On Novelty vs Peace in Dating and Relationships

Let's change things up a little

Having just gone through a divorce, I’ve been spending a lot (a lot) of time examining what I could have done better and what makes a healthy relationship. I’ve found a lot of fantastic Instagram accounts of psychologists and other types that give excellent relationship advice for both men and women. Most can be applied equally to both sexes.

I saw a video last night that really struck me though that I thought I’d discuss. The psychologist said:

So what happens is the brain starts to seek pleasure rather than peace. And men or women when they meet someone peaceful, they label it as boring and they're always seeking some person who gives them pleasure or dopamine. The best person who gives you dopamine is a toxic attachment. What happens with a toxic attachment is you get pre-occupied with that person. You're thinking about them: Where are they? Why haven't they called? Blah blah blah. And people mislabel that toxic attachment as love instead of pre-occupation and they forget to look for peace.

When the relationship loses its excitement, we assume it's lost its love but really it's lost its novelty and novelty is only available in new relationships. So what happens are people are craving the feeling of new relationships rather than enjoying the stability of existing relationships.

Now, I’ve noticed for a very long time a trend of both men and women that seem attracted to very toxic partners and I think she hit the nail on the head. Both sexes can be attracted to toxicity because it sets the reward part of our brain on fire.

But that’s not what makes for good long term relationships and certainly not for a happy marriage.

Now, I’ll be very clear and say I used to be like this. I fully understand the dopamine release she is describing. And I think younger men and women are more susceptible to it. I’ve since grown up and learned that a peaceful relationship is 100x more rewarding than all of that chaos and novelty. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t have fun as a couple, but in order to form a strong marriage, you need to understand that almost all of the novelty goes away as a relationship becomes routine and repetition, especially after marriage or having kids.

I’ve learned through my own experiences and that of my friends that this is, as she said, very frequently mistaken as “boredom” and move on, turning into serial daters because it does reward our brain with more dopamine. This is of course not to say everyone and certainly both sexes suffer from it.

So if you want a stable, long term relationship, you need to reach a point where you understand that the peace it brings is what you are actually after. A conflict-free couple enjoying themselves could be described as boring. Or it could be described as delightful, depending upon what you are seeking. But my advice to everyone who wants to get married or have successful long term relationships is to understand the novelty wears off. If your partner brings you peace, value that as finding those partners is significantly more rare and they should not be thrown aside but instead nurtured and enjoyed.

Fortunately, I’ve grown out of these ways and greatly enjoy peace in my relationships, but having it put so clearly helped me understand a lot about so much of the societal dating world that we see today. I’d like to see it change and have more people value peace over toxic pleasure.