Love on Low Battery: Why Emotional Maintenance Matters

Picture it: mid‑forties. The kids can Deliveroo their own ramen, Slack has replaced school‑gate gossip, and an eerie silence hovers where “Mum, where’s my…?” used to live. Statistically you’ve got another forty—maybe fifty—years on the Apple Watch left. That vow you took at twenty‑something felt gorgeously endless back then; now it feels… mathematical. Fifteen‑thousand breakfasts with the same face across the table is a lot of oat‑milk lattes to sip while pretending their chewing doesn’t drive you mad.

Robert Erskine reminds us we’re built for eight relational nutrients—security, validation, mutuality and the rest—essential to the psyche the way protein is to the body. Miss too many emotional check-ins, and intimacy malfunctions—glitchy, distant, buffering takes its place and couples start describing their “good” marriage which feels oddly airless. The problem usually isn’t too little need but abundance, with no fresh circulation: a perfectly‑climate‑controlled terrarium—safe, watered, and slowly choking on its own lack of weather.

Enter Esther Perel, who whispers the heresy that we need contradiction—safety and adventure, belonging and distance. We’re the first generation expected to stitch those opposites together for half a century of monogamy while juggling careers, Pilates, and at least one mindfulness‑app subscription we never open. No wonder clients ask whether separate bedrooms, polyamory, or a six‑month sabbatical to Bali might let them breathe.

Nana stayed put because Grandad held the purse strings; today’s woman wields her own Amex—and can Uber to Paris if she fancies. Unsurprisingly, the infidelity scoreboard is shifting: recent General Social Survey data still puts husbands ahead—about 20 % of men versus 13 % of women admit to a little extracurricular cardio —but the female number has swollen almost 40 % since the early ’90s. 

Why? Because risk no longer equals ruin when you can bankroll the fallout yourself. The big house that once symbolised success can feel like a concrete prison and sex that ends the second he climaxes (“Sorry babe, Zoom in three”) starts to look less like partnership, more like unpaid admin. For many wives the new calculus is, I don’t actually need this BS.

Hence the surge in fling‑curiosity. But unless you rewrite the script, you’re just replacing one actor with a shinier understudy and handing him the same stale lines. Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis says we relate from three ego states: Parent, Adult, Child. Midlife malaise is often two parents managing a household while their starving child ego states doom‑scroll at midnight, wondering where the mischief went. Invite the Adult back to the wheel and let the Children play—dance lessons, solo retreats, or finally voicing the fantasy you shelved as “too weird for Wednesday.”

Berne also spoke of hungers—for structure, stimulation, recognition. Work deadlines, school runs and PTA WhatsApps drip‑feed those hungers in our thirties; then the scaffolding disappears. We’re left with a mortgage, three streaming subscriptions, and a creeping question: Is this it? Many answer with an affair, a boat, or a PhD—none wrong, all blunt instruments when the real craving is authorship of our own story.

Nothing stays the same; entropy is baked into the love contract. If you don’t plan for change, change plans you. Have the awkward chats before the attraction dips below sea level. Map the terrain of aging bodies, shifting identities, menopausal libidos and career pivots while you still like each other’s faces. Schedule the therapy that unpicks black‑and‑white thinking, imagine the versions of “us” that might feel sexy at sixty, eighty, one‑hundred‑and‑two. Otherwise you’ll wake in an emotional washing‑machine wondering who pressed spin.

And if you’re naïve enough to believe the comfort zone will stay comfortable, it’s time to wise up, grow up, and craft new beliefs about how this ride unfolds. Personally, I’d rather pre‑approve a hall/whore pass—that solo trip, that carefully negotiated flirty adventure—than run the marital ship straight into an iceberg called “I never saw it coming.”

Cultivating novelty without torching stability is artistry. Intimacy thrives where sovereignty and togetherness learn a choreography—close, spin away, reconnect. Spaciousness feeds closeness; it keeps us just unfamiliar enough to stay intriguing. And you cannot outsource aliveness: call it prayer, therapy or cold‑water dips, but meeting yourself daily stops you treating a partner like a dopamine vending machine and invites them back as a fellow pilgrim. From there, generosity returns, eroticism re‑ignites and the decades ahead stretch like a horizon rather than a corridor.

So, forty years from now:

Will you be two curious adults reinventing rituals every decade, or co‑managers of a nostalgia museum?

Will your relationship be the container that lets you risk, or the excuse that keeps you small?

Neither outcome is accidental. The future is scripted every time you notice a hunger, own it aloud, and co‑author its fulfilment. Perel says we aren’t looking for the same person; we’re looking for a new relationship with the same person. Translation: your partner can’t stay the love of your life unless both of you keep becoming new lovers.

Take the risk. Learn the dance. And when that ordinary Thursday arrives in 2065—one of fifteen‑thousand mornings—you’ll pour the coffee, catch their eye, and realise the adventure never left the room.

Jemma Hardelle

I untangle minds, redesign lives, and occasionally ruin denial—in style.