Case Study 1 — Chapter 18: Romantic Relationships and Intimacy

Jordan: What Five Years Looks Like

Background

Jordan and Dev have been together for five years. They moved in together after eighteen months. They have a shared account for household expenses and separate accounts for everything else. They have argued about Jordan's work intensity, Dev's tendency to go quiet when overwhelmed, money (twice, briefly), a vacation that Dev wanted and Jordan kept rescheduling, and, with decreasing frequency, the question of what they are building toward — whether this is permanently it or a stage on the way to something else.

They are, Jordan would say if pressed, deeply compatible. He would also say, if pressed more honestly, that he has sometimes been less present in this relationship than the relationship deserves.

The Thursday evenings are new. Three weeks ago. Dev's response to the structured time was characteristically precise: "You know you could have just been here. You didn't need to schedule it." Jordan knew they were right and also knew he needed the structure, because without it the evening would have been occupied by Jordan's tendency to find one more thing to finish.

The Sternberg Assessment

Working through the chapter's framework, Jordan maps his relationship against Sternberg's three components.

Intimacy: High, he decides — but qualified. He and Dev know each other thoroughly in many respects: Dev knows how Jordan's anxiety operates, knows his work history, knows the complicated relationship with his father, knows the specific texture of Jordan's best and worst professional days. Jordan knows Dev's design philosophy intimately, knows their relationship with their parents, knows the particular quality of silence that means Dev is processing something versus the quality that means Dev has already processed it and moved on and is now actually just quiet.

What Jordan is less certain about is whether he has kept the intimacy current. The investment model's suggestion that intimacy requires ongoing updating — that Love Maps need maintenance — sits uncomfortably. He has the five-year map. He is not sure it has been fully updated in the last two years.

Passion: Lower than it was, which he knows is normal and also sometimes misinterprets as a warning. The chapter's account of passionate love's habituation — neurologically normal, not a sign of failure — provides what Jordan recognizes as relief rather than conviction. Relief suggests he was worried. He reads the section again.

He thinks about what Perel said about desire requiring separateness. He and Dev are, in some ways, extremely merged — same apartment, extensive shared social network, shared domestic routines that have become automatic. He wonders what it would look like to maintain the space in which Dev remains, in some ways, surprising to him.

Commitment: Very high. The investment model calculation produces a number Jordan can't quite argue with. Five years, shared life, deep knowledge of each other, genuinely limited alternatives that feel attractive. More importantly: he wants to be here. This is not inertia. At some point in the last year — he can't date it precisely — he moved from being in this relationship because he couldn't imagine leaving to being in it because he actively chooses it.

The Thursday Conversation

They are on the couch. Dev has put down their book. Jordan has put down his tea.

"Can I ask you something?" Jordan says.

"Yes."

"Do you feel like you know me? Like, currently? Not the five-years-ago version."

Dev considers this seriously, which is one of the things Jordan loves about them — they do not give social answers to questions that deserve real ones. "Mostly," they say finally. "There are things about where you are right now that I feel like I'm reading around, rather than directly. Like there are gaps."

"What gaps?"

Dev is quiet for a moment. "I'm not sure how you feel about the initiative now that it's actually underway. You got what you worked toward and now you seem... I don't know. Not what I expected."

Jordan hadn't expected Dev to name this. He feels the familiar impulse to deflect — I'm fine, it's going well — and catches it. The response gap. He uses it.

"I think I'm afraid of what it means if I succeed," he says. The sentence arrives with more honesty than he planned.

Dev waits.

"I worked toward this thing for two years. And now the question is: what if it goes well, and I discover that it doesn't actually fix what I thought it would fix? What if the problem isn't the work situation and it's just... me?"

Dev doesn't rush to reassure him. This is important. They sit with it for a moment.

"I think," Dev says carefully, "that's exactly the right thing to be afraid of. And I think it means you're becoming more honest, not more broken."

The Map Exercise

Inspired by the chapter's Love Maps concept, Jordan and Dev spend part of the following Sunday morning doing what Dev calls "the update": deliberately asking each other questions about current states that they have not been asking.

Jordan learns: - Dev has been quietly considering a pivot in their work — not the design agency, which they withdrew from, but something else, something smaller and more independent, and they haven't mentioned it because they're still deciding whether it's real - Dev's best friendship (with someone named Priya from their previous job) is in tension because of a communication gap that Dev has been managing by saying less - Dev is more optimistic about their relationship now than they were eight months ago — specifically, they noticed Jordan "arriving" in a way that was different from before

Dev learns: - Jordan's anxiety about the initiative has a specific texture: not will it fail but what if it succeeds and nothing changes internally - Jordan has been thinking about his father more than he has said — something about the initiative's success and whether the father's framework ("work = seriousness") is being replicated or genuinely departed from - Jordan is afraid Dev will eventually want children and he genuinely doesn't know what he wants, and he has been not asking about it because the uncertainty feels dangerous to surface

The conversation goes longer than either of them planned. By the end, Jordan has a clearer sense that his map was out of date and that Dev's map of him was also partially outdated — they have both been working from older information than either had realized.

The Analysis

Later, Jordan writes in the notebook he has kept intermittently since Chapter 12:

The Love Map concept — the idea that you need to actively maintain current knowledge of your partner's world — feels like the thing I was doing wrong. I thought I knew Dev because I have known Dev for five years. But people change and I hadn't been asking. I was living with the five-year-old map.

Dev's observation — "I'm reading around things, not directly" — is the intimacy-ceiling version of this. We got to a depth and stopped. Not because we didn't want to go deeper but because deeper means things that are more uncertain and more embarrassing to name.

The thing about what happens if the initiative succeeds and nothing changes: I've been carrying that for three months without saying it. It took one question — "do you feel like you know me, currently?" — to surface something that has been affecting our dynamic without either of us being able to name it.

This is the vulnerability paradox in practice. Not the dramatic disclosure. The small, current disclosure that was right there, available, if I'd been willing to give it.

Postscript: The Separateness Question

Two weeks after the Sunday morning update, Jordan does something he hasn't done in a long time: he goes to a concert alone. Not because Dev couldn't come — they had plans — but because the artist is someone Jordan has followed since college, someone whose music is specifically his, not theirs, and he wants the experience of being in that crowd as himself rather than as half of a unit.

He texts Dev from the venue: You were right that I could have just been here. I'm learning.

Dev texts back: Who is this?

Jordan laughs out loud in a crowd of strangers. It is, he thinks, exactly the right thing.

Analysis Questions

Jordan identifies that his intimacy with Dev is "qualified" — high in some respects but with outdated maps. How does this distinction between depth of historical knowledge and currency of present knowledge relate to the chapter's account of Love Map maintenance?
Jordan's Sternberg assessment reveals high commitment but lower passion. He identifies his relief at the habituation explanation as evidence he was worried. What does this suggest about the misconception that passion-moderating in long-term relationships represents? How would the chapter's framework address Jordan's worry?
Jordan's disclosure to Dev about the initiative — "I'm afraid of what it means if I succeed" — illustrates the vulnerability paradox. What specifically made this disclosure difficult, and what did it produce? How does this connect to the intimacy model of Reis and Shaver?
The Love Map update reveals things both partners had been not saying. Why does this "not saying" happen in established relationships, even between people who communicate reasonably well? What does the chapter's account of positive sentiment override and intimacy ceiling suggest about the mechanism?
Jordan goes to the concert alone — a deliberate act of separateness. How does this connect to Perel's account of desire and maintained individuality? Is this a threat to the relationship or a maintenance behavior? How would you distinguish the two?