Ignore Your Feelings

Khazan: One thing that’s interesting in the love chapter, it seems like sex is not necessarily seen as the highest priority in a relationship. I wonder how you reached that conclusion and whether you think that’s controversial at all in your field? A lot of the messages we get about relationships are that once you get everything figured out sexually, the whole ship rights itself.

Michael: I think that expectation is really dangerous. A partnership with all that life throws at you, and even more stuff that gets thrown at you when you have a kid. It's really hard, and you're tired and angry, and if in addition to that you expect the feelings to be positive and loving and warm, you just feel like a horrible loser.
Whereas if you've gone into with more common sense, and a sense that this is really somebody you want to be with, but you’ve also checked them out, and they’re solid, and they’re not using substances, and they want to go the same way you do, and if you want to have kids, that that’s what they want too, and that they're good in a pinch and good in an emergency—in other words, you've thought a bit about the job description, and the values somebody has to really be a good partner in life. Then you're much more likely 10 or 20 years later to really love them.
I've seen people through a lot of divorces. Divorces never seem to be because “I fell out of love with you.” Divorces are much more partnership issues: “I love you but I can't stand the way you've spent us into the poorhouse, or the way you never do your job, or you’re always out at night drinking, or a certain way you never accept me and you never did, I thought you would someday.” It all has to do with partnership issues.

Sarah: People also, over the course of long relationships—their interests change, and their interest in sex changes. If you are with someone that you have vetted in this way, that you know is reliable, that you know you can trust in certain ways, that you have a more substantial connection with, [then] if the sex fades you have less to worry about. Sex and attraction are two more things you really can’t control. Especially when you get older. It's part of your physiology that really isn’t in your hands.
Holding yourself responsible and your relationship responsible for having the same chemistry you once had when you first met in your 20s, and you’re now in your 50s, is really not fair.

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