Can’t Keep a Long-Term Partner? You’re Not a Failure — Our Culture Is.
By: Sarah Stroh
Tags: Relationships, Culture, Love, Life Lessons, Women

“Every other year he brings another woman home for Christmas,” said a voice in the cafe line behind me.

“That’s crazy, why can’t he just stick with one person? At his age? There must be something wrong with him,” said her friend.

As I ordered my Americano, I felt my stomach knot. Maybe there’s something wrong with me too, I thought.

I’m 32 and have been in seven different relationships in my life. The longest ones lasted only a year and a half. So those women could have easily been gossiping about me.

And it’s hard not to take their words to heart. It’s hard not to feel like a social deviant for my relationship history.

According to a survey, about half of people ages 18–34 and almost 80% of people ages 35–49 are in steady long-term partnerships. So the majority of people around my age are coupled up long-term.

And every time I go on Facebook, my newsfeed is lit up with photos of proposals and baby bumps. Posts that regularly get hundreds of likes.

This enthusiasm on social media shows how much society approves of coupledom, marriage, and kids more than almost anything else.

I imagine the people who make those posts and my growing number of married friends with kids at the top of some hill, living the dream.

And I’m here stuck at the bottom. After many attempts at climbing up the hill, (once getting so far as living with a partner) I’ve always lost my footing somewhere and slipped back down again.

After all this time, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve gotten nowhere. It’s hard not to feel like a failure.

The relationship escalator fallacy

But maybe I’m not the problem. Maybe that man who brought the different women home for Christmas was not the problem either.

Maybe the problem is that in our culture, we tend to see our romantic lives as a progression, with casual relationships at the bottom and marriage and kids further up.

But an enriching relationship is not about getting anywhere. It is not about how far you can “ascend,” what “level” you can “reach,” or how long you can endure.

It’s about committing to your own spiritual growth and that of your partner. It’s about supporting each other and growing together.

Whether that happens over the course of a year with one person and over a few years with another, doesn’t really matter. Those few years could be more valuable, deep, and enriching than a lifetime in marriage could have been.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with someone who is with a new partner every year.

When two consenting adults decide to enter into a relationship, enjoy each other’s company, and then later realize the relationship isn’t right for them, who is to tell them they’re doing it wrong?

Being in a long-term relationship doesn’t not make you more successful.

It’s okay to only want short-term relationships or to not want a classic relationship at all. It’s okay to want to be single your whole life.

It doesn’t make you a sociopath, hopelessly impulsive, or simply unloveable.

If you decide you never want to be with someone long term, there are no real victims. The only victim is an irrelevant cultural standard. If someone judges you for that, that’s on them.

An ended relationship is not a failed relationship.

Even though all of my long-term relationships “failed,” they did so for a reason. They ended because I chose something else (or they did). Because I wanted something more from life and being in a relationship wasn’t compatible with whatever that was.

I chose other things that I felt would be a better use of my time like traveling the world solo.

And I regret neither leaving those relationships nor having them in the first place. All of my relationships have changed my life and made me who I am today.

Be in a long-term relationship for the right reasons.

To be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want a long-term relationship.

There’s a lot of good that can come from being committed to someone for a long time: a stronger bond, deeper trust, and companionship.

But when we do so, we have to really want all of that regardless of what happens down the line.

The effort and commitment it takes to be in a relationship cannot be made only for the sake of reaching some point in the future together. It must be made because both people want it now.

I’ve been with my current partner for nine months, and I hope that we will stay together for a long time. At this point in my life, I want to experience the type of love that comes with being with someone long term. And I feel like I’ve found someone perfect for me. Someone who is also interested in non-monogamy and would be a great father to my future children.

We have something in mind for the future. But that’s not why we’re together today.

We’re together today because I love my life with him in it. Right now.

And even if doesn’t work out down the line. Even if we were to break up tomorrow, it doesn’t mean we failed. That time we shared would not have been wasted.