Page 49 - Advanced Romance

46 Advanced Romance*
large part of the population believing they are failures. And worse, they often view their exes as emotional cripples or evil people who are only interested in using others. Part of this fundamentalism is changing in that, according to a 2017 Match.com poll, 50% of men and 42% of women stay friends with their exes.26 Though this study may not be anywhere scientific, it does prove that some people are staying friends.
This friendship effort may mean that many people are less inclined to view their abbreviated relationship as a failure with the concomitant hatred of the ex. Or
it may just mean what it says: they want to remain friends with their ex, and this has no implications about whether they view it as a failure or not. We need to have a national study on romantic love to find out these statistics!
Another school of thought on this subject derives from the fact that we’re now living on average about forty years longer than when marriage first became the dominant mating institution several thousand years ago. So that it now takes a lot more relationship glue to keep things held together than it did then. It’s not surprising that people’s compatibility changes as they go through different life stages.
The belief that a relatively short-term relationship
is by definition a failure is immensely destructive to the relationship that you do have, to any prospects of having a civil breakup should the relationship end, or to any