Creating Great Love: Building What Lasts

Great love isn’t found — it’s created

Finding someone you think is extraordinary is a great beginning. There’s the recognition, the chemistry, the delicious curiosity, and that wonderful moment when another human being begins to feel different from everyone else. And let’s not forget that first kiss. Mmmm. But finding each other is only the opening act. The really interesting question is what happens next. What do two people do with all that possibility once they have it?

They create something that didn’t exist before they met. Over time, their relationship develops its own language, history, humor, rituals, memories, erotic energy, and peculiar little customs. Two separate lives become connected without either person disappearing into the other. Eventually there is you, there is me, and there is this remarkable third thing called us. That is what makes great love so fascinating. You don’t simply discover it. You get the privilege of participating in its creation.

Paying Attention to the Person You Love

One of the easiest ways to lose something extraordinary is to become so accustomed to it that you stop appreciating it. Human beings are remarkably good at this. We can spend years longing for someone wonderful, finally find them, and then gradually become more interested in whether they remembered to take the garbage out. Familiarity is lovely, but it can also make us lazy.

The solution? Keep looking at the person you love. People continue changing, questioning, learning, struggling, dreaming, and surprising us throughout their lives. Stay interested in who your partner is becoming. Ask questions you don’t already know the answers to. Notice what excites them, what worries them, what they are proud of, and what makes their face light up when they talk.

And when you see something beautiful, tell them with your outloud voice. Admiration that never leaves your head isn’t nearly as useful as admiration that reaches the person you admire. Tell them what you respect about them. Tell them when they make you laugh, when they impress you, when they move you, and when you find them ridiculously attractive. Let them catch you looking. There is something profoundly intimate about being seen by someone who knows you well and discovering that they are still fascinated.

Make Delight Part of the Relationship

Delight may be one of the most underrated ingredients in love. Most people want to know that their partner loves them, but there is something especially wonderful about knowing that the person you love genuinely enjoys you. They like your mind. They like your body. They like talking to you, touching you, teasing you, laughing with you, and hearing whatever bizarre thought just wandered through your head.

That delight should be visible. Be happy to see each other. Flirt. Be affectionate for no particular reason. Give compliments that have nothing to do with birthdays, anniversaries, or getting laid. Surprise each other occasionally. Make ordinary things more fun simply because you are doing them together. There is no rule requiring a serious relationship to become a solemn one.

Some of the happiest couples are the most gloriously ridiculous together. They have private jokes, absurd nicknames, strange traditions, and stories they have told so many times that neither can remember which parts are still technically true. They understand something important: life is going to hand you plenty of serious shit. You don’t need to manufacture any.

Make Each Other Feel Precious

There’s a difference between loving someone and making them feel loved. There is an even greater difference between making someone feel loved and making them feel precious.

Cherishing another person requires knowing them well enough to understand what reaches them. One person feels loved when you listen without trying to fix anything. Another melts when you touch them. Someone else needs words, reassurance, laughter, time, protection, encouragement, or the simple experience of knowing that when they walk into the room, somebody is genuinely glad they came home.

This is where love becomes wonderfully personal. You learn the person rather than memorizing a set of relationship rules. You discover where they are tender. You learn what makes them feel safe enough to reveal the parts of themselves they don’t show everyone else. You become trustworthy with that knowledge. And because you love them, you begin asking one of the most beautiful questions a person can bring into a relationship: What can I do to make your life better?

When both people are asking that question, love becomes incredibly generous.

Give More Than You Keep Score Of

Nothing sucks the life out of generosity faster than an invisible relationship ledger. I did this, so now you should do that. I apologized last time. I initiated sex yesterday. I emptied the dishwasher three times this week, and apparently no one is erecting a monument in my honor. Scorekeeping makes love feel like a business arrangement with occasional nudity.

Great relationships operate differently. Both people give because giving itself becomes pleasurable. You make the coffee because you know exactly how they like it. You reach for them because you want them to feel wanted. You take something off their plate when they are overwhelmed. You remember the small thing they mentioned weeks ago. You make them laugh when the day has kicked the crap out of them. You offer affection without requiring an immediate return on investment.

None of these things is particularly dramatic, which is precisely why they matter. A magnificent relationship is not constructed entirely from grand romantic gestures. It is built from thousands of ordinary acts that quietly say, “You matter to me.” Eventually those acts accumulate into something much larger than themselves. They become the atmosphere of the relationship.

Learn How to Be Angry Without Becoming an Asshole

You’re going to disagree. It doesn’t matter how compatible, evolved, spiritually enlightened, sexually satisfied, or madly in love you are. Put two human beings in close proximity long enough and eventually one of them will do something that makes the other wonder whether there has been a recent head injury. Conflict is not the problem. What matters is what you allow conflict to turn you into.

The person who loves you will eventually trust you with information that could hurt them in the wrong hands. You will know their insecurities, fears, regrets, tender places, and probably several things they desperately hope nobody else ever discovers. That knowledge is one of the privileges of intimacy. Using it as ammunition during an argument is a betrayal of that privilege.

You can be furious and still remember that this is the person you love. You can say what is true without trying to humiliate them. You can disagree without contempt. You can walk away long enough to get your head screwed back on and then come back. And when you are wrong, you can apologize without adding twelve paragraphs explaining why technically you were still sort of right.

Great love isn’t created by people who never hurt each other. It’s created by people who care deeply about what happens after they do.

Keep Mischief Alive

Love needs tenderness and devotion, but it also needs mischief. There should be something happening between two people that belongs only to them and occasionally makes everyone else wonder what the hell they are laughing about.

Create a private world together. Develop traditions nobody else understands. Have songs that instantly transport you somewhere. Dance naked in the kitchen. Make each other laugh in bed so hard that you snort. Take the unnecessary detour that gets you hopelessly lost. Celebrate things that are not technically occasions. Occasionally behave in ways that would make your children, neighbors, or respectable members of society grateful they were not present. 

This private world becomes one of the great pleasures of intimacy. Over time, a glance can contain an entire conversation. A phrase can resurrect a twenty-year-old joke. A particular song can bring back a room, a night, a kiss, an erotic encounter, or an earlier version of yourselves. You begin accumulating a shared mythology, and suddenly the ordinary world is filled with things that mean more because they belong to both of you. That’s part of what makes a relationship feel like home.

Don’t Let Familiarity Make You Blind

There’s something beautiful about becoming familiar with another human being. You know the sound of their footsteps. You know which story they are about to tell. You know how they look first thing in the morning, what they order without opening the menu, and which expression means, “Do not say another fucking word until I have eaten something.” But familiarity should deepen intimacy, not replace curiosity.

The person beside you remains a mystery no matter how long you love them. There will always be thoughts you haven’t heard, desires that are still taking shape, fears they haven’t quite named, and parts of themselves they are only beginning to understand. Keep asking. Keep listening. Keep discovering.

This is true erotically as well. Knowing someone’s body does not mean you have exhausted its possibilities. Desire changes. Bodies change. Confidence changes. What we want, how we want it, and what it means to us can become richer with time. There is something exquisitely intimate about being deeply familiar with someone and still being capable of surprising each other.

Keep Choosing Each Other

We tend to romanticize the first choosing: the first declaration of love, the commitment, the proposal, the wedding, the moment two people decide that this is it. Those moments deserve their magic. But there is another kind of choosing that may be even more beautiful. It happens later.

It happens after you have seen each other tired, frightened, sick, stressed, grieving, unreasonable, magnificent, naked, triumphant, ridiculous, and occasionally impossible. It happens after life has stopped being an extended date and become an actual life, complete with bills, responsibilities, disappointments, dirty laundry, and people who apparently still cannot figure out how to load the fucking dishwasher correctly. And you look at this person you know so well and think, Still you. That’s not resignation. It’s devotion.

This Is Where Great Love Actually Happens

Finding love gets all the good publicity. We love the story of how two people met, the first kiss, the impossible coincidence, the moment they knew. But the magnificent part comes afterward.

It happens during all those years when two people continue seeing each other, delighting in each other, protecting each other, irritating each other, forgiving each other, laughing together, wanting each other, and building a life neither could have created alone. Bodies become familiar without becoming ordinary. Trust deepens. Private jokes multiply. Desire changes shape without disappearing. Two people become witnesses to one another’s lives while somehow remaining lovers inside them.

That’s great love. Not perfection. Not permanent bliss. Not two people gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes while somebody else apparently handles the laundry.

It’s something far better. It’s two gloriously imperfect human beings who find each other and then have the audacity to create something magnificent together.

Finding each other is the beginning. Creating the love is the adventure.

Song Recommendation:
— “I Love You,” Steve Miller Band, 1970

This is page from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.

The Erotic Four™ is a trademark of Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.