Are you bored in your relationship?
Want to solve the problem?
Here is a provocative idea: perhaps there is no problem here.
Let us start in order. Meteoric technological progress and frantic social media do not necessarily do our relationships any good.
And nobody broadcasts live the quantities of psychological suffering and loneliness people experience. Nobody puts a spotlight on it.
People continue their lives in misery and disconnection from human contact, and somehow it seems to us that this is fine, that this is the natural state.
Am I simply making empty and embittered accusations? Here is an example of one lethal process.
The need not to be bored drives us far more powerfully than the need to look for love, and that is a disaster.
The wish to avoid boredom at any cost pushes us harder than the longing to find meaning, or stable love, or simply to build a satisfying career — and that is a psychological catastrophe.
You can be annoyed with me until tomorrow, read texts about the power of this moment until your eyes water, try desperately to focus on the here and now, even at the cost of what would do you good in a week or a year.
But our lives, it turns out, are not only this moment.
And here is what nobody tells you about boredom in a long relationship: a certain amount of it is not a symptom. It is the texture of familiarity, and familiarity is the thing you were after.
The alternative to a partner who occasionally bores you is not a more exciting partner. It is a series of people who are interesting precisely because you do not yet know them — which is a condition that expires, reliably, in every case, at about the same point.