Dear Roe,
I’ve been in a happy relationship for years. We make a strong team, have a great sex life and trust each other completely. We’re planning to marry, have children and buy a house. When we first got together, I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I was withdrawn after being hurt. She wasn’t my usual type, and I didn’t feel butterflies. But over time, a deep companionship grew, and I felt happier than I had in a long time. Despite this, I’ve recently been plagued by all-consuming doubts, and I don’t know why. Is companionship a poor substitute for deeper, passionate love? Is valuing our sex life so highly a sign of shallowness? Did I stop chasing the type of girl I imagined because an ex hurt me? Why didn’t I have butterflies? Have I built something on a weak foundation? The fact I have doubts makes me worry they must be justified. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s keeping me up at night. It seems, in relationships around me and in media, that irrational passion is what holds people together when reason might pull them apart. I once asked a friend who often argues with his wife if he had doubts, and he scoffed. I feel like the only one who second-guesses this much. Normally I’d talk to my partner, but I fear this would hurt her too much. I didn’t have good relationship role models growing up. I’m terrified of bringing kids into an unhappy marriage, of growing apart and of hurting my partner. I’m treating every disagreement like it’s make-or-break, when before I’d have just seen normal ups and downs. I think my partner senses something’s wrong. I worry I’m creating the distance I fear. But how do you stop? How do you know you’re making the right choice? Can a relationship still work without butterflies?
After this letter, my inbox is going to be full of emails from readers telling you to hold on to your great companionship, fantastic sex life, strong foundation and unprecedented happiness as tight as you possibly can.
I don’t mean to dismiss your feelings. It’s awful to feel uncertain about your relationship, and when you’re making life plans with someone, the pressure of the future looms large. But I do want you to be able to discern the difference between actual problems in the relationship and anxieties you have about relationships generally, because those are different. If you conflate the two, you risk sabotaging a lifelong love based on unaddressed fears you may have inherited and left unquestioned since childhood.
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Let’s start with the butterflies. Popular culture has done an extraordinary job of convincing us they’re the gold standard of romance. We celebrate chemistry, sparks, being swept off our feet, the person who makes us feel unable to eat or sleep. We call it falling in love for a reason: it feels involuntary, intoxicating beyond reason.
But butterflies aren’t one thing. Sometimes they’re excitement and attraction. Sometimes they’re uncertainty, anxiety and feeling unsure and disrespected. Sometimes they’re your nervous system responding to unpredictability, inconsistency or emotional unavailability. If you’ve spent years chasing emotionally unavailable people, someone who is steady can feel strangely quiet. Boring, even. Not because the connection is lacking, but because your body isn’t being asked to brace itself.
That isn’t to knock butterflies completely. Plenty of healthy relationships begin with intense attraction. But they’re a terrible metric for predicting longevity. The intensity of early infatuation is designed to fade, and what replaces it is safety, intimacy, trust and peace. That’s not lesser. In fact, that’s kind of everything.
You write that when you got with your partner, she wasn’t your “usual type”, and I do want to point out that whatever your “type” was, those relationships didn’t work out. You ended up deeply hurt, in fact. Many people do this – they create an on-paper checklist of things they’re attracted to or things they think they should be attracted to, like a particular height, hair colour, aesthetic, lifestyle, hobby or personality trait. Most often, these things are no indication of a person’s character or values and make little difference to the day-to-day experience of your relationship. But because people are so invested in the abstract idea of their “type”, they look to fulfil the checklist again and again, despite all the mounting evidence that the checklist bears no relationship to their actual happiness.
Here’s what I will say: you’re not planning a date or a stint in Love Island. You’re planning a life, and picking a person to navigate its joys and stresses with. This is the person who you’ll turn to if you lose a job or face financial stress.This is the person who will keep you steady and sometimes laugh when life knocks you. This is the person who will sit in doctors’ offices with you if you get bad news, and the person who will celebrate all your wins. This is the person you’ll face all the challenges and joys of child-rearing with, and the person who your children will grow up resembling, in spirit and character. This is the person who will have to step up and keep life going when you need to collapse.
This is the person who will be by your side on the day you bury your parents.
Butterflies and passion are beautiful, but life demands a partner. It sounds like you have a great one.
So start looking at where these questions and doubts are coming from. You write that you “didn’t have good relationship role models growing up”, and I suspect this is what needs exploring, more than anything. If you grew up believing that conflict was always catastrophic, that love was untrustworthy, that cruelty or abandonment were always just an argument away, then you have learned how to constantly scan the horizon for signs of trouble. If nobody modelled for you a stable, happy, nurturing, drama-free relationship, then stability and safety may be boring or even suspicious, as if you’re waiting for the catch.
This doesn’t mean you’re destined to repeat any negative patterns you witnessed growing up. But part of breaking patterns is becoming aware of them, and learning how to examine and address your anxiety instead of blindly obeying it.
Find yourself a great therapist. Talk about your childhood the relationships you saw growing up, what you learned about what love was meant to feel like and how these anxieties are coming up for you now. Notice all your questions like what if you and your partner grow apart, what if you have children and become unhappy, what if the relationship breaks down – these are all hypotheticals about the future, but you’re treating these fears and anxieties as if they’re evidence about the present. They’re not.
[ ‘My sister has stopped putting in effort with me since she had kids’Opens in new window ]
Nothing in your letter indicates that your relationship is lacking. Everything in your letter indicates an incredibly healthy, even enviable, relationship – and a person who doesn’t know how to trust it.
By all means, keep paying attention to your relationship – relationships require and deserve maintenance, honesty and curiosity. But be equally curious about your anxiety – the source of it, the aims of it and how it crafts its arguments on hypotheticals rather than facts. Don’t assume that just because it’s loud, it’s true.
And remember that bravery isn’t always about leaving a relationship to chase something better. Sometimes bravery is allowing yourself to believe that the love in front of you is real, and that you deserve it. Good luck.
