Why does love go sour?

if you're looking for an answer to this eternal ques-
tion, you may want to check out Robert J. Sternberg's
Love is a Story: A New Theory of Relationships

Sternberg, a psychologist who has studied love for
decades, believes that,

At some level, lay people recognize what many psychologists don't: that the love between two people follows a story. If we want to understand love, we have to understand the stories that dictate our beliefs and expectations of love. These stories, which we start to write as children, predict the patterns of our romantic experiences time and time again. Luckily, we can learn to rewrite them.

in other words, Sternberg proposes that we see our
romantic relationships as following a script

this script is important since it will go a long way in
determining our feelings and actions, as well as the
course and outcome of our relationships -

and all this takes place at a largely unconscious level

Sternberg's research has identified some two dozen
scripts, or love stories; and he expects that there
are many more

they are called such things as The Teacher-Student
Story, The War Story, The Recovery Story and The
Sacrifice Story

importantly, each individual will project his or her
own story onto the relationship

and to the extent these two stories "match", there
is a tendency towards satisfaction, stability and
permanence

stories that do not match are those whose implicit
assumptions and expectations predispose the lovers
toward feelings and actions that are in conflict -

a situation that bodes poorly for the relationship

Sternberg writes,

If the stories don't match, sooner or later people become unhappy or unfulfilled . . . When you talk to two people who have just split up, their breakup stories often sound like depictions of two completely different relationships. In a sense, they are. Each partner has his or her own story to tell.

and he further points out that,

People complain that they keep ending up with the same kind of bad partner, that they are unlucky in love. In reality, luck has nothing to do with it: They are subconsciously finding people to play out their love stories, or foisting their stories on the people they meet.

the important message of Sternberg's work is that
when lovers sense that their relationship is beginning
to sour, they would be wise to -

- try to make conscious the assumptions and expec-
tations (the "story") they are bringing to the relation-
ship

-assess the reasonableness and compatibility of their
their expectations and their stories

and as Sternberg says,

- "Learn to rewrite them."