accidents of life” such as illness, the loss of a loved one or a sudden change in professional situation; Or “events linked to the evolution of the cycle of family life, such as a birth, that of the eldest in particular, or an adoption, the departure of the last of the children, separation.”*