We all know that love is a wonderful feeling, so wonderful that stories, poems, and songs have celebrated it throughout recorded history. We also know that feeling love had little to do with marriage for most of human history; marrying for love is a recent tradition. And we know too well that feelings of love decline in frequency (not importance), as they compete with other feelings in the routines and stresses of modern living.

Daniel Kahneman’s famous distinction between feeling happy and a happy life holds for love as well. Feeling love, like feeling happy, is a momentary experience. The sense of a loving relationship, like the sense of a happy life, emerges from reflection on memories.

More important, feelings of love run on autopilot, while judging your relationship to be loving requires reflection and effort. Because feelings of love occur without effort, we’re apt to misjudge that our relationships are not loving because they require effort. If we regard them as not........

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