when the promise of 'forever' ends

trying to understand how people transition out of being in love

tl;dr: has anyone considered my feelings before deciding to break off their long-term relationship?

This post is about transitions, with a focus on transitioning from lovers to exes. Lately, I’ve been coming across endless news of people ending long-term relationships, or even just thinking about leaving their long-term partner for [insert literally any reason here; I’ve heard it all]. Oftentimes, these were relationships that, I thought, were going pretty well.

For some reason, hearing news of breakups affects me deeply. My guess is that I almost take it personally because I’m trying to reframe how I view relationships to be more positive, which is especially difficult after being exposed to only miserable and failed ones my entire life.

So every single breakup, especially the ones that are most surprising to me, feels like an assault on this new worldview I’m still trying to build—one in which there is hope for long-term relationships that are healthy, strong, and happy. (For the record: I’m in one now! But I don’t want to feel like it’s working out against all odds. I want to believe that there is a reality in which these healthy and happy relationships are the norm, and I’m part of that norm.)

So, this post is my attempt to talk through these feelings and try to understand what the hell is going on out here, along with, of course, a potential solution.

but first, let’s talk about transitions

I think a lot about the various transitions we experience in life.

Many of the transitions I think about happen over months, years, or decades; some happen in an instant and can forever alter your life. I consider some transitions exciting (e.g., gaining independence as an adult) and cower over others (e.g., death). And for some transitions, I was able to reframe how I feel about them; in the case of aging, for example, I went from feeling fear and dread to excitement and hope. (I plan on writing a Substack post about this in the future; specifically, how the book The Telomere Effect radically changed my understanding of and feelings around aging.)

I also think a lot about the physical spaces that hold us during our transitions; the ones that have seen us both at our best and at our worst, but remained unjudging throughout. These spaces exist for many practical reasons, but lately I’ve been considering that they also exist for more sentimental reasons, like to gently remind us of the changes we go through in our lives.

For example, I think of the paths I walked almost every day for four years as a student at UNC Chapel Hill; these paths bore witness to my many transitions throughout that time period. I walked these paths with people who went from acquaintances to friends, and friends to strangers; I walked them while crying and feeling like my life was over, and while laughing and feeling like I was on top of the world; I walked them at my healthiest, and at my weakest; I walked them as someone who firmly believed in X, and later as someone whose belief in X was withering away.

I recently revisited these paths, four years after graduation, and was overwhelmed with how many memories they held for me. These paths—winding, steep, breaking off into different directions, and occasionally with missing bricks—didn’t belong to me anymore, but they kept alive the memories of the old me. Or, at least, they resurrected those memories in my presence. Standing on those pathways reminded me of the transition I experienced from student then to working adult now.

I think about how listening to a song can seemingly transport you back to the time you first heard it, reminding you of how different things were back then. The song has not changed, but you have; it almost feels as though the song is tethered to the old you, and re-molding it to fit the new you would be a crime.

Perhaps you wouldn’t realize how different things are now without the song—or smell, place, whatever it is—to remind you.

And before you roll your eyes, I think a lot about liminal spaces, too. In fact, a lot of what I described above could fit into the idea of liminality, defined as “the places and times in life where one is on the threshold of change … being neither here nor there, this in-between period of time in life can create a feeling of not just anxiety, but also joy and excitement for what’s to come.”

Liminality can be felt in a physical space (e.g., stairwells, hotel hallways at night, elevators, empty malls, abandoned homes, playgrounds at night)—but it can also be a mental state or something non-physical (e.g., divorce and breakups, a coming of age vs. a midlife crisis, job loss, moving).

A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.

— Cambridge Art Association

I don’t know if I’m communicating these examples clearly, but this is how I think of the various transitions we experience in life: typically in relation to something, usually physical, that remains constant throughout our transition and later reminds us of the change happening in the first place.

How intensely would we feel the aging of our physical appearance, for instance, without pictures and videos to visually remind us of our younger days? Similarly, loss hits us much harder when we encounter a scent that reminds us of the person we lost. Buried memories on the verge of disappearing spring out at us when we hear an old jingle, song, or commercial from our childhood—would we have remembered those specific moments, and who we were, and how we felt, otherwise?

Going from being in a romantic relationship with someone for years or even decades, to being single, is a transition that in my experience is so ubiquitous that it might as well be considered a fact of life. This is the transition I want to focus on here. It’s the one that bothers and perplexes me the most, occupying my mind at all times.

the end of a long-term, romantic relationship

For a long time, my worldview was shaped by bad relationships and marriages that were not just unsuccessful, but brutally unsuccessful. I know I’m not alone in this experience; I frequently hear from people that their parents’ divorce had a major effect on them or that they are terrified to commit because they have never seen commitment work out. I know of too many women who have faced unspeakable harms committed by their male partners; at the same time, I’m increasingly hearing from men their fears of being emotionally manipulated and/or financially abused by their female partners. Queer relationships face their own set of typical and unique struggles as well.

Turns out, regardless of your identity or circumstance, feelings of affection are easy but relationships are… a little more complicated.

Whenever someone shares that they are breaking up, separating, or divorcing after many years together, I find myself desperate to know how and why it happened. I want to probe—not out of morbid curiosity, but out of absolute fear.

I bite my tongue, to be polite of course, but I desperately want to ask them: are you shocked, or is this outcome obvious in hindsight? Were the red flags always there but ignored, or did something happen one day that changed everything? Can you recall when the transition from wanting to be together to not wanting to be together happened—and why? Who felt that way first? Sometimes people say they did not see their breakup coming—how?

How can you go from loving someone enough to want to commit to that person for the rest of your life by getting married, building a home together, having kids, building a future—to suddenly calling it quits? (Contracts and government interference aren’t working! We need to find another way to secure love!)

I’ve seen the lover-to-enemy trope happen with countless relationships, and while I understand many of the alleged causes of failed relationships—money, differing values, miscommunication, infidelity, boredom (this one seems the silliest to me), abuse, optionality—I still struggle to wrap my head around the entire phenomenon.

Maybe it’s denial, maybe it’s cope, or maybe it’s fear. Either way, I’m angry about it because these breakups so often seem unnecessary.

When my boyfriend and I are having a wonderful time together, which thankfully is the case more often than not, a small part of me starts to wonder if the couples going through a nasty divorce or breakup had similar happy moments throughout their relationship before things went south. And if so, what does that mean for the relationships that are seemingly healthy and secure? Can they too take a turn for the worse?

It’s not enough to say people just change. People change all the time while maintaining healthy relationships, so is it specific changes that lead to breakups? Is it one’s reaction to these changes?

Is it possible that relationships that end poorly, or end at all, were never strong or healthy to begin with?

Do failed relationships typically fall into a pattern of:

• good (honeymoon stage) →

• messy (the beginning of the end, going back and forth between wanting to break up and fighting for it to survive, hurting each other) →

• over (officially breaking up, divorcing)?

Or is it more like:

• bad (toxic beginnings, weak foundation, infatuation, lust, but all justified by strong feelings and some good moments) →

• worse (breaking up and getting back together, moments of peace followed by ever-worsening conditions) →

• officially over?

Without a doubt, strong and healthy relationships that do last have also experienced transitions from good to bad and back to good, in varying intensities and contexts and timeframes. Maybe they found the courage to stay, learning how to handle these transitions better and committing to working through their issues instead of taking the “easier” route and leaving. (Although some people find it easier to stay in unhealthy relationships, and leaving is what takes courage.) Maybe they had a stronger foundation to work on in the first place.

maybe, we need to think about ‘love’ differently

I recently read bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions after hearing, repeatedly, how transformational this book has been for so many people.

In just 11 short chapters, hooks manages to completely dismantle our conventional understanding of love as “deep affection” or an “instinctual feeling”; she explains why this line of thinking—pushed by movies, books, and even people who mean well—does such a disservice to relationships of all kinds, including romantic ones.

Instead, she asserts that love must be thought of as a verb, rather than as a noun:

The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the most astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

Echoing the work of Erich Fromm: ‘Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.’

Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.

— bell hooks

Thinking of love as a verb, rather than a noun, is helping me better understand why relationships fail. Investing feelings or deep emotions in someone is simply not enough to carry a relationship long-term, through all of life’s trials and tribulations, through all the inevitable transitions.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling — it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.

— Erich Fromm

Affection, according to hooks, is only one ingredient of love. The ingredients missing from our collective yet misguided understanding of love include care, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. Of course, accepting this definition of love can have some pretty upsetting implications, like realizing love, the verb, isn’t really present in your family or relationship.

But imagine how much confusion and unnecessary pain we would all avoid if we did accept this definition of love, refocusing our energy from “finding” love—or, more absurdly, waiting for love to “find” us—to improving how we show love. (And by the way, regarding finding love, what do people think happens afterward? That love is sustained by… divine intervention? That love transforms from noun to verb overnight?)

It makes me sad to think of how much misguided time, energy, and money goes into “finding” love. And the discourse! It’s so bad. Agonizing over the latest beauty trends, learning manipulative behaviors, and obsessing over what constitutes a good first date—all of these might find you a partner, but none of them can guarantee you love.

And if a relationship fails despite both individuals treating love as a verb, well… then back to the drawing board for me. For now, I’m holding on to this theory for why so many long-term relationships end.

Someone on TikTok said something that will stick with me for a while, and I think this is the root cause of relationship failures, and it can potentially explain the other alleged causes of breakups: “People often say relationships are a lot of hard work, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. I don’t think the relationship is hard work — I think the personal growth you have to do is the hard work.”

Working on oneself is an endless endeavor. Can improving yourself be considered a transition, or maybe a series of transitions? Either way, my conclusion is that it might just be the most important transition of all, because it enables the most important thing of all: love.

Springtime by Pierre-Auguste Cot, 1873