The significance of the couple relationship in the twenty-first century

Abstract

According to The Guardian (Beaumont-Thomas, 2017), Ed Sheeran was the most frequently streamed artist on Spotify in 2017 and his song Thinking out Loud became the first song to hit 500 million streams in October 2015. The lyrics promise long-lasting love: When your legs don’t work like they used to before And I can’t sweep you off your feet Will your mouth still remember the taste of love Will your eyes still smile from your cheeks And darling I will be loving you ‘til we are 70 And baby my heart could still fall as hard at 23 And I’m thinking ‘bout how people fall in love in mysterious ways Maybe just the touch of a hand Oh me I fall in love with you every single day And I just wanna tell you I am… This song’s popularity suggests that we can only be truly sustained by everlasting romantic love, in spite of the fact that it is unrealistic to expect to be in such a perpetual state with a partner. Beall and Sternberg (1995) argue that the yearning for everlasting romantic love is simply a social construction. Others attest that besides the social layer, there is a biological basis to this yearning in that “romantic love is an attachment process—a biosocial (emphasis added) process by which affectional bonds are formed between adult lovers, just as affectional bonds are formed earlier in life between human infants and their parents” (Hazan & Shaver, 1987, p. 511). In my clinical work with couples and also in the course of my conversations with those I encounter in my daily life, many people have often told me that they feel actualized when experiencing a meaningful connection with their significant others. On a global level, cross-cultural anthropologists have attested that romantic love is a powerful emotion that we feel in our body and which forms part of the six basic emotions that all human beings experience no matter where they are living (Karandashev, 2017) the others being joy, anger, sadness, fear and hate.