Between Us: A Structural Account of Love, Estrangement, and Partnership

This paper applies the structural theory of La Profilée to the human self and human partnerships. It reframes love not as a feeling that persists or fades, but as a structural activity — the ongoing maintenance of coupling capacity through real transformation. Marriage, estrangement, the transition from falling in love to everyday life, and the experience of growing apart are not mysteries of the heart. They are structurally describable events in the persistence architecture of two people and the relationship they share. The paper derives the six structural regimes of partnership — from Flourishing through Dissolution — and maps the major relationship milestones (moving in together, engagement, marriage, children, the empty nest, retirement) as structural operations on the Frame/Module/Coupling architecture. Three forms of estrangement are distinguished. The defensive use of relational Frame as a substitute for internal stability is analyzed as a structural configuration with predictable consequences. And the question of what one carries from one relationship to the next is given a structural answer. The foundational claim is precise: a relationship can be no more structurally stable than the two people who carry it. Individual persistence capacity — internal Frame clarity, Module tolerance, self-Coupling — is the prerequisite for relational persistence. The paper ends where it must: not with a prescription for what love should be, but with a structural account of what makes it last.