I was reading some very old threads a few days ago where some posters wrote things like : “I’ve had 2 long-term relationships and they both lasted about 7 months” or “My only long-term relationship lasted 10 months”.
This got me thinking about my own experience and I realized that all my relationships were either unambiguously short-term (a couple of months at most) or clearly long-term (2 ½ years, 2 years, 3 years, 18 years, 2 ½ years). I’ve never had anything in-between.
So when can a relationship be meaningfully described as long-term ?
For the poll, 2 - 3 years means “starting on the second anniversary and ending the day before the fourth”.
Some people have a strange definition of “long term”. To me, for a relationship to qualify as “long term”, it has to grow emotional roots. It has to be exclusive over an extended period of time. It may involve living together for some of that time.
Long-term needs to involve multiple, repeated birthdays and holidays as well as inclusion in traditional family events. That’s why I picked 2-3 years (as a minimum.)
Polyamorous: “To be polyamorous means to have open intimate or romantic relationships with more than one person at a time”
Someone fitting that definition can have several long term relationships at once. I think that can be very complex, but that is the comfort zone of a polyamorous person.
I wanted to focus on duration only because numbers are objective.
Of course duration alone does not mean quality. Many parameters come into play such as honesty, faithfullyness, shared outlook on life, communication, quality time actually spent together but these are difficult to quantify.
I think it could be even shorter than 6 months. It’s about having moved into a “this is a relationship, not dating”-stage, and that has to have lasted a couple of months. I met my wife in September, she lived with me a few weeks in December between her lease running out and returning to the US for a few months, I visited her for New Years, and at some point in that period we decided she was going to move in with me when she came back to Norway in March. Even if something had come in the way of her returning that would have been a long-term relationship because that was our intent and we maintained that intent over a sustained period of time.
I don’t think it’s actually a set period of time at all, but about intention. If you get to a point with someone that you reasonably (for whatever counts as “reasonable” to you) expect that you’ll be together for most or all of your life, then that’s a long-term relationship, even if something unexpected then comes up very quickly to change your mind. If you’re thinking “We’ll be together for the next few years”, that’s not a long-term relationship. If you’re thinking “We’ll raise kids and grow old together”, and then the next day one of you gets hit by a bus and killed, that is a long-term relationship.
Engagement or marriage is almost always a sign of a long-term relationship. Absent those, having kids together probably is, and likely also living together.
I chose “1 year”, perhaps in contradiction to my experience. However, this is clearly the lowest threshold. Anything below that, I’d have very hard time qualifying as “long-term”.
But 1 year makes sense for several reasons.
In all the relationships that I’ve had, the first-year anniversary always felt like a big deal symbolically.
Psychologically, being able to talk about your relationship in terms of years changes the perspective. “We were together for 11 months” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “We were together for 1 year”, although the time considered is almost identical.
After a year, relationships become cyclical. You do the same activities, wear the same clothes that you did back when you met. You watch the new season of the tv shows that you discovered when you were just beginning. Everything you do or see, even the smells in the air and the birdsongs remind you of your first rendez-vous (ice cream in the park, or hot coffee inside).
You’ve experienced all the regular milestones of the year together : both your birthdays, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, summer holidays.
It feels like everything you do afterwards, even the most life-changing decisions, is just building up on that.
occurring over or involving a relatively long period of time
of, relating to, or constituting a financial operation or obligation based on a considerable term and especially one of more than 10 years long-term bonds.
I really can’t see how a few months or even a year or two constitutes a “long term relationship”, but I guess we all have different views.
Poly person here. Managed to start three concurrent relationships in 2010.
a1= She got very upset about the outcome of election 2016 (understandable) and began traveling internationally on her own a lot, basically ghosted me, I’m going to call it 7 years. She ghosted her other partners too so I don’t take it too personally.
a2= We’re still together but the relationship has morphed from romantic-sexual to ongoing friendship. Part of the advantage of poly is not having to have “slots” where a connection you cherish is either a romance or a friendship and you have to designate it as such in order to maintain “only one romance”.
a3= We’re still together and got through COVID together. We’d both like other additional partners which is difficult in the midst of pandemic but we’re good together.
I think that, part of it, may also be a function of one’s age, and relationship history.
My wife and I have been together for 32 years (married for 30); we started dating when I was 24. That, certainly, is a long-term relationship.
But, when I was in college, I was in two separate relationships, each of which lasted about a year and a half. Both of those were pretty serious relationships, and in the latter of the two, she and I were seriously talking about marriage in the final six months or so.
To an 18 year old, or a 20 year old, a year and a half is a significant fraction of your “life to date” – at that time, I considered those to have been “long-term relationships”: they were far more than a few casual dates, we were mutually committed to each other, etc. And, even now, 35+ years later, I would consider those to have been, for me, long-term relationships, despite the fact that I have since been in a relationship that has been many times longer than the first two.
This.
IMHO anyone that thinks you can define human interpersonal relationships by some defined length of time doesn’t understand human interpersonal relationships
I agree with you, as I mentioned upthread, there much more relevant caracteristics than duration when trying to define what a good relationship is.
But again, for the purpose of this thread, I was reacting specifically to some very old posts that included lengths that I thought fell short of “long-term”. This is precisely why I wanted to leave out the more subective, but arguably more essential aspects.
Agreed. And this is why I didn’t vote in the OP’s poll. As responses in this thread have already shown, there’s no one answer, no one time duration that’s a hard-and-fast breakpoint.
A favorite post from Redditt a few years ago was about a girl ready to throw in the towel as far as men were concerned. She was wailing about her long term relationship that had broken up. In one post she mentioned she was 14 years old. Another poster replied, “You’re 14? Girl, you need to grow up. I’ve had bad relationships that lasted for14 years”.
Yeah, I would count my high school-to-college relationship that lasted a year and a half as long-term without a question. The three or four-month relationship afterwards would not count. My girlfriend in my 20s was two years plus. I can’t remember for the life of me how long. That would definitely count. My wife (was about to say “current wife” – oops), probably was inching towards me proposing to her by about year two, but we went five before we got married. For me, long-term can start somewhere around a year or so, but it’s fuzzy. In my 40s, I probably wouldn’t call that “long-term,” but I might, depending on the circumstances.