Why don’t our loves last as long as our parents’ did ?

The question keeps coming up, asked with a touch of nostalgia, as though the longevity of unions past were proof of a sturdier love. But what if we read it the other way around? What if our parents’ couples lasted not because they loved each other more, but because leaving was simply unthinkable? Conjugal longevity has never been a gauge of love. For a long time it was a gauge of constraint. What we are witnessing today is not the collapse of feeling; it is the disappearance of the bars that kept it caged. And when the cage falls away, we suddenly discover who was staying by choice and who was staying for lack of anything better.

What Has Changed Is Not Love, but the Walls Around It

Because people no longer stay “for the children.” That phrase, repeated for decades as a noble sacrifice, now sounds like a confession: we offered our children the daily spectacle of a lifeless home, believing we were sparing them a wound, when what we were really handing down was a model of resignation.

Because women no longer turn a blind eye to their husbands’ parallel lives. What once passed for tolerance, even for a kind of feminine wisdom, now stands revealed for what it was: a humiliation negotiated in silence for want of any alternative.

Because happiness has become a legitimate demand, no longer a luxury one granted oneself after ticking the box marked “marriage.” Being fulfilled now counts as much as being married, and often more.

Because a woman no longer needs a man in order to exist in society. She earns her own living, signs her own contracts, owns her own roof. Marriage is no longer a survival strategy, which means it must now justify itself on its own terms, by what it offers rather than by what it spares.

Because men still dream, more or less consciously, of living as their fathers did, while women are utterly determined not to live as their mothers did. This divergence of trajectories is one of the silent fault lines of our age, and we will come back to it.

Because, finally, an entire generation has looked its parents’ marriage squarely in the face and refused to make it their horizon. Not out of ingratitude, but out of clear-sightedness. We inherit a legacy; we do not inherit a destiny.

What the Numbers Say, and What They Don’t

One might suppose this is all just so many impressions. Yet the data tell the very same story. Divorce exploded between 1960 and 1980, driven by three almost simultaneous ruptures: the pill, which severed sex from procreation; the mass entry of women into paid work, which gave them a way out; and the arrival of no-fault divorce, which turned a shameful ordeal into a simple formality. In the United States, the rate peaked around 1980, then fell by roughly a third over the following decades. The wave has passed; the sense of conjugal apocalypse that still haunts our conversations is, in fact, out of date.

But the most telling detail lies elsewhere. This decline has been anything but uniform. Demographers speak of a “divorce divide”: among college graduates, breakups have dropped by about thirty percent since the early 1980s, while among the less educated they have held steady or even risen slightly. Those who have time, material stability, and who marry later, and therefore more maturely, hold together better. Far from refuting my argument, this finding confirms it with almost cruel precision: once external constraint disappears, the survival of a couple becomes a matter of resources, inner as much as material. Lasting love is no longer imposed from above; it is cultivated, and not everyone can afford it.

It will be objected that marital satisfaction eventually climbs back up over the years, that calm follows the storm, and I will be pointed to the famous U-shaped curve. This is, in large part, a statistical mirage. When the same couples are followed over time rather than comparing different age brackets, the late upturn vanishes, and what emerges instead is a fairly steady decline in contentment at every stage of marriage. What looked like a renewal of happiness is often nothing more than the effect of a merciless sorting: the unhappy couples divorced along the way, and only the survivors remain at the finish line. The curve does not say that love improves with time. It says that the dissatisfied have left.

That leaves the question of income, and here, caution. Women’s financial independence is an unqualified gain: fewer marriages merely endured, fewer instances of violence suffered, fewer lives sacrificed. But it also produces a purely mechanical effect: it lowers the cost of leaving. When walking away no longer means falling into destitution, people walk away. Does it follow that a woman who earns more than her partner weakens her marriage? The studies are contradictory here, and prudence is in order. For unions formed in the 1960s and 1970s, a wife’s earning advantage markedly raised the risk of a breakup; for those formed in the 1990s, that correlation had largely faded. Other research argues, on the contrary, that the effect persists. The decisive factor, then, is not money in itself, but the gap, sometimes painful, between inherited expectations and a reality that has changed far faster than they have.

Men Dream of Yesterday; Women Refuse It

It is precisely in this gap that one of the most underestimated tensions of our time resides. The modern man, even when he proclaims himself modern, often carries within him, like muscle memory, his father’s script: to be the pillar, the provider, the one whose quiet authority gave the household its shape. The modern woman, for her part, has largely defined herself in opposition to her mother’s fate, whose surrenders she watched up close, the self-effacement, the ambitions folded away in a drawer. One would like to reproduce a model; the other built herself to escape it. These are not two versions of the same dream; they are two irreconcilable stories sleeping under one roof, stories that wake at the first quarrel. A great many of today’s misunderstandings stem not from a lack of love, but from this silent collision of two inheritances.

So much for the apparent causes. They are real, measurable, documented. But they are only the scenery. Behind that scenery something far deeper is unfolding, something that touches the very nature of what we call “loving.”

Being in Love Is Not Love; It Is Only a Key That Opens the Door

It must be said plainly, at the risk of shattering a few illusions: what we call “falling in love” is not love. It is a biological mechanism of formidable efficiency, a chemical intoxication engineered to draw us together just long enough to form the bond. In that altered state, we do not see the other person. We see the screen onto which we project our wants, our dreams, our unspoken wounds. We fall in love with a promise we wrote ourselves, and we are astonished, months later, that the real person refuses to play the role we assigned them.

True love is not born of that fever. It begins exactly where the fever burns out. When the enchanted fog lifts, when the other stops being a flattering mirror and becomes once more an opaque, contradictory being, shot through with shadows and cracks, only then does choice become possible. And it is a choice, not a feeling: the conscious, renewed decision to take the other in fully, including what is difficult, exhausting, and imperfect in them.

This does not fall from the sky. It is a discipline, in the most demanding sense of the word, almost an ascetic practice. A daily exercise that turns a passing attachment into a bond nothing can undo. To sustain that effort, our grandparents had an entire scaffolding: the watchful eye of the village, the weight of religion, the sheer material impossibility of leaving. That scaffolding is gone, and good riddance, for no one should stay out of fear. But its collapse has laid bare an uncomfortable truth: stripped of every external constraint, lasting love now rests entirely on our inner qualities. On our capacity, ours alone, to keep our word when nothing compels us to.

The Trouble Is, We Demand These Qualities Without Cultivating Them

And this is where the real difficulty lies. For these virtues, patience, forgiveness, generosity, the courage to tell the truth, the vast majority of us do not possess by nature. That would be no great matter if we sought to acquire them. But we do the opposite: we make no effort to develop them in ourselves, and we demand them all the more fiercely from others.

Look around; the pattern is everywhere. People brandish their past wounds like a badge of experience, when those wounds are often just an alibi. A convenient pretext for treating the next partner worse than the last, under cover of having “learned from their mistakes.” With the years, such people do not open up; they close down. They do not grow more generous; they grow more bitter. And the most insidious part is the vocabulary they use to dress up this regression: they call “healing” what is merely a retreat into themselves, they call “reclaiming their power” the act of growing more selfish, and “protecting themselves” the decision to wound before being wounded.

Because that, at bottom, is what it comes down to: the fear of suffering takes over, and we then allow ourselves, sometimes without even admitting it, to make the other suffer in order to spare ourselves. We draw first. Then we marvel, with a look of genuine surprise, that everything around us is deteriorating, that trust is growing scarce, that relationships have become a minefield.

The Collapse Is Not the Work of Monsters, but of Perfectly Pleasant People

Here is the point I want to hammer home, because it is the heart of the matter. We like to believe that harm comes from elsewhere, from a few toxic individuals, a handful of predators we need only keep our distance from. This is false, and the belief suits us, because it lets us off the hook.

Collective trust does not collapse under the blows of a few monstrous people. It collapses under the sum of millions of gestures committed by perfectly ordinary, likable people, the kind you would pass without suspicion and find altogether charming. Each one, in their own small measure, makes a little cut in the unspoken contract of the respect we owe one another. A lie dodged out of cowardice. A silence where speech was called for. A tiny cruelty excused in advance. And always the same reasons: because in the moment it was simpler, because we were tired, because we were too afraid to tell the truth.

Every time you allow yourself to belittle or neglect someone who has done you no harm, you are not merely settling a private score. You dim a good person a little. And that person, in turn, will go on to chill the next one, justifying themselves with the phrase that has become the password of our age: “you can’t trust anyone anymore.” A perfectly self-fulfilling prophecy. Collectively we manufacture the very cold world we then complain about, each of us convinced we were only reacting to everyone else’s coldness.

This is why our loves no longer last. Not because we have become incapable of loving, but because we have inherited a magnificent freedom without cultivating its counterpart: responsibility. We have won the right to leave, which is an immense step forward, and we have mistaken it for the right to do harm.

There remains an old piece of wisdom that the centuries have not worn down: whoever takes up the sword to defend himself will, in the end, fall by a blade. The protection we think we find in hardness is only a reprieve. It does not shelter us; it shuts us in. And one might ask whether the only way to find loves that last is not to choose others better, but to become, oneself, the person an exacting love deserves.