Who wants to live in the lie (?)

Art work by Hieronymus Bosch.

According one study "maintainers" recalled their relationship as being lower at the beginning than they had reported yet higher at the end. So is your relationship moving toward marriage, and If it isn't, you probably can't admit it.

They had given themselves some room to grow and remembered the recent past as better than they had reported it being.

If they saw maintenance as stagnation, that's a way of addressing that cognitive gap. It helps them feel that their relationship is developing in some way - that they're making progress, reported today's Science daily.

Now we know that dating couples who have moved toward marriage over the course of their relationship remember accurately what was going on at each stage of their deepening commitment. But couples whose commitment to each other has stagnated or regressed are far less accurate in their memories of their relationships, says a new University of Illinois study.