Love Is a Practice: Building a Relationship That Grows Stronger Over Time
We absorb a particular story about love from the culture we grow up in: that it is primarily a feeling, something that either exists or does not, something that arrives unbidden and, if we are fortunate, stays. What this story obscures is that the relationships people describe as genuinely loving, the ones built on deep trust and authentic knowing, are almost never the product of feeling alone. They are the product of practice. Of sustained, often imperfect, and entirely ordinary acts of attention and repair and choosing each other again and again even when it is not convenient. As a marriage and family therapist working with couples in Hidden Hills and Calabasas for over four decades, I have watched many relationships begin with tremendous feeling and slowly empty out. I have also watched relationships that seemed beyond repair come back to life. The difference, almost invariably, is this: whether both people are willing to practice.
What the Research on Lasting Relationships Shows
Decades of research into what distinguishes thriving couples from those who struggle has produced findings that are both surprisingly simple and surprisingly demanding. Couples who do well over time are not the ones who have the most romantic chemistry, or the most compatible personalities, or even the fewest areas of disagreement. They are the ones who have developed habits of turning toward each other rather than away, of making regular small deposits into what one researcher called an “emotional bank account,” and of recovering from conflict without allowing resentment to calcify.
These are habits. They are not the natural expression of how people feel in any given moment. They are choices made repeatedly, often against the pull of defensiveness or exhaustion or the gravitational force of old grievance. That is precisely what makes them a practice.
The Small Things That Turn Out to Be the Big Things
Couples often come to therapy focused on the big conflicts: the recurring argument about money, the tension around parenting, the breach of trust that has not fully healed. These matter, and we address them. But I find myself returning again and again to the smaller fabric of daily relational life, because it is there that the quality of a relationship is really built or eroded.
How do you greet each other at the end of a day? When your partner makes a bid for your attention, something small, a funny observation, a request to look at something on their phone, do you turn toward them or stay absorbed in what you were doing? When you are tired and irritable, do you give your partner the short version of yourself that is left over, or do you make some effort to be present with them? These small moments of attention and turning toward are not romantic gestures. They are the daily practice of keeping a relationship alive.
Conflict as an Opportunity
One of the shifts that couples therapy can produce is a fundamental change in how partners understand conflict. Most people come in treating conflict as evidence of failure: something went wrong, the relationship is broken, we are fundamentally incompatible. What I offer instead is a different frame: conflict is information. It tells you where each person’s needs are not being met. It shows you where the relational system needs adjustment. Approached with curiosity rather than defensiveness, it can actually deepen understanding rather than destroy it.
This requires something that does not come naturally to most people in the heat of conflict: the capacity to slow down, to become curious about what the other person is actually experiencing, and to respond to their vulnerability rather than their surface behavior. That capacity is developable. It grows with practice, and therapy is a place to practice it safely, with someone in the room who can help when the old patterns take over.
Choosing Each Other Again
The couples I most admire, the ones who have built something genuinely durable, often describe their relationship not as one where love was found and then kept, but as one where love is chosen, regularly and deliberately. They are not naive about each other. They know each other’s limitations and histories. And they choose each other anyway, not because everything is perfect, but because they have decided that the practice of this relationship is worth continuing.
That kind of love is not a feeling. It is a commitment expressed in daily action. And it is, in my experience, the most sustaining thing two people can build together.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
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📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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