How many relationships are really “successful?”

Here in “red pill” circles, we often focus a lot on the perils of marriage, which much of the discussion revolving around the fact that 40-50% of marriages end in divorce with 70-80% being filed by women.

While this is certainly one metric of evaluating relationship failure, it seems far from all inclusive. I’m sure most of us can think of relationships in our own lives where a loveless, affectionless couples stays together long-term to “keep it together for the kids,” or to keep up appearances for social or religious reasons. It seems wrong to call these largely unhappy pairings “successful;” rather, it seems to just be a different flavor of failure. This then raises the question: how many relationships are really, truly successful and maintain a strong degree of romantic love and intimacy?

In your personal experience, how many couples do you know that actually seem to legitimately maintain both satisfaction with their marriage and sexual energy toward one another? How does this change with the relationship’s duration? Are is there any difference by gender, or do you feel like satisfaction is about the same between men and women?

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So how often does the science suggest this happens? There is certainly a lot of literature in love out there, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to focus on this meta analysis. If you skim the introduction, you will actually see this is one of the more optimistic takes. To briefly summarize, they did a factor analysis to investigate the differences between “romantic” (sexual but non-obsessive) and “passionate (sexual and obsessive) love and how well they correlate with relationship satisfaction based on the passionate love scale (PLS).

There’s a lot to unpack here, but of relevance to the question at hand, there are two factors to note. First, perhaps unsurprisingly, romantic love was highly predictive of relationship satisfaction. Maintaining this romantic love seems absolutely critical to achieving relationship satisfaction, in line with other analyses showing that decreasing sexual desire, particularly in women, decreases relationship satisfaction.

But concerningly, this actually doesn’t appear to be terribly common. Per the paper’s analysis, only 13% of respondents rated all romantic love (NOT obsession) items on their scale as a 6 or above. If you refer to the PLS questionnaire linked above, this is marginally above the test’s median value and rating an average response of 6 corresponds to “occasional bursts of passion.” The lack of a full data breakdown limits our conclusions slightly, but it appears that most couples do not actually maintain that level of affection in their relationships.

Do these results make sense in light of your personal experience, or do you think something is mistaken about the confusion? If it’s accurate, how do we deal with the fact most couples will seem to eventually fall out of love? “Til’ boredom do us part” doesn’t have the same ring to it.