Feature Story

Why Does Romance Fade; Yet Friends Can Last Forever

A young woman in her mid-twenties is seated at a bar.  She is dressed in business attire; a black, short sleeve dress cut just above the knee.  She listens patiently while her soon-to-be ex boyfriend continues with his “it’s not you it’s me speech.”  They seem to end on good terms.  Breakups are all too common in our society today.  It is a very rare instance that a person will enter a “committed” relationship with someone without a backup-breakup plan.  So why is it that we are able to keep friends for 30 years, but lovers, even spouses, may not last more than five?

The answer to that can be found in one very obvious way.  Look it up.  By definition, a friend is “a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.”  Mutual affection; it seems so apparent. One has to give and take for a bond to last.  One also has to have a desire, which should be shared by both parties, to be with the other person. Yet, when we venture to the other pages of the dictionary and look up words such as boyfriend, girlfriend, lover, and spouse, a “mutual affection” is nowhere to be found, but seems to focus more on the sexual aspect.  Some form of the word “relation” is in each of them, however, the phrase one would think that is most necessary for relations that take people to “more than friends” doesn’t seem important enough to define. 

We now get a better understanding of what makes a friendship last and why a  “relationship” tends to fall apart at the seams.  The strands that hold a friendship together are intertwined with a tighter, more trustworthy hold than that of the typical frazzled and frayed strand that two people believe will make a lasting commitment in a romantic relationship.  It is not to say that romantic relationships are doomed and one should never enter into one, however, keep in mind that there should be mutuality to it.  A mutuality that goes beyond just the physical desire to be with each other, but rather a genuine appreciation for the each other’s individuality.