The beginning stages of a relationship are always exciting. The passion is off-the-charts, date night happens multiple times a week, and everything is an adventure. However, once you get more comfortable in your relationship, it’s normal for things to settle down and get a little more ‘boring.’ If this has happened to you, don’t despair—self-help author and development coach Mark Manson says that just might be the key to a successful relationship.
- There’s too much pressure to seem exciting. How often have you been scrolling down Instagram only to be bombarded with pictures of seemingly ecstatic couples going on grand adventures, jet-skiing in the Maldives or backpacking across Europe? It’s a killer, and it can make you feel like you have to compete, like your relationship is less-than if you’re not doing something super exciting all the time.
- Being incredibly “boring” is the key to success. In a conversation with Business Insider, Manson explained that at the end of the day, couples who’ve been together for years and years don’t get that far because they’re doing glamorous activities all the time but because they’re comfortable doing nothing together. “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 their crazy vacations and ‘Oh my God, look at their pictures,'” Manson explained. “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.”
- What makes people interesting often makes them bad partners. Manson also insisted that while we all feel the pressure to be seen as exciting, those sought-after qualities aren’t all that great in a long-term relationship. “It’s an important thing for people to understand because I think, especially today, a lot of people — we 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,” Manson said. “A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person, makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.”
- Let’s all embrace being bored. Manson advises us all to care less about trying to keep the excitement alive in our relationship and instead start to embrace being boring in all its glory. “In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives, like boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing and I think it’s definitely a good thing for relationships,” he explained. Hey, I like staying in my PJs as much as anyone, so I’m all for it.
