Modern relationships come with an impressive list of expectations.

We want love, trust, attraction, friendship, emotional support, sexual compatibility, humour, stability, shared values, intellectual connection and a compatible lifestyle. If children are involved, add co-parenting. If life becomes difficult, add emotional support. If work gets intense, add encouragement. And somewhere in all of this, the relationship should still feel spontaneous, alive and desirable.

It is a lot to ask of one person. But the real difficulty may not be that some boxes remain unticked. It may be that we no longer know which unticked boxes actually matter.

We score relationships even when we pretend we do not

Most of us carry an internal spreadsheet whether we like it or not: sex, trust, friendship, attraction, emotional support, financial stability, shared values, humour, lifestyle, ambition, family, intellectual connection.

Some of those dimensions matter enormously. Others matter far less. And the weighting changes from one person to another. One couple can have extraordinary chemistry and very little intellectual connection. Another can feel deeply bonded but sexually lukewarm. Someone may value financial stability more than spontaneity; another may tolerate practical chaos but struggle with emotional distance.

This is why two outsiders can look at the same relationship and reach completely different conclusions. They are using different formulas. The problem begins when we assume every dimension should be strong at the same time.

Not every missing box means the relationship is broken

A partner who dislikes museums is probably manageable. A partner you no longer trust is something else entirely. A period of low desire after a stressful year does not mean the same thing as five years of feeling sexually invisible. A phase of emotional distance during grief is different from a relationship in which one person has stopped caring.

So perhaps the useful question is not, “Is my relationship good enough?” A better one is: “What exactly is missing, how important is it to me, and is it changing?”

That is a more useful starting point because different problems require different responses. A couple can improve communication. It is harder to repair contempt. A relationship can survive a period of low sex, but it becomes much harder when one partner feels fundamentally unwanted and the other no longer wants to engage with the issue.

John Gottman’s work on couple stability has long focused on destructive patterns such as criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. The point is not that one bad argument predicts divorce, but that recurring patterns matter more than occasional conflict. The question is therefore less “Do we have problems?” than “What happens when we have them?”

Four questions worth asking

For someone trying to understand their own situation, four questions are more useful than a score out of ten.

The first is: what is actually missing? Not “something feels wrong”, but something specific: desire, trust, admiration, emotional safety, attention, respect, shared plans, friendship. Naming the missing dimension matters because vague dissatisfaction is almost impossible to work with.

The second is: how important is this dimension to me? Not every need has equal weight. For one person, sexual connection is central to feeling loved; for another, emotional reliability matters far more. Some people need intellectual stimulation, others need peace. The mistake is not having priorities. The mistake is assuming everyone should have the same ones.

Eli Finkel’s work on modern marriage is useful here. He argues that contemporary couples increasingly expect relationships not only to provide love and belonging, but also self-esteem, authenticity and personal growth. That can make the best relationships exceptionally fulfilling, but it also raises the bar. A relationship does not need to meet every possible need, but it probably does need to meet the ones you consider fundamental.

The third question is: is the problem temporary or structural? Stress, parenting, illness, grief, work pressure and exhaustion can temporarily flatten desire, patience and intimacy. A structural problem is different: it persists, repeats itself and resists conversation until it gradually becomes part of the architecture of the relationship. The useful question is not only “How bad does this feel now?” but “How long has this been true, and what happens when we try to address it?”

And the fourth is: does the other person still want to work on it? This may be the most important question of all. Many relationships can survive difficult periods if both people still believe there is something worth repairing. The danger is not always the missing dimension itself; sometimes it is the disappearance of effort. Imperfect sex can be discussed. Stress can be managed. Conflict can be repaired. Indifference is harder.

We may have become less patient with repair

Previous generations often stayed in marriages because leaving carried enormous financial, social and practical consequences. That was not necessarily healthier. Today, many people have more freedom to leave relationships that no longer fulfil them, and that freedom is valuable.

But it also changes the psychology of repair. If one important part of a relationship is disappointing, it can be tempting to think someone else might provide a better overall match. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the fantasy of a better relationship is simply easier than the work required to rebuild the existing one.

Repair is rarely glamorous. It means uncomfortable conversations, changing habits, repetition and tolerating periods where improvement is slow. New relationships arrive without old disappointments attached, so they represent possibility while the existing partner has to carry reality. That comparison can be emotionally powerful, but it is not always fair.

This is also where divorce statistics become less straightforward than they first appear. Eurostat can tell us how often people divorce across Europe, but it does not offer one harmonised European ranking of the emotional reasons marriages end. That in itself is revealing: relationships rarely collapse because a single universal box was left unticked. The reasons are usually layered, personal and difficult to reduce to one category.

Some dimensions compensate for others

This is where the spreadsheet metaphor breaks down completely. One extraordinary dimension can compensate for several weaker ones.

A couple may have limited shared interests but enormous trust. The sex may be ordinary but the companionship exceptional. One partner may provide financial stability or social security that the other values deeply. Another couple may remain intensely connected because the physical attraction is unusually strong.

There is no moral hierarchy here. People weight these things differently, and those weights change over time. What matters enormously at 30 may matter differently at 55. Financial stability can become more important when children arrive; freedom can become more important when they leave. Desire can fade and return. Friendship can deepen. Admiration can disappear.

And then there are the things spreadsheets are particularly bad at measuring: fascination, attachment, chemistry, shared history and the feeling that this particular person matters in a way that is difficult to explain.

Someone can tick every box and leave us cold. Someone else can miss several and still feel impossible to replace.

Love changes the weighting.

The goal may not be perfection

A relationship that is strong in every dimension at all times probably exists somewhere between fiction and the first weeks of dating. Real relationships move. People become tired, ambitious, distracted, ill, curious, bored, affectionate, distant and close again. Some needs become louder. Others fade.

The useful question is therefore not whether the spreadsheet is perfect. It is whether the columns that matter most are healthy enough, whether the weaker ones are tolerable, and whether both people still care enough to work on what is not.

Love is not an Excel sheet. The boxes do not all carry the same weight, and sometimes the thing that holds a relationship together cannot be put in a box at all.

Perhaps that is the real difficulty of modern relationships. We have more freedom than ever to ask for fulfilment, but we still have to decide for ourselves what “enough” looks like — and whether the relationship in front of us is imperfect in ways we can live with, imperfect in ways we can repair, or imperfect in ways we no longer should accept.

What are the three things you consider non-negotiable in a relationship?

And which things once seemed essential to you, but turned out to matter much less than you expected?

Odeesy explores the conversations we often have in private about love, desire and modern relationships.