Can Love Last?
Love's long game
Description
Stephen A. Mitchell spent his career as a psychoanalyst listening to couples who arrived with a version of the same complaint. They had loved each other once, powerfully, and now the charge was gone. The sex had faded, or turned dutiful. The person across the breakfast table had become familiar in a way that felt closer to furniture than to mystery. Nobody had cheated, nobody had left. Something quieter had happened. And almost everyone Mitchell saw had already decided what that something was: the natural, inevitable cooling of romance over time. Passion is for the beginning, they told him. Comfort is for the rest.
In his last book, published in 2002, the year before his death, Mitchell took that received wisdom and turned it over. The dominant story — the one repeated by evolutionary psychologists, marriage counselors, and resigned dinner guests alike — says that desire is designed to burn out, that we are wired to want novelty and biologically incapable of sustaining hunger for the same person across decades. Mitchell thought this account was doing something suspicious. It was too convenient. It let everyone off the hook a little too neatly, and it explained a loss that, on closer inspection, did not behave the way a purely natural decline should.
What if romance does not die of old age? What if we are the ones, half-knowingly, who put it to sleep — because the alternative, staying awake to someone we love and cannot possess, is more frightening than boredom? That is the reversal at the center of Mitchell's argument, and it changes what the whole complaint is about.
The question we’re asking : If desire fades in long relationships, is that nature taking its course, or something we're quietly doing to ourselves?What we’ll see : How a psychoanalyst rereads the death of passion as a defense we build against the vulnerability of loving someone we can't control.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The story we tell about desire cooling
There is a standard narrative about long love, and most of us absorbed it without ever examining it. Romance, in this account, belongs to the early phase. It runs on novelty, uncertainty, the thrill of not yet knowing whether the other person wants us back. Then the relationship settles. The uncertainty resolves, the novelty runs out, and what remains is affection, companionship, a warm and durable bond that has traded fireworks for security. On this view, the fading of passion is not a failure. It is maturity. Wanting your partner to still feel like a stranger is a childish refusal to grow up.
Mitchell noticed that this story comes reinforced by science, or at least by science-flavored authority. Evolutionary biology tells us that novelty-seeking is adaptive, that the brain habituates to any reliable reward, that we are built to pursue new mates rather than keep desiring old ones. Neurochemistry tells us the dopamine of early attraction cannot last. The message across all these registers is the same and strangely soothing: it is not you, it is your species. Nobody is to blame because nature wrote the ending in advance.
02Chapter 2 — Not too much familiarity, but too little risk
The usual diagnosis blames familiarity. You cannot desire what you know too well, the thinking goes; mystery is the fuel, and marriage is the systematic destruction of mystery. Mitchell challenged the premise directly. We never actually know another person completely. The partner across the table remains, in every meaningful sense, a separate consciousness with a private interior we can never fully enter. The familiarity of long relationships is largely an illusion we manufacture — a comforting sense that we have the other person mapped, pinned, accounted for.
And that, Mitchell argued, is exactly the point. The problem in stalled love is not too much knowledge. It is too little risk. What genuine desire requires is not novelty but a live sense of the other as free, unpredictable, capable of surprising us and disappointing us and leaving us. Desiring someone means wanting something you do not control, from someone who could withhold it. That is thrilling and it is also, quite reasonably, terrifying. The stranger at the beginning is exciting precisely because the stakes are open and we have not yet secured them.
03Chapter 3 — The self-protective work of shrinking a lover
If we are the ones dampening our own passion, how exactly do we do it? Mitchell's answer draws on the daily, unglamorous machinery of intimate life. We reduce our partners. We take a full, contradictory, unpredictable human being and file them down into a manageable set of known quantities — dependable, irritating in familiar ways, safe. We decide we know what they will say, how they will react, what they are and are not capable of. This diminishment feels like intimacy. It is often the opposite: a way of neutralizing someone so they can no longer frighten us.
The mechanism is not conscious cruelty. It is self-protection. To keep desiring a partner as a free agent is to keep oneself perpetually exposed to loss, to rejection, to the ordinary catastrophe of caring enormously about someone who might not care back with equal force tomorrow. Reducing them to a fixed, controllable figure is a way of managing that dread. If the partner is predictable, they cannot blindside us. If they are a little diminished in our eyes, their power to wound us is diminished too. We trade the vitality of the relationship for a sense of safety we can hardly admit we needed.
04Chapter 4 — Why we quietly conspire against our own passion
Step back from the couch, and Mitchell's real subject comes into view. He was writing about love, but the deeper argument is about how we handle being vulnerable to anything we cannot control. Desire is only the sharpest instance of a wider human predicament: we want intensely, and wanting exposes us. The natural-decline story of romance is attractive not because it is true but because it converts an unbearable openness into a settled fact. If passion simply expires on schedule, then no one has to keep standing, indefinitely, in the frightening posture of needing someone who is free to disappoint them.
Seen this way, the fading of love is less an event than a solution. It resolves a tension we would rather not live inside. Mitchell's contemporaries in psychoanalysis had long noticed that people flee not only from pain but from too much aliveness, from intensities that threaten to overwhelm the manageable self. What he added was the recognition that romance in long relationships is one of the main places this flight happens, hidden in plain sight, dressed up as maturity and endorsed by biology. The couple that has gone quiet has not failed to sustain something difficult. They have succeeded at avoiding it.
05Conclusion
The couples who arrived in Mitchell's office believing their passion had died of natural causes left, at best, with a more unsettling and more hopeful idea. The charge had not evaporated on its own. It had been dimmed, deliberately if not consciously, by two people managing the risk of loving each other too much. That reframing is harder to live with than the biology story, because it removes the alibi. But it also removes the sentence. What we have arranged, we can, in principle, rearrange.