There are many ways to ruin a perfectly decent marriage. You can wage war over the thermostat. You can introduce your in-laws into every minor decision.

Or—you can take the quietest path to utter relational ruin: keep score.

I drove to your cousin’s wedding, so you’d better drive to mine.
I folded the laundry—so you owe me sex.

This is quid pro quo marriage, America’s favorite pastime. We like to call it fairness. But the truth? It feels less like love and more like an audit.

And the evidence is in: marriages run like ledgers don’t just feel brittle—they decline over time.

We’ve all been sold the same relationship fantasy: keep it fresh, keep it fiery, keep it Instagrammable.

Surprise trips to Paris! Elaborate gender reveals! Interplanetary vacations that require a second mortgage!

But ask anyone who’s sat across from me in couples therapy, and they’ll tell you—novelty, while highly valued, can’t hold a marriage together all on it’s own.

What actually saves relationships is something far less flashy and far more human: Nemorinity.

Nemorinity is the “pleasant un-surprise.”

It’s the relief of finding your partner in the exact place you expected them, doing the exact thing you hoped for. It’s the familiar casserole on the table, the Saturday morning coffee handed over without comment, the sarcastic sibling banter that somehow refuses to die.

It’s not boring. It’s oxygen.

Romantic comedies sell us the myth of instant compatibility: find “the one,” cue fireworks, cue happily ever after. But real couples will tell you something else.

They’ll say, “We weren’t perfect at first. We learned each other. We grew together.”

So what does research actually say about growing into your partner? That’s not just a sentimental notion. It’s one of the core ways long-term love works.

In the 1990s, psychologists Sandra Murray and John Holmes discovered that happy couples don’t view each other with cold-eyed objectivity.

They see each other better than reality. These “positive illusions” turn flaws into tolerable quirks:

• Stubborn becomes “persistent.”

• Quiet becomes “thoughtful.”

• Messy becomes “creative.”

This isn’t denial—it’s generosity.

And couples who practice it report greater satisfaction and commitment (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1997). Long-term love depends, in part, on the ability to soften your gaze.

Your partner gets the job. There’s champagne, high-fives, and maybe a nice dinner out where you both pretend life won’t change much.

Then Monday comes. The alarm goes off earlier. Dinner gets later. They come home with a brain full of acronyms and coworkers’ names you don’t know.

Suddenly you feel like a side character in a sitcom you didn’t audition for.

This is what a job change does. It doesn’t just add new responsibilities; it rewrites the daily script. And romance—once woven into the old routine—can slip through the cracks.

Falling in love is a little like finding a new café that serves the perfect cappuccino. You want to go there every day, sit in the corner booth, and tell the barista your entire life story.

The problem? That barista doesn’t need to know about your middle school heartbreak, and neither does someone you’ve been dating for two weeks.

That’s where emotional boundaries come in—not as walls that keep people out, but as fences with gates.

You decide who comes through, and when.

Done right, boundaries let intimacy grow at a healthy pace instead of collapsing under the weight of overexposure.

If rigid boundaries are like fortress walls, loose boundaries are more like broken cellar doors.

Anyone and everyone gets in—solicitors, raccoons, and that friend who always “forgets” their wallet at dinner.

At first, loose boundaries feel generous. You’re the “easygoing” one, the partner who never says no, the friend who’s “always there.”

But eventually you realize: always being there means no one is ever really there for you.

Loose boundaries might protect relationships in the short term—no conflict, no drama—but in the long term, they erode self-respect and intimacy.

Because if you can’t draw a line, no one knows where you actually stand.

We live in a culture that romanticizes independence. “I don’t need anyone,” we declare proudly, as if total self-sufficiency were the gold medal of emotional life.

Instagram tells us to “know your worth,” TikTok therapists remind us to “protect your energy,” and before long we’re mistaking solitude for enlightenment.

But there’s a thin line between healthy boundaries and barbed-wire fences.

Boundaries are supposed to make love sustainable, not impossible.

They’re the fences around a garden—meant to keep out the rabbits, not prevent the flowers from being watered. But if your fences are too high, too thick, or topped with emotional razor wire, you might find yourself safe… and very, very alone.

That’s the paradox of rigid boundaries: they protect you from pain, but they also protect you from joy.

Love changes us.

Not in the Hallmark sense, but in the literal sense: who we think we are, the skills we use, even the way we move through the world.

Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron built an entire program of research around this idea, calling it the Self-Expansion Model.

The claim is simple but startling: romantic relationships thrive when they allow us to expand our sense of self by including our partner’s traits, perspectives, and resources (Aron & Aron, 1986).

In other words, we don’t just fall in love with another person—we also become enthralled with the notion of becomng a vaster version of ourselves.

Physics has the Big Bang, quantum entanglement, and black holes that swallow time itself.

Psychology? We get “smile more, it helps.”

It’s not a fair fight.

And yet, every now and then, psychology coughs up an idea that feels suspiciously like a natural law—a principle that explains why marriages survive, families adapt, and love doesn’t just collapse under the weight of modern life.

One of the main culprits here is Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist who took the audacious step of studying happiness in a field obsessed with misery.

She gave us three ideas—Broaden and Build, Upward Spirals, and The Undoing Hypothesis—each sounding like the title of a self-help workshop but backed by actual data.

Taken together, they form what I like to call the secret physics of love.

Let’s walk through them.

Psychology in the late 20th century was a gloomy business.

Entire careers were built on studying fear, depression, and rats in mazes.

Joy? Curiosity? Amusement? Those were treated as fluff, maybe suitable for weekend hobbies but hardly worthy of serious science.

Enter Barbara Fredrickson. In 1998, she had the audacity to ask: What good are positive emotions? (Fredrickson, 1998).

Her answer became the Broaden-and-Build Theory, a framework that suggested positive emotions aren’t trivial decorations on the evolutionary tree.

They are functional.

Joy, interest, love, amusement—all of them expand our mental horizons (“broaden”) and help us accumulate durable psychological and social resources (“build”).

I

n other words, feeling good helps you see more, connect more, and prepare better for the not-so-good times ahead.

A team of scientists recently strapped heart monitors onto 148 long-married couples, set up cameras, and told them to argue.

Not surprisingly, what emerged was not the spectacle of marital apocalypse—but proof that love hides in the tiniest flickers of connection.

The couples who still laughed together, mirrored each other’s smiles, or matched their tones—even in conflict—were the same couples who scored higher on enduring love.

Thirty years into marriage, the data suggested, romance survives not because of grand gestures, but because of micro-moments of emotional synchrony.

If this sounds familiar, it echoes what I’ve written about in quiet quitting marriage—that relationships don’t collapse in fireworks, but in the erosion of everyday attention.

Marriage for Indian Americans isn’t just a relationship—it’s a referendum on loyalty, culture, and adaptation to the often impossible task of pleasing everyone.

You fall in love, sure, but you also inherit three WhatsApp groups, a retired astrologer, and a family definition of “compromise” that involves flying to India for a cousin’s wedding in the middle of Q4 budget season.

In this modest guide, I’ll attempt to unpack the clash of tradition and autonomy, explore a few examples of deep-rooted regional differences from the Indian subcontinent, and walk you through a bit of the research on Indian-American marriage dynamics—

including what happens when your spouse sometimes is not just your partner, but your parents’ biggest project.