We talk about love as something we feel. But couples who have spent decades together describe that “you're not always going to like them”. So what is the secret for lasting love?

What is the secret to lasting love?

Earlier this year, BBC journalist Megan Davies put that question to more than 100 couples. Their relationships were different. Their stories were different. Some had spent decades together; others had navigated distance, adversity and enormous changes in their lives.[1]

Yet certain answers kept appearing.

Honesty. Communication. Respect. Forgiveness. Friendship. Laughter. Kindness. Working through arguments together.

Some of the examples were wonderfully ordinary. One couple talked about ending the day with a kiss. Another described the importance of empathy and a hug when life became difficult. One couple even holds an annual "professional development review" for their marriage: a deliberate opportunity to sit down and talk about how their relationship is going.

Perhaps most strikingly, some of the couples challenged the assumption that lasting love means continually experiencing the feelings we associate with falling in love. One man put it simply: you can continue loving your partner even during the moments when you don't particularly like them.

Taken together, their stories suggest something important.

We usually talk about love as a noun or a feeling.

But lasting love often sounds remarkably like a verb.

Falling in love and staying in love are different problems

The beginning of a relationship can feel almost effortless.

We want to know everything about the other person. We make time for them. We ask questions. We plan dates. We touch. We notice small things. We express admiration. We create first experiences together almost constantly.

In other words, many of the behaviours that nourish connection happen naturally.

Then life changes.

Novelty becomes familiarity. Conversations that once lasted until 2am become conversations about what to buy at the supermarket. Work gets demanding. Children arrive. Parents age. Bodies change. Stress accumulates.

None of this necessarily means that love has disappeared.

It means the conditions surrounding love have changed.

And that's where a strange cultural assumption can become problematic: the belief that if the relationship is right, connection should continue happening spontaneously.

We rarely apply this logic anywhere else.

We don't expect friendships to survive decades without contact. We don't expect our bodies to remain healthy because we ate well ten years ago. We don't expect a garden to keep flourishing because we watered it enthusiastically when we first planted it.

Yet most of us expect romantic relationships to sustain themselves on the strength of how intensely we once felt.

Relationship science has a word for some of this: maintenance

"Relationship maintenance" doesn't sound particularly romantic. It sounds like servicing a boiler.

But researchers have spent decades studying the things people do to preserve and strengthen close relationships.

A meta-analysis by Brian Ogolsky and Jill Bowers brought together 35 studies involving more than 12,000 participants. It examined maintenance behaviours including positivity, openness, assurances of commitment, shared social networks and sharing tasks. Across the literature, these behaviours were associated with outcomes including relationship satisfaction, commitment, love and liking. [2]

That doesn't mean researchers have discovered a checklist that guarantees lasting love. Much of this evidence is correlational, and relationships are far too complex for that.

But it does challenge an appealing romantic idea: that once love is real enough, it should take care of itself.

What couples repeatedly do appears to matter.

Intimacy isn't something we simply have

Consider intimacy.

We often describe couples as either "intimate" or "not intimate", as though intimacy were a property of the relationship.

Research suggests it may be more useful to think of intimacy as a process.

In diary studies of everyday interactions, self-disclosure and partner disclosure have been associated with greater feelings of intimacy, with perceived partner responsiveness playing an important role in that process. In simple terms, intimacy grows partly when I reveal something meaningful about myself and experience you as understanding, valuing and caring about what I've shared. [3]

Other research following couples through their everyday lives has found that concrete responsive acts predict whether partners actually experience one another as responsive, and that this perception in turn predicts feelings of intimacy. [4]

That distinction matters.

"I feel understood by you" isn't simply a fact about our compatibility.

It is an experience we continually create together.

And these processes may become self-reinforcing. Feeling that a partner is responsive has been associated with greater emotional expression, while responsiveness has also been linked prospectively with affectionate touch. In one series of studies, affectionate touch itself subsequently predicted the partner's perception of responsiveness, suggesting that intimacy may sometimes operate as a reciprocal cycle rather than a fixed state. [5,6]

Perhaps connection isn't something a couple either possesses or loses.

Perhaps it is something they keep producing between them.

Even excitement can be practised

Another common fear in long-term relationships is that "the spark" has disappeared.

Again, familiarity inevitably changes how a relationship feels. We shouldn't promise that the neurochemistry of first falling in love can be reproduced indefinitely.

But research suggests that what couples do can influence how the relationship feels.

Arthur Aron and colleagues studied couples participating together in novel and arousing activities. Across surveys and experiments, shared exciting activities were associated with relationship satisfaction, and experimental participation in brief novel and arousing activities produced greater short-term increases in experienced relationship quality than more mundane activities. [7]

The lesson isn't that couples need ever more elaborate date nights.

It's simpler.

Novelty doesn't have to be something that happens to a relationship.

It can sometimes be something partners intentionally create.

Love can be real even when the feeling changes

This brings us back to something those couples interviewed by the BBC seemed to understand intuitively.

A relationship can contain frustration without being loveless.

There can be periods when one partner is exhausted, preoccupied or irritating.

There can be disagreements.

There can even be periods when two people feel less connected than they once did.

Emotions fluctuate because human experience fluctuates.

Stress changes us. Sleep changes us. Health changes us. Parenthood changes us. Work changes us. Age changes us.

If we use the intensity of today's romantic feeling as the only measure of a relationship, every ordinary fluctuation risks becoming evidence that something is wrong.

The alternative isn't to ignore our feelings. Feelings contain important information, and sometimes persistent disconnection tells us something that needs serious attention.

It's simply to recognise that love can involve both an emotional experience and a set of intentional behaviours.

I may not be able to command myself to feel close to you at 7:30pm on a stressful Wednesday.

But I can put down my phone when you're telling me about your day.

I can ask the second question instead of stopping at "How was work?"

I can tell you something I appreciated.

I can reach for your hand.

I can protect a ritual that belongs to us.

I can suggest we do something different this weekend.

I can repair after speaking harshly.

I can remain interested in the person you're becoming.

None of those actions guarantees a particular feeling.

But they help create the conditions in which connection can grow.

This is what we mean by Relationship Nutrition

At Haven, we've started describing this idea as Relationship Nutrition.

The analogy is deliberately simple.

Nobody expects one healthy meal to nourish a body forever. Physical health emerges partly from what we repeatedly consume and do over time.

Relationships may deserve a similar mindset.

We've identified seven experiences that we think help nourish relationships: Curiosity, Appreciation, Growth, Affection, Presence, Rituals and Novelty.

Look again at what many long-term couples describe when asked what has helped their love endure.

They talk about listening.

Touching.

Laughing.

Showing kindness.

Making time.

Working through difficulties.

Creating rituals.

Continuing to choose one another.

They rarely describe a single extraordinary act that secured the relationship forever.

They describe patterns.

The danger of "choosing love"

There's an important qualification here.

Saying that love is also a practice should never become "if you just try hard enough, every relationship can work."

Some relationships are unsafe. Some differences genuinely become irreconcilable. Relationships require participation from more than one person, and no amount of intentionality gives us control over another human being.

Nor should relationship practices become a way of suppressing dissatisfaction or remaining somewhere that repeatedly causes harm.

Relationship Nutrition isn't about preserving every relationship.

It's about recognising the agency we have *within a relationship worth nurturing.

That's an important distinction.

What did you feed your relationship today?

Perhaps one reason the stories of long-term couples can feel reassuring is that their advice is so ordinary.

Very few people say the secret was one perfect holiday, an unforgettable Valentine's Day or never arguing.

Instead, decades of love seem to be made partly from thousands of tiny moments that would look insignificant in isolation.

A kiss before sleeping.

A question asked with genuine curiosity.

A joke during a terrible week.

An apology.

A hug.

A ritual.

A new adventure.

A moment of undivided attention.

One expression of gratitude.

Then another.

And another.

Falling in love may sometimes feel like something that happens to us.

Lasting love asks us to participate.

Perhaps that's why the question we ask at Haven isn't only:

"Do you love your partner?"

It's also:

"What did you do to nourish your relationship today?"

Because love is a feeling.

And lasting love is also a practice.

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Sources

1. Davies, M. (2026). 'You're not always going to like them' – 100 couples reveal the secret to lasting love. BBC News, 14 February 2026.

2. Ogolsky, B. G., & Bowers, J. R. (2013). A meta-analytic review of relationship maintenance and its correlates. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(3), 343–367. DOI: 10.1177/0265407512463338.

3. Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238–1251. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1238.

4. Debrot, A., Cook, W. L., Perrez, M., & Horn, A. B. (2012). Deeds matter: Daily enacted responsiveness and intimacy in couples' daily lives. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(4), 617–627. DOI: 10.1037/a0028666.

5. Ruan, Y., Reis, H. T., Clark, M. S., Hirsch, J. L., & Bink, B. D. (2020). Can I tell you how I feel? Perceived partner responsiveness encourages emotional expression. Emotion, 20(3), 329–342. DOI: 10.1037/emo0000650.

6. Jolink, T. A., Chang, Y.-P., & Algoe, S. B. (2022). Perceived partner responsiveness forecasts behavioral intimacy as measured by affectionate touch. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(2), 203–221. DOI: 10.1177/0146167221993349.

7. Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273.