There’s an old story about a psychologist inching his way up a battered, gray-and-white speckled mountain. He scrapes and scrabbles his way up the cliff faces and ice walls, a breathless ascent, thinking all the time that he’ll enjoy in solitude an indescribable view with the knowledge of being the first person to ever scale this peak.

But when he drags himself over the last precipice and reaches the peak, exhausted and frozen, he finds a circle of poets and philosophers already there, comfortably talking amongst themselves, wrapped in warm furs with steaming cups of aromatic and exotic tea in their hands.

The point of the story is that wherever science or psychology goes in its search to understand the human condition and the nature of our world, the poets and philosophers are already there, exploring that terrain through intuition, reflection, and art.

One example of this phenomenon can be found in what science has unearthed about the key predictor of relationship success, which turns out to be something Western Christian philosophy has long known.

The long-term success of a romantic relationship does not depend primarily on the force of the immediate, magnetic attraction. Initial chemistry can burn out with time. Instead, deep, lasting romance is built on something much less flashy.

“The quality that predicts longevity has been hiding in plain sight for over 2000 years, under a name most people associate with philosophy rather than psychology: Temperance,” writes psychologist Dr. Mark Travers for Psychology Today. “Classical thinkers used it to describe the capacity to feel a powerful impulse and choose not to act on it.”

In his famous work on morals and character, “The Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle discussed the importance of temperance, which he defined as moderation with regard to pleasure. And in the Christian tradition, temperance is considered one of the four “cardinal virtues” (along with prudence, justice, and fortitude), the virtues on which all the others “hinge” (the Latin “cardo,” from which we get “cardinal,” means “door hinge” or “pivot”).

Travers points out that a 2001 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found “dispositional self-control” – in other words, temperance – was a strong predictor of a person’s ability to check their impulse to retaliate when their partner did something unkind or unfair (“accommodation”). This practice of accommodation can halt relationship-destroying spirals of hurt and aggression on both sides. It goes a long way toward mitigating conflict and ensuring a smooth, long-lasting relationship.

A number of studies have found that self-control is correlated with various relationship benefits, including better communication, sacrifice, forgiveness, reduced aggressiveness, and reduced temptation toward attractive alternatives to one’s spouse. Unsurprisingly, all of this leads to greater satisfaction in the relationship as well.

This dry, unexciting character trait of temperance or self-control hardly seems to be the key ingredient needed to maintain the zest in a long-lasting romance. Yet, when we remember that the essence of love is in the commitment of the will – not a concoction of excitable chemicals – we can understand why long-term relationship success depends on the development of virtue more than it does the stimulation of excitement.

That’s not to say that chemistry doesn’t play a role, of course. Butterflies in the stomach even after years of marriage is part of the joy of a romantic relationship, the gift of knowing and seeing another human being as no one else knows and sees them.

But it doesn’t play as big of a role as Hollywood and grocery-store romances want us to think. In fact, the scientific literature suggests that the effort you put into a relationship is a better predictor of its success than how perfectly compatible you are with your husband or wife.

This truth should free us in our relationships because it teaches us that we aren’t merely the playthings of a capricious Cupid, falling in and out of love according to forces outside our control. Rather, we are rational creatures who can choose to love permanently.

Love isn’t a lottery (“Did I get lucky and find the one soulmate out there for me?”). It’s a commitment made between two flawed people who are determined to love each other despite those flaws. We can choose to work on our relationships and to work on ourselves through virtues like temperance, and in so doing build something that can withstand the passing whims of the moment.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Needpix