What Keeps Relationships Together?

 

Love or Compromise?

Is it love that holds a relationship together? Or is it compromise?

Love is what draws us together in the first place. But compromise is what keeps us together.

Love alone is not enough. Psychologists define love as an emotion. And like all emotions, love fluctuates with stress, sleep, health, and the thousands of other factors that shape our daily lives.

You can love your partner deeply and still get annoyed, frustrated, or angry with them. Love won't shield you from conflict, nor will it magically resolve your disagreements.

That’s why even the happiest couples argue and go through rough patches, regardless of how much love they share. The difference is that strong couples understand love can’t fix everything—but compromise can.

The Psychology of Compromise

Compromise happens when you balance what you want, what your partner wants, and what’s best for the relationship itself.

Every couple brings together unique habits, values, and experiences. Expecting perfect alignment is unrealistic. Instead, healthy couples learn to negotiate their shared reality. They turn “my way” and “your way” into “our way.”

But compromise only works when it’s rooted in a strong sense of we.

Research shows that couples who describe their conflicts using “we” language—“we decided,” “we talked,” “we figured it out”—feel more connected and satisfied after disagreements. When both partners see compromise as a shared effort rather than a personal loss, it actively strengthens the bond between them.

What Compromise Looks Like in Real Life

Compromise doesn’t always look romantic. Sometimes it means agreeing to watch a movie you’d never choose yourself. Other times, it means listening to your partner vent while resisting the urge to immediately offer solutions.

Rigid, black-and-white thinking—where one person must be right and the other wrong—will never work in a relationship. Even if you are technically right, if your partner cannot follow or agree, you are both left stuck. Insisting on fairness in small things—“You have to clean up, it’s your turn, I did it last time”—often leads to unnecessary conflict. Maybe your partner did something else for you in the meantime. Is getting furious over such things really worth it?

Instead, you’ll constantly be presented with a choice: Are you willing to meet your partner halfway?

Today, it might be about chores. Tomorrow, how you spend your evening. Next month, how you navigate family holidays. It might involve finding middle ground, taking turns, or agreeing to a third option neither of you had initially considered.

What matters is that both of you feel heard and respected, and that no one feels the need to “win” or “be right.” When you consistently make enough space for one another’s needs, you build something that love alone rarely provides: reliability.

My Video:  What Keeps Relationships Together? https://youtu.be/zeQIEntAAOY

My Audio: https://divinesuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/Podcast5/What-Keeps-Relationships-Together.mp3