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In biological symbiosis two organisms cannot survive without each other. Love can be experienced in a similar way (Sharpe, 1981). Symbiotic lovers experience psychological merger and seem for a time to require no one and nothing else (Person, 1988). In romantic passion, lovers become mirrors.
Such emotions are normative in courtship and may reflect a biological program to bring about mating and reproduction (Symons, 1979). The problem in marriage is how to handle the inevitable decline and disappearance of passion. Some relationships quickly break down once the symbiotic bubble bursts. As described by Kohut and Wolf , “mirror-hungry” individuals cannot sustain intimate bonds for long, inside or outside marriage, and will either give up on love or search for new partners with whom the symbiosis can be recreated. But those marriages that attempt to maintain courtship over long periods of time sacrifice growth and individuation. Such couples are trapped in eternal adolescence like insects in amber.
Young lovers are often puzzled by the separateness of those who have been coupled for many years. The companionship and shared goals of long-term marriages seem to reflect a sterile compromise. They do not anticipate that with time marriage must either grow or stagnate. Unless each partner can become individuated inside the marriage, the marriage either dissolves or becomes fossilized.
Although symbiotic love is associated with youth, aging may not reduce the yearning for it. Romantic passion is exciting, even addicting. It has been compared with the ecstatic communication of infants and mothers, with characteristics such as intense eye contact and mutual smiling (Bak, 1973). Children who have been deprived of this experience with their own mothers yearn all the more intensely for a love that will heal all wounds and make up for