Are you dreaming of a loooo long love? Then you should perhaps say goodbye to an apparently widespread idea.
Today, partnerships are much more non-binding and short-lived than in the past: While our grandparents or great-grandparents married when they were 18 and stayed together until the end of their lives, today we often already had four steadfast relationships at the age of 30, so that we can decide, but better again living single for a couple of years.
Reasons for this development include the loosening of social conventions and our comparatively much greater freedom in shaping our lives, higher prosperity and an advanced and still advancing equality of men and women. In this respect, we actually have nothing to complain about – because who needs a lifelong relationship when they have freedom and smartphones and are allowed to go to work or do not have to feed the family alone?
Besides, nothing and nobody prevents us from having long-term partnerships despite our new achievements. If you want, you can still get married today at 18 and stay together until the end of your life. However, one thing should not necessarily be the focus of the relationship: self-realization.
Partnership as "maximum self-realization" – can that work?
In his book "Praise of Long Love", the author and science editor of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" Dr. med. Werner Bartens asked why many people today find it comparatively difficult to bond with one another in the long term. He sees one reason – in agreement with the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz quoted by him – in the claim that more and more people are making of love and partnership: "The maximum realization of the self".
"Relationships are primarily understood as helpful mosaic pieces for self-discovery", writes Bartens, and they primarily served to make "one's own total work of art" even more valuable. Having as many different experiences as possible and "experiencing a variety of intense feelings and personal maturation processes", according to Bartens, this is the relationship goal of many modern people. And this goal can undoubtedly not be achieved as well with a long-term partnership as with several short ones.
Long-term relationships tend to give us a strong feeling of security and security. Partners and partnerships as reliable, constant elements in our life. Adventure, variety and challenge, on the other hand, tend to offer changing relationships – after all, the new is always more interesting than what we already know.
Are love and self-realization mutually exclusive?
Does that mean that we have to choose between self-realization and long-lasting love? Not necessarily. After all, we don't even know one hundred percent whether a variety of experiences is really the best and only way to find and develop oneself. We certainly need a certain amount of experience and have to leave our comfort zone regularly in order to develop our self (self-awareness). But we can't try everything anyway – and if we change partners every three years, for example, we will never find out what security feels like.
In addition, life beyond love and partnership offers us many other potentials to experience variety and challenges: Professionally, we have to change every few years, technically new innovations are constantly coming onto the market and who knows which planets you will be on in 10 years can go on vacation ?! Under certain circumstances, a relationship doesn't have to be another area that keeps us on our toes through adventure and variety …
Maybe there are people for whom long-term relationships are really nothing, because they get bored after a while and need new input. But for others it might just be good to have a kind of safe haven in their relationship where they can arrive and rest. Both are currently possible in our luxurious society. But that gives us the task of figuring out what we want.