As an aging individual who is no closer to marriage than the day he came out of the womb, this is something that, as much as I try not to think about it too much, is more and more in my consciousness. I know I have talked about there not being "The One" in the past, but it doesn't change the fact that we are sort of conditioned to think about having a partner, and I am still a hopeless romantic at heart. Aside from this, though, I do have fascination with psychology and behavior, and as I have aged, naturally both my friends and the people I have dated have aged as well (I am definitely not the type to date much younger than I am). I'll tell you what I expected to see: I expected to see relationships lasting longer because, well, we're not getting any younger, and the fear of being alone begins to outweigh the desire to be in the relationship we want. I expected folks to settle, to put up with more and get less in return, to encounter severe problems with resignation and just continue on in a an unfulfilling relationship.
Much to my surprise, I believe I have found the opposite. Relationships seem to fizzle out more quickly. In hindsight, I do feel this does make just as much, if not more, sense than my original hypothesis. I think there are probably three contributing factors. The first I think speaks to "young love". Younger individuals may feel more inclined to stick in a relationship because it's a first love or unfamiliar territory. Without having experienced heartbreak or negative aspects of relationships, it does make it conducive to continuing on for a longer period of time due to lack of experience and wherewithal to identify problem areas or red flags. Younger individuals are also still developing into the people they'll grow up to be; certainly as teenagers we do have aspects of ourselves that are fairly firmly cemented into our makeup that won't change, but there are many other areas in which we will continue to change in. As we age, those aspects are a bit less likely to change, and therefore "we know what we want" and can identify if a relationship will satisfy those desires or not. That increased level of certainty along with the experience to enable identifying positives and negatives in relationships lend to older individuals having shorter relationships.
The second item, and this is perhaps what both makes sense and surprises me at the same time, is the desire to invest effort to making a relationship work. I really and truly believe that all relationships require effort, no matter how "right" people are for each other. A couple really should never be at the point of stagnation; much like we should always strive to grow and better ourselves, our relationships should continue to grow and find new ways to thrive as well. Now, with youth there may come a propensity to not be able to recognize incompatibility or significant issues that will make a relationship unfeasible. When we are younger, however, there is also probably a subconscious reassurance that even if the relationship fails, we're still young, and there is still plenty of time to find love anew. The older we get, the more doubt that resides there will be opportunities later. The longer we continue in a relationship that we have any sort of doubt about, the more time we've "wasted". I truly feel I have witnessed this very thing. And it is logical: the longer we spend in unsuccessful relationships, the more time we spent out of the dating pool, and the more time that others in our age range in the dating pool become unavailable (and at an older age, perhaps it is reasonable to make the assumption that more people exit the dating pool than enter the dating pool, but it certainly is not a one way flow of people). The flip side to this is does it make folks lazy? Does it make people more likely to nitpick items that are easily resolved or that are non-issues as a means to move on? There are a number of ways where this phenomenon results in folks demonstrating an unwillingness to put forth the requisite effort to make a relationship work. As someone is wired to give an immense amount of himself to others, due in part to a difficulty in finding the ability to love himself, this is a harshreality to encounter. In many instances it may be the right thing to cut short a relationship because it wasn't the right one, but in many other instances a relationship that does have a natural fit and legitimate promise may be cut short due to the anxiety of spending too long in a relationship and it not working out at an older age.
Now, one item that I think, at a minimum, facilitates the above, and perhaps is more responsible than either of the two reasons above, is the progression of technology and the ease with which people can find potential partners. This impacts us two ways. One is the actual ability to find more people more quickly than ever before with loads of information available at our fingertips. A second, less obvious outcome is perhaps a byproduct of the availability. Due to the technology, people may have developed a mentality to date around more and not invest as much regardless of if they use the technology to do so. Now, this could very well be an age independent variable as well, but to the extent it adds fuel to the fear of time commitment fire outlined above, it cannot be understated the role that technology and dating services play in how relationship behavior has changed. And, anecdotally, since this was not nearly as prevalent in my younger years, I have a difficult time comparing my younger years to my older years due to an inability to adequately correct for this variable. I do still believe that the other explanations provided are compelling enough to think there's merit to the hypothesis that relationships are shorter the older we get (when removing the relationships that end in marriage, that is).
At the end of the day, we're still individuals with our own tendencies and different inclinations on how to treat relationships. I don't know that my mentality will change that much for any of the reasons I listed above; if anything, I treat each failed relationship as just that: a failure, and it makes me try that much harder next time. It's probably a somewhat destructive mentality, as even now I am left wondering what more I can possibly do, and I fear that I won't be adequate for future potential partners because I will have set expectations of myself that I won't be able to continue to surpass. Being able to frame how others may perceive relationships as they age, though, has been a valuable dedication of my time as it makes me more aware of what I may encounter in the future.
