We like to fantasize that life with a significant other will be like a rom-com. We get a taste of it early in the relationship — what we call the honeymoon phase, the “New Relationship Energy” — and it's incredibly addictive.
But when the downside comes, and we first experience some kind of pain, we get stuck because we haven’t yet developed the skills to bloom the relationship back open into something greater. It seems gravity will always pull us back down.