Romance Needs Maintenance: The Myths We Tell About Love
The couple at table seven hasn't looked at each other in twenty minutes.
Romance Needs Maintenance: The Myths We Tell About Love
The couple at table seven hasn't looked at each other in twenty minutes. She scrolls through her phone while he studies the wine list with the intensity of someone solving quantum physics. They're probably planning their summer holiday together — maybe even browsing those "15 romantic date ideas" articles that promise to rekindle what they've somehow managed to extinguish simply by being themselves for too long.
I watch them from across the restaurant and recognise the performance. The careful choreography of two people who love each other but have forgotten how to be interesting to each other. They'll book the sunset picnic. They'll go wine tasting. They'll take the hiking adventure with the scenic views and the photo opportunities. And for a few hours, they'll feel like they did something important for their relationship.
Here's what nobody tells you about romantic maintenance: most of it is expensive procrastination.
We've created an entire industry around the idea that relationships require constant tending, like delicate orchids that die if you forget to mist them twice daily. Date nights become assignments. Romance becomes labour. Love becomes a project you're always behind on.
But the couples I see in my practice who actually stay interested in each other? They're not the ones scheduling weekly romantic adventures. They're the ones who still argue about books. Who interrupt each other's stories because they have something urgent to add. Who disagree about the thermostat setting and somehow make it flirtatious.
The mythology of relationship maintenance suggests that love is naturally entropic — that without constant intervention, couples drift toward indifference. But that's not entropy. That's comfort masquerading as intimacy. It's the mistake of thinking that knowing someone completely means there's nothing left to discover.
Real maintenance isn't about manufacturing experiences. It's about maintaining curiosity about the person you wake up next to. It's asking questions you don't already know the answers to. It's being genuinely surprised when they order something different from the menu after three years of the same Tuesday night restaurant.
The couple at table seven finally looks at each other when the waiter spills wine on her dress. For thirty seconds, they're a team again — him dabbing at the stain while she laughs, both of them suddenly animated by this tiny crisis that requires them to be present in the same moment.
That's when I realise what they actually need: not better date ideas, but more wine-spilling moments. More interruptions to the script they've been performing. More reasons to look up from their phones and remember that the person across from them is still capable of surprising them.
The uncomfortable truth about romance is this: if you need to schedule it, you've already lost it.
