为什么你不能拥有一份长久的亲密关系？Why Love Fades: The Science of Making Intimacy Last

"Seasons come and go, youth slips away, and life is just a chess piece on the board — win or lose, it all fades into smoke. And yet, when I look back, you alone are still there, unchanged."

Over the past week or so, three things blew up online: the PG One scandal, the nationwide trivia-app craze, and the surprise box-office hit Ex-Files 3. Everyone's been posting their ticket stubs. One friend put it this way: most girls drag their current boyfriends to see it hoping the movie will show them a side of themselves they've never quite managed to express — a plea to be a little more patient, to cherish a little harder, and please, please don't let us end up like the couple on screen. Consider it a warning shot.

Love is an accident that was meant to happen. If love were a game, there'd be no walkthrough for it. The only thing a walkthrough ever accomplishes is ending the game — so the characters in Ex-Files 3 dutifully speedran theirs to completion, and the breakup was the ending they earned. A love walkthrough kills off every possibility. The film slaps the label "love" on exactly the kind of feeling none of us needs; in the end the man finds himself a younger girl, the woman falls back on a placeholder ex, and the film calls that most unnecessary of endings a happy one.

I won't dwell on the movie here — and honestly, I don't think it's all that good. What I want to talk about is the differences between men and women, in biology and in how we think. Only once you truly know and understand where the two sexes are alike and where they diverge can you take better care of a relationship.

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What Intimacy Is Made Of — and How It Changes

Intimate relationships differ from passing acquaintance along six dimensions: how well you know each other, how much you care, mutual dependence, mutual consistency, trust, and loyalty. First, intimate partners have broad, private knowledge of each other. They're familiar with each other's history, tastes, feelings, and hopes; they care for one another, and each senses more affection coming back the other way. The lives of intimate partners are usually interwoven, too: what one person does shapes the other's goals and their ability to act on them. That mutual dependence — how much they need each other and how much they affect each other — is frequent (they influence each other constantly), strong (each has a marked effect), diverse (in many different ways), and enduring (over a long stretch of time).

Our generation's intimate relationships look very different from our parents'. A lot of forces shape a relationship, but the biggest is the level of socioeconomic development a culture has reached. The more industrialized and affluent a society, the more it accepts staying single, tolerates divorce, and supports the choice to marry. Ample education and material wealth also give people the security and foundation to stand on their own.

Self-esteem matters enormously in a relationship. Most people like themselves; some don't. How you appraise yourself is what your self-esteem is built on. Rate your own skills and traits positively and your self-esteem runs high; doubt yourself and it runs low. High-self-esteem people generally live healthier lives than low-self-esteem ones. Humans are intensely social animals: it's very hard to like ourselves when others don't. In most cases, someone who can't get enough acceptance and appreciation from others, and who stays low in self-esteem for a long time, develops a negative view of themselves. People low in self-esteem sometimes underestimate how much their partner loves them, and that undercuts the relationship; someone with a low opinion of themselves struggles to believe their partner truly, deeply loves them, and as a result they tend to be pessimistic about whether love can last. Which, in turn, makes them overreact to their partner's occasional bad mood.

Attraction

According to stimulus–value–role theory, we get three different kinds of information from a partner, and each one shapes how the relationship unfolds. When partners first meet, the attraction rests mainly on "stimulus" information — obvious external features like age, sex, and looks. Next comes the "value" stage, where attraction hinges on how well your attitudes and beliefs line up, as you start to learn whether you like the same food, the same movies, the same way of taking a vacation. Later still, "role" compatibility becomes the thing that matters most, as partners finally discover whether they agree on the basics of life — parenting, careers, how to run a home.

Time and experience also show up in what's called fatal attraction. If the very quality that first drew you to a partner slowly curdles into their most irritating, infuriating trait, you've got fatal attraction. Someone who came across as proactive and funny early on, say, may later read as irresponsible and foolish. The maddening trait was never a hidden secret — people just fail to grasp how much their own judgment will shift over time.

The third subtlety is that we rarely know our partner as well as we think we do. Partners overestimate how alike they are. We tend to like people who resemble our ideal selves — people who have the qualities we long for but don't possess. The most attractive partner is someone who's like us in many ways, yet also has the ideal traits we could realistically grow into with effort.

When two partners have different skills, one is often happy to let the other take the lead in their area of strength. That's complementarity, and it appeals to us because it makes up for what we lack. But most "complementarity" is really just similarity in disguise: a warm, easygoing person is happiest when met with warmth and humor. The truer form of complementarity involves genuinely different behavior between partners — dominance and deference. When people feel confident, they want a partner who takes their advice; on other occasions, when they need help and counsel, they want a partner who can give it. So "opposites" may occasionally attract. But we shouldn't make too much of it. People like others who are similar in temperament more than those who aren't — even the strongly dominant type prefers someone with a mind of their own over a spineless doormat who submits forever. Besides, when you actually want to get something done, it's best if your partner can help you pull it off. In the end, we like partners who make us happy and who have our back.

Social Cognition

As you get to know a partner better, you keep adjusting what you expect of an ideal partner, so that your standard comes to fit who your partner actually is. To a degree, people can decide, more or less at will, that the qualities their partner already has are precisely the ones they were hoping for. So by choosing to see things optimistically — believing your partner is doing their best — and by continually recalibrating your hopes and standards to fit reality, we make it far more likely that we'll get along happily with the partner we have. In fact, partners usually know full well that we're idealizing them, and they usually want us to — and in return we get their positive, generous read of us, too. Win-win.

Communication

Communication is a tough thing to pin down. Women tend to outperform men at nonverbal communication, and both skill and motivation seem to be at play: on average women have a better nonverbal touch and are more fully committed to the task of communicating. Prompt men to pay closer attention and read others more accurately and their scores improve — but still not to the level of women. Women are naturally quicker and more accurate than men at reading other people's emotions.

Verbal communication, meanwhile, is a vital part of intimacy. The range of communication grows along two axes: (1) breadth — the variety of topics you discuss — and (2) depth — how much personal meaning those topics carry for both of you. Lasting intimacy hinges on a partner's responsiveness, not on mere back-and-forth interaction. That is, people want to feel loved and valued, so they want their self-disclosures met with visible understanding, care, support, and respect. When we confide something private to a close friend or a lover, we don't need them to trade us a secret of equal weight; we want our sincerity to draw out their sympathy, tolerance, and acceptance.

Compared with ordinary conversation, what marks talk between intimate partners is that they understand each other clearly, disclose more of themselves, and feel more at ease. Women self-disclose more than men, and they also draw more self-disclosure out of the other person; men, by contrast, generally disclose more intimately to women than to other men. The upshot is that social encounters involving a woman tend to be more meaningful and intimate than all-male ones — men open up to women, women open up to each other, but men generally don't disclose much to other men. One important consequence: men typically rely on women for warmth and closeness, while women depend on men for it far less.

The reason women can communicate so intimately with a trusted partner is that they tend to be more expressive — able to talk about their feelings freely and easily. Highly expressive men can obviously do the same, just as androgynous men (both assertive and warm and outgoing) can, like women, easily build meaningful, intimate connections with either sex. So it's quite wrong to say men and women hail from different planets and speak different languages. How intimate any given person's interactions are is generally tied to how expressive that person is — and once you factor that in, whether the two people talking are men or women stops mattering much. Expressiveness, moreover, is a trait that varies in degree within both sexes, so it's far more useful to attend to individual differences in communication style than to lump all men into one box and all women into another, as if they were fundamentally different species.

When we receive a message from a partner — or anyone — two important tasks fall to us. First, to accurately grasp what the other person actually means. Second, to signal our attention and understanding, to let them know we take what they're saying to heart. You can do both by paraphrasing back what you heard. When conflict erupts, immature and unhappy partners run into the following trouble: they can't state their own intentions clearly; they struggle to listen patiently and carefully to each other, and struggle even more to stay polite and composed.

A lot of couples in the first flush of romance — myself included — can't understand how two people who once loved each other end up unable to "just talk." In that early honeymoon phase, it seems like you'll never run out of things to say, like every sentence clicks perfectly into place, like there's no secret you can't be honest about and no need you can't voice. What they don't realize is that this phase doesn't even deserve to be called "communication." In truly effective communication, the rational appeal outweighs the emotional one — and that's what deepens mutual understanding and yields more of the skills you need to get along.

Most people's communication just skims the surface. At best they manage the equivalent of a guy sitting through a rom-com for his girlfriend, or a girl sitting through a ball game for her boyfriend — which is really just a mutual behavioral concession. They still haven't grasped the meaning underneath these gestures: they're propping the whole thing up on feeling alone, and once the feeling fades to lukewarm or starts to drain away, they'll instinctively want to retreat to the life they lived before. That's exactly why so many long-together couples end up complaining that the other person "isn't as good to me as they were at the start."

Deeper communication requires stepping out of your own comfort zone — moving toward, then up to, then into the other person's way of thinking, and pulling the two mental territories close until they finally overlap. Once that overlap forms, it's almost irreversible — you formally begin to walk into each other's lives, forming a real, genuine attunement, the kind that lets you face disagreements, cold wars, and fights with ease. Long, mutual exploration lets you truly understand each other, so you're not so easily torn apart by a misunderstanding or a flash of temper. For the vast majority of people, stepping out of the "comfort zone" of your own thinking is a hard thing to do; pulling it off takes real courage and abundant patience, and it takes a high degree of mutual recognition and acceptance between partners.

Interdependence

A woman needs absolute security. She needs a man who can shoulder responsibility on his own, who steps up to be the solution when a problem arises, who answers when she sends out a signal — and answers in the way she needs. All of us seek rewards and want to avoid costs, but these are two different drives, and how they combine shapes what we feel in a relationship. Hit an avoidance goal and you've dodged a cost, but you're not necessarily happy; hit an approach goal and you feel full and excited, but perhaps not safe and secure. Only when both drives are satisfied at once do people feel completely fulfilled and happy.

Once a new partner gradually becomes familiar, self-expansion tends to slow down, and at that point many people start to find the relationship duller and more ordinary than it was at the start. The key to staying happy is to creatively keep finding ways to grow as a person. So: deliberately seek out new sources of fun and delight, laugh together, and never stop chasing novel activities and challenges. Monotony drains the life out of any relationship, while constant reinvention and fresh novelty keep boredom at arm's length.

What plagues every couple boils down, more or less, to a handful of questions. In a love and a period of growth that catch you off guard, how do you get back to the confident version of yourself? When will we be able to reply not just with "mm" but with "I can't live without you"? If your feelings aren't repaid with equal worth, will you carry on? As love drifts toward clarity and stability, are you independent enough? These questions cut deep, but they really are the age-old problems that trouble most people's love lives. We read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles, and still we never learn how to love someone at just the right moment, in the truly right way — how to find love again inside the gorgeous transformation from the other person's callow youth to their maturity — until even a simple goodbye gets stuck in the throat.

Closing

In Ex-Files 3, after Lin Jia leaves, Meng Yun's company goes from strength to strength, and he finally builds the career he always wanted. But he can never forget the day six years earlier when he founded the company, and Lin Jia said to him, gently, "Go chase it — don't worry, I've got things at home." That one line gave him strength and warmed him for a lifetime.

When we're young, we don't understand love — we're timid and thin-skinned. We meet someone who loves us, and we let them slip away, never cherishing them the way we should. We watch, helpless, as the person we love walks off, and then spend the better part of our lives regretting it. That ridiculous version of yourself, those absurd old stories, that aching love; all those people who appeared in your life and then vanished from it. They shaped you, molded you, made you whole.

Last year Hu Ge's new show was a huge hit, and a reporter asked Xue Jianing whether she'd been following it. Xue smiled and said she didn't want to talk about Hu Ge, because he's just too famous now. She said Hu Ge is an actor with dreams, and she was happy for his success. Later, when Chen Luyu interviewed Hu Ge, she said to him point-blank: "You let a good woman get away." Hu Ge fell silent for a long time, then choked out: "She really is wonderful."

Real cherishing isn't "I've seen other scenery and I still think you're the finest." It's that you've never been replaceable in my heart — that with you, I never even thought of anyone else. May every woman who, like Chun Jiao, bends low for love and sinks ever deeper into it, find her own Zhiming: someone so attuned to her in spirit, and willing to change for her. And let's stop saying: your arrival was to teach me what love is — while mine, perhaps, was to teach you what growing up and cherishing really mean.