When I watch them, I am always amazed at the intensity with which they focus on mastery of each others every dimension. I also realize that most of those new couples will fall out of love eventually. The multiplicity of connections and continued motivations that great, long-term relationships require are hard to come by and easier to leave behind, especially when another new and more exciting experience is easy to find.

I observe my patients with each new technological gadget, intensely immersed and devoted until the next more up-to-date version emerges. The recently beloved castaway lies in the dust, ungrieved and forgotten. How similar this is to sequential, lust-driven relationships that produce the same intense immersion and eventual decline. Why wouldn't lovers want to feel continuously excited and challenged in their intimate relationships the same way as they are by their new telephones?

I cannot simply tell today's couples to just master those once-cherished skills that were the backbone of successful, old-fashioned relationships. In our pressured, faster-is-better society, most of my patients don't have the time or motivation to work that hard at it. However, those skills are crucial for any wonderful relationship to sustain and, without them, lovers have a harder time staying the course when their intimacy begins to diminish. In addition, these too-soon escapes into new or parallel relationships are now more open to external observation and readily supported in much of the social media. TV talk shows, hyper-sexual sitcoms, Internet opportunities, and magazines readily bless the need, and even right, to maintain a passionate sexual life with whomever, whenever, and however it may occur, no matter if those experiences are temporarily exclusive or concurrent.

There are still many romantic, commit-for-life die-hards who truly believe that long-term, deeply intimate relationships offer rewards not possible in rapidly successive affairs. They are convinced that shared histories, friend and family ties, healthy lifestyles, deepening intimacy, and, of course, less chance of sexually related diseases, are much more likely when partners stay together.
I confess. I am one of those long-term committed people. But the relationship skills I learned cannot adequately serve the problems facing couples today. The explosion of technology, so much a part of this new generation, has created a language gap that has yet to be solved. My patients from fourteen to thirty-five do not have the same attitudes toward sex, friendships, vocational loyalties, family obligations, or what creates life satisfaction as I was taught were beyond challenging. That doesn't mean that the new generation, despite their technical acumen, doesn't have the same desire for an eternally secure relationship that also provides novelty and excitement. It is just harder to find amidst the flurry of today's instant everything.

I truly believe that we could have both sustained discovery and excitement within the same long-term relationship if we only knew how to achieve, and maintain, that magical formula that would make it possible. If we knew how to do that, why wouldn't we try harder to stay committed to one person? If that relationship could avoid the pitfalls of boredom, fear of entrapment, and failed curiosity that so often emerge in long-term relationships, why wouldn't we want that?
Since the temptations of constant stimulation and change are not going to subside and we still ache for the combination of intimacy and lasting love to survive, the only answer is to change the way we are in the relationships we create. The only thing left to evolve is us.

If you want to stay in love with one person for the rest of your life and not continue to look for excitement outside that relationship, you'll need to become a different kind of person and hook up with someone similar. That partner must be someone whom you cannot ever fully know, master, or predict and you have to be the same wonderfully elusive being for him or her. In short, you need to be a simulated emotional, sexual, philosophical, physical, spiritual, mental, and very human equivalent to a technological gadget in constant evolution.

Ask yourself the following questions:

What changes would you need to become an ever-interesting person?
What would you need to do to offer your partner a non-ending series of unanticipated and exciting dimensions that neither of you knew existed when you first met?
How can you make your relationship behavior brave enough, open enough, and supportive enough to constantly risk security in exchange for the anxiety that must accompany this level of freedom as you guide your future together?

The effort to create yourself as a person who can both stimulate and support, challenge and validate, would take thought, commitment and sustained action. If you can achieve that evolution, you could attain a new way of being continuously intimate with your long-term lover that very few have attained. It would be like having sequential, fascinating relationships with many people who happen to be the same person. To actually embrace that possibility, you will need to approach love in a very different way.

Here are my suggestions:
Always remain more in love with your own transformation than you are with another person.
Continuously question and remap your dreams, your beliefs, your ideologies, and your possibilities.
Keep your physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and metaphysical bodies as vibrant and alive as you can.
Be ready to let go of habits, rituals, or commitments that limit your availability to joy and transformation.
Stand for the things you must in order to live your truth, whatever the cost.
Learn to love what you currently have and are without giving up what you can still become.
Do what you have promised unless those commitments turn out to be wrong. Then, with humility and genuine remorse, renegotiate for a better outcome.
Always be ready to laugh at yourself along the way.
Never equate freedom with a lack of accountability. You are not what you intend or promise; only what you do.
Maintain an external reference that continually witnesses your promises to yourself.

These may seem hard guidelines, but the ever-changing landscape of creating multiple, sequential relationships with people you may never deeply know, or be known by, can be far more damaging to the soul over time. You can't be bored without being boring. You can't be trapped unless you give the keys to your emotional prison to another. And you can't stay in love with yourself or anyone else if you do not continue to evolve and transform intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.
Change is uncertain and true love is never entrapping, but if you follow the suggestions above, you will become a person who can create a successful long-term love despite the many temptations that lie before you.