How to stay together forever – and why we often don’t: These are the keys to keeping your bond with your partner intact for decades, reveals top sex scientist DR JUSTIN GARCIA

Some years ago, I was invited to a houseboat party by a physician friend who thought I would enjoy meeting the people of floating community life, on a lake a few miles away.

There I met Martha, an incredibly welcoming, and immediately forthcoming woman in her 50s.

We quickly slipped into that familiar pattern where someone realises I’m ‘that Kinsey guy’ and starts telling me personal things.

Entirely unsolicited, Martha detailed some of the unexpected benefits of the HRT she’d been taking to combat the symptoms of the menopause.

‘I feel like I’m 18 again,’ she laughed playfully. ‘Sometimes the wind blows, and I get turned on.’

As the evening wore on and the Margaritas flowed, Martha’s body language became more and more affectionate and intimate: leaning closer, leaving a hand on my shoulder. At one point she even started to eat from my plate.

I chalked it up to a party flirtation, though this didn’t explain why her partner kept smiling and winking at me, as if signalling I needn’t worry.

Finally, my friend leaned over and whispered, ‘You know they’re swingers, right? That’s why I thought you would find them so interesting.’

My friend wasn’t wrong. Martha’s invitation (which I declined, politely) highlighted one of the most fascinating paradoxes of human sexuality: we are wired to want variety. But at the same time, we also crave the intimacy that comes with exclusivity.

But is there any way we can eat our cake and have it, too? Can relationships withstand this push and pull of want and need and survive into our golden years?

Although Martha and her partner may have found a way to keep their particular flame alive, as I discussed previously, consensual non-monogamy isn’t for everyone.

Yet many couples do maintain their pair-bonds for decades without engaging in infidelity – consensual or otherwise.

A senior colleague of mine who is in her 70s recently celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary. Over the course of their marriage, she and her husband raised two sons while juggling the demands of their careers.

When I asked her how they made it work for so long, she replied: ‘Oh, there were definitely times when it would have been easier to walk away. But we were committed to each other, to the relationship, and to the life that we were building together.’

Keeping the faith

We understand why people cheat, but why don’t  they? It’s a fascinating question my colleagues and I have started to explore.

Our research is ongoing, but our early thinking suggests that it may very well come down to empathy— the same neurological function that allows for deep connections with others, part of the very foundation of our capacity for intimacy.

Most of us know what cheating could do to our partners, to our other relationships, to our reputations. It’s hurtful to be the one ‘cheated on,’ and in loving relationships we generally try to prevent hurting our partners.

It’s interesting to note that infidelity is linked to what’s known in psychology as the ‘dark triad’ of personality traits: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, all of which contain elements of disregard for the feelings of others.

There have been many studies focusing on the particular brain regions associated with dopamine and early-stage romantic love, and those linked to attachment and long-term bonding.

They found how these, in turn, impact our nervous system’s reactions to our social world – and the temptations it throws our way.

Psychologist Jon Maner and colleagues looked at how people in committed romantic relationships respond to seeing attractive people of their preferred gender who were not their partner.

They found that after being asked to think about their romantic partner, people would avert their eyes and gaze away, without awareness of what they were doing.

This is how our body regulates the tension between our sex drive and our evolutionary propensity to pair bond, reinforcing monogamy by directing our focus back to our mate. Doing so is adaptive; it helps ensure that we nurture the bonds that help our species survive.

Love in later in life

As people age there is a general decrease in sexual frequency. As our bodies become more worn, we experience various hormonal changes, often combined with the medications many take for chronic health conditions that affect libido or even the ability to have sex.

One national study led by gynaecologist Stacy Lindau of over 3,000 adults between the ages of 57 and 85 showed that the number of people engaging in sexual activity within the last year declined with advancing age, with women being less likely than men to report sexual activity.

The decline is not always synchronic, however: we found that men experience declines in frequency of sexual thoughts and sexual activity later in life than women, creating what has been called the gendered ‘double standard of aging’.

Yet, it is very possible to have a very healthy sexual life decades past our reproductive prime. Research into geriatric populations bears this out.

Another double standard, however, is that sexual satisfaction – if not frequency – actually increases with age in women, though not in men. 

This may be because older women are more comfortable with their bodies, because they know what they want, and because they are more assertive with sexual partners.

Most important is to remember that as we age, our priorities change and our sexual and romantic lives change with us. 

And the better we pay attention to our shifting desires, the evolving needs of our partners, and the intimate contexts in which we operate, the better we can navigate later in life love.

Keep on dating

My research has convinced me that the best way to maintain intimacy in a relationship is to continue to date your partner throughout the entirety of your relationship.

Yet, finding the time to reaffirm those intimate bonds can easily get lost in the shuffle of our busy lives, especially in cases where people have very different social networks or work schedules or live in different geographical regions.

One long distance relationship strategy I’ve personally employed is to watch or stream a TV show with a partner either synchronously over a video chat or while live texting each other.

Watching the same reality TV show from your respective homes may not seem like a bonding activity, but research studies have demonstrated that sharing media or entertainment is associated with greater relationship quality.

It gives us something to talk about, and a jumping off point for exploring each other and ourselves within the partnership. What storyline or character did you find funny, interesting, or upsetting, and why?

Studies have also shown the benefits of mutual ritual: the things we do over and over with a partner can help us build security and trust.

But the flip side of such routine is the potential for boredom and lethargy. Satisfying relationships have consistent patterns and rituals while also making room for curiosity and novelty.

What we’re really doing when we date is carving out time for each other to share an experience through a common activity.

Garden together, go for a walk – try ziplining maybe!

Breaking up

Relationships end for a host of reasons. Sometimes it’s out of our hands altogether. Sometimes it’s just the timing just wasn’t right. Sometimes something, or someone, hurts us so badly that staying is more painful than leaving.

Most of us have watched friends and colleagues suffer in relationships where the bad starts to outweigh the good.

Publicly available marital data from around the world tell us that many couples who have spent a significant portion of their lives in a committed pair bond will at some point find themselves facing the prospect that their relationship has run its course.

One report noted that the average length of marriage in Rome was roughly 18 years, with a close to 30 per cent divorce rate; in the UK it’s around 12.9 years, with a divorce rate of 43 per cent. [ONS figures]

In the United States, divorce rates have somewhat declined in recent years, with 80 per cent of first marriages formed in the 2010s still together in 2025.

Of course, these are averages, but what these numbers tell us is that while many couples are together for a substantial duration of their lives, not every relationship remains intact until death do us part.

One interesting finding is that while relationship dissolution is often challenging for everyone, women may find it somewhat easier to break free than men: two thirds of divorces in the United States are filed by women.

But what happens to our brains and bodies when the pressures on a pair bond cause it to break? And what is an intimate animal to do when love is truly lost?

It’s easy to dismiss a breakup as something frivolous, but the data show there’s a very real cost in terms of human wellness. We lose weight. We gain weight. We get swept up in a roller coaster of mood swings: sad, angry, relieved, sad again.

In one study, my colleague Helen Fisher found that some people even feel physical pain during relationship loss.

In a preliminary study, when she and her team of collaborators brought 15 people who had been recently romantically rejected into a medical laboratory for an MRI scan, they found activation of brain areas involved in cocaine addiction.

In in other words, the brain of someone who had been through a recent heartbreak looks remarkably like that of someone going through cocaine withdrawal.

Love again

However painful the break-up, or how long our relationship lasted, research tells us it is possible to love again, when we are ready, and if that’s what we want. 

While we may lament we’ll never find someone ‘like him / her’ again, it’s true – we won’t. We’ll find someone and something completely new.

To illustrate this, I like to share what I’ve observed in gibbons, those small apes that mainly live in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and our genetic close cousins.

While about 15 percent of all primate species engage in social monogamy, gibbons are the only apes other than humans that exhibit patterns of pair bonding, and those patterns are not dissimilar to ours.

They also serve as a wonderful example of how romance looks in the natural world: when two gibbons are intensely bonded, they ‘sing’ to each other. Some primatologists believe that gibbons will only sing one particular song to one particular partner, ever.

That is to say, if a gibbon loses a mate, it will not sing the same way to another for the rest of its life.

Humans, metaphorically speaking, do the same thing. No two loves are alike, and in those instances when we try to sing the same old love song to a new partner, we’re setting ourselves up for disaster.

Intimacy, by its very definition, is a state we can experience only in the context of another person; it’s that magical mix of closeness, trust, and vulnerability that ripens over time and anchors us in the world.

It’s perhaps for this reason above all that we have evolved as the Intimate Animal – to allow us as a species to weather the uncertainty of ever-changing physical and social environments.

When that bond is broken, we can love again; sometimes better, but always different, because relationships are dynamic, and we learn from the past and adapt to experience.

When we put all the pieces together, the research is clear: It’s possible to fall out of love, it’s OK to grieve that loss, and it’s in our nature as the intimate animal to learn a new song and love again.

Adapted from The Intimate Animal by Dr Justin Garcia (Penguin Life, £20), to be published February 12. © Justin Garcia 2026. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid until February 7; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937