short-term love is hormonal. long-term love is delusional. the nature of long-term love is delusion i.e. in order to maintain love we must delude ourselves. in order to maintain this delusion we must work at it.

short-term love is easy because your hormones do all the work. it makes you do all that you can for the other person and it makes you forgiving of the imperfect things they do. short-term love even makes the other person better-looking and more interesting than they really are. although the raising of a human baby is important, the having of the baby in the first place is even more important. this is why evolution made short-term love so controlled by your instincts and long-term love just an after-thought for you to figure out on your own. in most species, there is only short-term love. they are led by their hormones to mate and then the mother is left to take care of the aftermath. it is rare for a species to mate for life. some do but most don't.

evolution did not forget about long-term love but it did not put much effort into it either. there are definite benefits to long-term love. for one, the human babies get two providers instead of one. this means more protection and more care which would translate into a better chance at survival. in most other species, the females are the same size and have the same physical ability as the males. this is not the case in humans so it would be a logical conclusion that the larger human male is needed in the protection of the human female and her baby as well as for food procurement. also, human offspring take much longer to mature than other species. this forces the human mother to devote more time and effort into taking care of her baby. this also shows that a male partner would be advantageous.

from the perspective of the male and female humans, long-term love has some benefits as well. when we settle down into a long-term relationship we tend to relax and feel more complete. we do not groom ourselves as much and care less about our physical appearance because we no longer have the urge to compete for a mate. our need to mate becomes satiated. its even been shown that humans in long-term relationships live longer than those who aren't.

but here is the problem, once your hormones stop keeping you in love, you are on your own. there isn't much keeping you together anymore beyond habit and remembrance of the short-term, passionate love you once had. this is why long-term love is based solely on delusion. we have to brainwash ourselves into thinking that we care about this person our hormones drove us to. if we do not delude ourselves then we will leave at the next sign of short-term love we get with someone else. this means that you must work at long-term love because it does not come so naturally. instead of your hormones making you see your mate as better-looking and interesting, you must now do it on your own. in other words, you must delude yourself. there are benefits to long-term relationships so this may be something you want to do to maintain the relationship.