While 82% of French people in relationships say they are satisfied with their relationship, only 59% are satisfied with their romantic and sexual life. A discrepancy revealing a contemporary malaise, where the demand for permanent thrill shakes up the very foundations of lasting love.
Routine, the false culprit of supposed disenchantment
It’s a well-established idea: routine would kill the couple. It would be this slow poison which erodes desire, stifles feelings, and ends up pushing partners away. However, in clinical reality, the observation is often quite different.
In consulting rooms, what emerges is not so much weariness with the repetition of everyday life, but an increasing difficulty in tolerating this everyday life itself. As if love had to remain permanently at its initial boiling point.
However, routine, when it is alive, constitutes a precious foundation. It reassures, it structures, it allows the link to last over time. Finding others, sharing habits, rituals, landmarks: so many elements that nourish emotional security.
Fragility appears elsewhere. When gestures become mechanical, exchanges are reduced to logistical management, and the other person ceases to be truly listened to.
The era of “always more”: an invisible pressure on couples
Behind this discomfort, a deeper transformation of our relationship to emotions and desire. Dating apps, social networks, hyper-stimulating love stories shape an implicit expectation: that of an intense, visible, constantly renewed love.
In this environment saturated with demands, the natural calming of the bond is often interpreted as a warning signal. No longer feeling the beginnings – this exaltation, this permanent novelty – becomes suspicious.
The figures bear this out. While a large majority of French people say they are satisfied with their relationship, their satisfaction with romantic and sexual life is significantly lower. In fifteen years, the proportion of those having weekly sex has fallen from 58% to 43%.
This discrepancy says something profound: the link holds, but it is less invested, less inhabited. As if solidity was no longer enough. Little by little, confusion sets in between constancy and boredom, between stability and absence of desire. And this confusion weakens relationships which, however, are not failing.
When the link ceases to be inhabited: the real tipping point
“The real poison in a relationship is not routine. This is the moment when routine is no longer inhabited, when it ceases to be a reassuring framework to become automatic piloting.“, explains Christian Richomme, psychoanalyst.
This shift is often silent. It is not accompanied by a crisis or an immediate breakup. It settles gradually, in the interstices of everyday life: less glances, less listening, less presence. We not only suffer from being unloved, we also suffer from no longer feeling met.
And this is perhaps one of the major challenges of contemporary love: relearning to invest the ordinary. Not by seeking to artificially recreate the intensity of the beginnings, but by giving meaning, attention, movement to what is repeated.
Rehabilitate the ordinary, reinvent the connection
Going against dominant discourses, this approach invites a shift in perspective. It’s no longer a question of escaping routine, but of living in it. To transform it into a living space, rather than into automation.
Ultimately, the challenge is not to rediscover the thrill at all costs, but to cultivate a presence. A renewed attention to others, even in simplicity.
In a society that values immediate intensity, this is perhaps the most subversive — and most valuable — gesture.