Maintaining a relationship can feel challenging, but science claims that we don’t need to be doing fancy things all the time if we want to have a healthy relationship.
In fact, the key to a healthy relationship could be simpler than you might think. It doesn’t involve grand gestures - instead, ‘being boring’ together could help you be more content in the long run.
According to author Mark Manson, relationships could benefit from being “as boring as possible”. Even though that might sound a bit strange, he’s got a good reason for saying that.
Speaking to Business Insider, Mark said, “That sounds really weird to people but if you think about it, a really happy 80-year-old couple that’s been together for 60 years, the reason that they’ve been together for 60 years, it isn’t because they took all these private jets and they had these crazy vacations and ‘Oh my God, look at their pictures.’”
He added, “It’s because they were able to be boring together. They are able to spend year after year, sitting around the house, talking about the same boring stuff, watching TV, watching movies, cooking dinner, and it went fine. There was nothing exciting, there's nothing blowing up, there's no huge drama, and dishes flying.”
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It seems that the happiest couples have simple, quiet lifestyles where they can enjoy each other’s company without feeling the pressure to be ‘interesting’ or constantly jetting off on fancy holidays.
People don’t want to be boring either, which Mark says is a problem. He explained, “A lot of people don’t want to be a boring person, like we really want to be interesting people and have interesting lives but the problem is that, that conflicts with what makes a relationship good in a lot of cases.”
Mark added that being ‘boring’ should be seen as a positive thing, and that it can ultimately be a good thing for long term relationships.