The Case For Centering Your Life Around Romantic Love

Even now, with unprecedented social freedom to remain single, to prioritize careers, to build chosen families, or join a polycule, most people still long for one person with whom to share a life.

That persistence suggests romantic love is performing psychological work we haven’t managed to replace with anything else. Not with friendship, not with family, not with casual flings, and not with ambition. This Valentine’s Day, we’re bringing back an appreciation for the most despair-inducing, euphoria-laden of all human experiences: love.

Valentine’s Day Has Become More Inclusive, But We’ve Lost Our Taste for Romance

It’s that time of year again. Valentine’s Day. Love’s allegedly in the air, or at least it used to be. The holiday once had a kind of earnest, unironic sincerity. Whether you’d been dating three weeks or married three decades, it was a built-in excuse to be openly, almost embarrassingly romantic. Store aisles filled with chocolates, roses, stuffed animals, and gushily thoughtful his-and-hers greeting cards. Bad rom-coms played on a loop on network TV for those of us without a date, offering a chance to think about what we could have had in a haze of longing and desire.

Any bitterness attached to the day mostly belonged to the recently dumped or the chronically unrequited lovers with a Mr. Big to their Carrie. Doubtlessly tragic as it was to be miserably single while everyone else rubbed it in, I fear something far worse has happened. It’s something that can only be described as total Valentine’s erasure. Single people are outnumbering the partnered, and now it’s not just cynicism and bitterness competing for the day’s attention. At least that would involve some passion.

We all knew that those who vocally “hated” Valentine’s Day really just meant they hated spending it alone and resented everyone who got to partake in the festivities with a chivalrous, thoughtful lover. The romantic essence of Valentine’s Day, the holiday’s original premise, is being quietly euthanized. The holiday has been usurped, conquered even, by women celebrating their female friendships via “Galentine’s Day” and single people reclaiming their power and value on a day devoted to romantic love.

Holidays are one way we signal that something is valuable or worthy of celebration.

Recent surveys show that Gen Z is leading the charge in making Valentine’s Day “more inclusive.” Fifty-seven percent of people believe that Valentine’s Day is becoming more about celebrating all relationships than just romantic ones, while 70 percent of Gen Z lean into the idea that Valentine’s is about more than romantic relationships. With an increase in solo dining and celebrations of platonic love, Valentine’s offshoots have sprung up left and right, from Galentine’s Day to Palentine’s Day. Sixty percent of Gen Z say they’re likely to celebrate February 14 with friends instead of partners, and 43 percent of Americans who celebrate Galentine’s or Palentine’s plan to strike up new platonic friendships.

It carries the same tone-deaf energy as a mom trying to make Father’s Day all about the “moms that do it all,” or crashing a birthday party and wondering why you’re not the center of attention. This might sound like a first-world problem, and my claim is not that romantics are some sort of oppressed class, but it does signal a shift in priorities and values. You can tell a lot about a culture or a country by what it honors. Holidays are one way we signal that something is valuable or worthy of celebration.

As of now, that still includes commemorations of birth and death, religious belief, nationhood, and social progress. As holidays honoring social progress increase and our staple ones centered on human experiences like love get diluted into a generic celebration of every form of platonic and self-love, what does that say about where romance actually ranks in the hierarchy of things we consider worth centering our lives around?

Can You Really De-Center Romantic Love?

Galentine’s Day now feels more ubiquitous than Valentine’s Day itself, displacing the intensity and cultural preoccupation we once reserved for romantic love onto our platonic friendships. The sort of intensity borne out of adolescence or Sex and the City, where a group of girls position romantic relations with men as fleeting while our girlfriends are forever. They’re framed as the stabilizing axis from which our world rotates.

I’m not one to downplay the value of nurturing deep, lifelong friendships. To the contrary, maintaining lifelong friendships is one of the best things you can do for your quality of life and overall happiness. Surely there’s a difference, though, between valuing friendships and elevating them to the point they crowd out romantic priorities altogether. Treating romance as optional or indefinitely deferrable during a narrow window of time, particularly for women whose fertility is not infinite, feels like a strangely juvenile exercise in denial.

Treating romance as optional or indefinitely deferrable during a narrow window of time, particularly for women whose fertility is not infinite, feels like a strangely juvenile exercise in denial.

Marriage and children may not be for all of us, but many of us are foreclosing that idea before we’ve even had the chance to entertain it. There’s a reason people say parts of you remain completely unexplored until you meet a particular person. Certain relationships can surface traits of yours that have never been given airtime. You discover new things about yourself, traits left dormant suddenly being woken up. It can transform your understanding of yourself, of who you are, and what you want. For some, that shift includes a sudden clarity about wanting children, even after years of believing parenthood wasn’t for them.

Centering platonic friendships at this stage of your life at the expense of your romantic life is a personal choice you’re free to make, but it comes with a high opportunity cost. Not just missing out on the narrow window to have children, but also in meeting your life partner. According to an in-depth analysis by the Bedbible Research Center, more than half of people meet their partner in their twenties. Seventeen percent meet their soulmate before they turn 18, and 24 percent meet “the one” between the ages of 21 and 25.

The Irreplaceability of Romantic Love

While marriage and children may not be right for everyone, our friends still can’t be everything to us. Both romantic and nonromantic love appear to be essential to our overall well-being and survival, according to Harvard Medical School associate professors of psychiatry and couples therapists Richard S. Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds. Schwartz and Olds have been married for nearly 50 years. The omnipresence of love across societies and throughout history appears to be rooted in something primal to human nature.

While our conception of what romantic love is and looks like, as well as our freedom to explore and express it, have shifted over time, its universality suggests it’s not merely a social construct. No explicit evidence has been found of a direct evolutionary advantage, but research suggests romantic love may be a tool to achieve pairing and commitment that ensures optimal conditions for rearing children.

Since children are dependent on their parents for survival, some form of sustained pair bonding is clearly essential, though Schwartz says there’s no reason to think it must be romantic. You could imagine, and indeed there is precedent, for a sort of kin-based, communal structure to raising children that gets the job done without monogamous romantic love. However, romantic love’s persistence across cultures suggests it’s a core feature of human psychology, not an incidental cultural invention.

Renowned biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of romantic love, has described it as humanity’s most powerful drive. “People pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love,” she has said, framing romantic love as a deeply embedded neural system that cannot simply be opted out of. According to Fisher, humans are hardwired for pair bonding through their very brain circuitry.

The drive to fall in love is neurologically hardwired.

Romantic attraction activates dopamine-rich regions of the brain’s reward centers, particularly the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is a primitive structure that regulates motivation and craving. This system sits near neural centers that govern survival drives like hunger and thirst. In that sense, romantic love functions like a biological imperative. The drive to fall in love is neurologically hardwired. We’re biologically driven to propagate our DNA. These are actual physical drives in the brain that light up on brain scans.

Not everyone finds romantic love. Sometimes people deliberately forgo it. But when they do, as in the case of monks or nuns, its absence is typically framed as a profound spiritual sacrifice, not a casual lifestyle preference. Forgoing the loving touch of another can lead to something known as touch starvation, as affection expressed through touch is a physiological human need. To illustrate just how crucial touch is, when babies aren’t held by their mothers, such as seen in the extreme Frederick’s study, where babies were intentionally deprived of touch, the babies literally "died for want of touch." Today, great emphasis is placed on the importance of skin-to-skin contact immediately after childbirth. Touch starvation in adults results in elevated cortisol, systemic inflammation, dysregulated sleep, high blood pressure, weaker immune systems, and a higher risk of depression and suicide.

Why Romantic Love Is So Beneficial

When we’re falling in love, we experience a cascade of hormones that temporarily boost cortisol and deplete serotonin. This accounts for the obsessive, lovesick honeymoon phase, where you can’t focus and all you can think about is your crush. You have intrusive, addictive thoughts about them. Dopamine, meanwhile, activates a sense of euphoria, making love a pleasurable experience akin to drinking or doing drugs. Oxytocin and vasopressin deepen feelings of attachment, making couples feel bonded to each other after having sex. Oxytocin creates a feeling of contentment, calm, and security, while vasopressin reinforces commitment.

The honeymoon phase doesn’t last forever, though, and that’s a good thing. Passion fades, consequently returning cortisol and serotonin levels to baseline over time. However, other neurotransmitters, like dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin, remain elevated. It’s the only form of bonding that presents the intermingling of neurotransmitters oxytocin, responsible for bonding, and dopamine, responsible for pleasure and motivation. While you can source dopamine and oxytocin from plenty of sources—friends, achievement, casual sex—romantic love is basically the only place you’ll get them as a package deal, on a sustained loop. This effectively rewires reward pathways to associate effort, sacrifice, and patience with pleasure.

While you can source dopamine and oxytocin from plenty of sources, romantic love is basically the only place you’ll get them as a package deal, on a sustained loop.

This transition from a flooding of hormones to a steady supply of pleasure, commitment, and bonding hormones facilitates the shift from passionate to compassionate or companionate love. Passionate love is intense and euphoric but tends to be short-lived once the high fades. Companionate love is based on deep friendship, mutual respect, and emotional intimacy. The latter is predictive of long-term successful relationships, while the former is considered high volatility and subject to failure once novelty wears off, within one to two years.

The good news is that the shift to less euphoric but committed companionate love doesn’t mean you’re settling for a life of boring commitment where all intense feelings of love completely vanish. Studies show that it’s possible to be madly in love with someone even after being married for decades. A 2011 Stony Brook University study performed MRI scans on couples who’d been married for an average of 21 years and found the same level of activity in dopamine-rich areas of the brain as in couples who were newly in love.

The Health Benefits of Romantic Love and Marriage

It should come as no surprise that romantic love confers unique psychological, physical, and health benefits that contribute to a reduced risk of all-cause mortality, including a lower risk of dementia and heart disease, better recovery prognosis from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes compared to single people. Among men, the highest-risk demographic for suicide, marital status is strongly protective against suicide.

The University of Texas at Austin explains that married people tend to live longer because strong social connections play a crucial role in longevity by encouraging healthy habits, reducing stress, and providing emotional support. Some of these health benefits include reduced inflammation and better regulation of stress hormones, both of which help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. People in securely attached relationships co-regulate each other, effectively reducing anxiety and depression, which are major risk factors for people suffering from loneliness. Happily married couples have better blood pressure than unhappily married or single people. They also enjoy better-quality sleep and report fewer pain complaints. In fact, love has been shown to modulate pain, provide healthier immune systems, and better gut health.

Beyond mere physical health, married Americans are persistently 30 percentage points happier than unmarried people. According to Chicago Booth’s Sam Peltzman analysis of data from NORC at the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, marriage is an “unparalleled factor in happiness.” However, he cautions against inferring causation from correlation. As much as marriage can make people happy, just as well, the trend can be that happy people tend to get married.

It does, however, show that this increased rate of happiness among married people isn’t gendered. Men and women have reported equal levels of happiness since 2000, though women’s happiness has declined slightly in recent years. Peltzman says the data show gender as a trivial factor compared with marriage or income. The same survey found higher rates of happiness among people who were married, had higher household incomes, and were politically conservative.

In the field of positive psychology, extensive research has been conducted on happiness and life satisfaction. Based on more than eight decades of research from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s largest study on adult life and happiness, good relationships are the most significant predictor of overall happiness, life satisfaction, and well-being. The study, which followed 724 men throughout their lives, is still ongoing 88 years later and has expanded to include the original participants’ spouses and children.

Marriage is an “unparalleled factor in happiness.”

The study noted that satisfying relationships offer long-term health benefits, such as a reduced likelihood of mental decline in your 80s, and that patients with strong social connections also reported being happier and healthier than those without. Besides greater emotional support, they were better at coping with stress and adversity, had increased belonging and purpose, lower blood pressure, and improved brain function.

People with strong, supportive relationships in the form of friends, romantic partners, family, community, and regular social interaction showed lower rates of diabetes, arthritis, and cognitive decline. Those who felt more connected experienced less chronic illness and lived longer. The study established that good relationships act as stress regulators and even help the body calm down after tough events. “The people who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80,” says lead researcher Dr. Robert Waldinger.

Despite research consistently positing that having strong social networks in general is predictive of living longer, healthier, happier lives, securely attached marriages appear to be especially protective of subjective well-being compared to never-married, divorced, and cohabitating couples. Gallup data from 2009 to 2023 found that married adults between the ages of 25 and 50 were more likely to report they were “thriving” by double-digit margins than adults who have never married. Gallup asked Americans to rate their current and future lives as thriving, struggling, or suffering on a scale from zero to ten. The marriage advantage held across all major racial and ethnic groups and was not explained by differences in age or educational attainment.

One likely explanation is relationship quality. Gallup data also show married couples report lower fighting frequency and are more likely to describe their relationship as loving and supportive. Married couples were more likely to report being in a strong and loving relationship with their spouse, 83 percent, compared to 69 percent for cohabitating couples and 61 percent for those in an exclusive relationship. Married couples were nearly half as likely as unmarried couples to report two or more occasions in which they were too angry to speak in the past 30-day period.

In an exploratory analysis of the perceived benefits of romantic relationships, researchers conducted qualitative interviews with 221 Greek-speaking participants and identified 82 distinct benefits. In a second study, they surveyed 545 participants and organized those benefits into ten broader factors, which were further grouped into two overarching domains: intrinsic and extrinsic. Across both samples, participants rated positive emotions, including love and passion, as well as having someone to provide support and share activities with, as the most important benefits of a romantic relationship. Other intrinsic benefits included having someone to give and receive care and sexual satisfaction. The highest-rated extrinsic benefits included social acceptance, sharing expenses, safe sex, and stability.

Love is a powerful emotion that acts as a bulwark against loneliness. That’s no insignificant feat, considering how deadly loneliness is, carrying the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. People in stable, committed, and securely attached relationships show better emotional regulation, lower levels of distress, and together facilitate the pursuit of long-term goals.

All other human relationships pale in comparison.

Most importantly, there is robust evidence that close interpersonal relationships are a fundamental source of meaning in life. We may see our families on holidays, meet friends for Saturday lunch, and spend five days a week in a cubicle alongside our work colleagues, but what could be more meaningful than choosing, every day, to share a life with someone, to fall asleep beside the same person and wake up next to them, to weather life’s storms together, and ultimately be laid to rest in the same plot?

Given the scientific literature, our neurologic wiring, the millions of years of evolutionary adaptation that shaped our relationship to pair bonding, the societal and psychological benefits of monogamy, and the risk that chronic loneliness poses, I can’t imagine why we don’t celebrate romantic love more often. It may be true that having a vast network of support systems through various kinds of relationships is key to living a long, happy, healthy life, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the room that is a huge part of the puzzle. Romantic love is just as important as friendship and family and work colleagues, if not more important, because it’s who you choose to share your life with, who you cuddle up next to at night, who you hold hands with, and reproduce with. All other human relationships pale in comparison.