I have spent a good part of my life fascinated by what makes relationships work or not work between two people.

We date. We get married. We get divorced. We try again. We fail again. Sometimes, we give up. We declare that we are much happier being single than having to put up with somebody else’s habits and behaviors.

Many of us want to be in love, but let’s be honest, there is no one size fits all definition of what love really is, and trying to make a match between two very different mindsets can be a difficult challenge.

It’s like a couple going to a relationship restaurant and she says to the waiter, “I’ll have the Saturday Night Special with the candlelight dinner and the piano music playing in the background. And, oh, give me a side of cuddling on the couch by the fireside.”

Then he says, “I’ll have the Monday Night Special with the NFL football game, a few bottles of beer and some barbecue wings on the side, please.”

We want to live happily ever after in our marriages, but that can be an unrealistic expectation. Divorce becomes the stigma of failure. He blames her. She blames him. I often wonder how two people can look at each other on their wedding day with puppy dog eyes, and then a few years later they want to stab each other in the heart while standing in divorce court arguing over who gets the house and who gets the BMW.

We might be envious of the 30- and 40-year marriages, but in some of those relationships the fires of intimacy had burned into smoldering embers many years ago, and now the couple stays together for the convenience of sharing daily tasks together. It used to be that an older man and an older woman stayed unhappily together because they feared the single life would bring a perpetual existence of living alone until the day they died.

Not so anymore, according to recent statistics. Age 50 and older “gray” divorce rates have risen sharply since 1990, with that rate being four times as much for women who are 65 and older and three times as much for men in the same age group. It seems like “for better or worse” has become for worse and not better through many long and stagnant marriages.

Unlike we humans, there is one species that has figured out how to love from the get-go without thinking about it all.

Perhaps we should take lessons from the dogs we have in our homes. I’ll use my girlfriend’s schnauzer, Bella Rose as an example. She was born not knowing what the word love means, but she gives affection with all her being. She lives in the moment. She forgives fast and she holds no grudges. She plays no head games. When she wags her tail, she elicits pure joy with no filters added. Every day she demonstrates her loyalty. She is all about giving. She teaches us to be kinder, better, softer.

Yet, we humans are the stubborn species, and unlike our dogs, we hold grudges. We get upset with our partners when they make mistakes. If our beloved pet should poop on the rug, what do we do? We scold the dog for a few seconds while she wags her tail, but that’s it. Forgiveness is given almost immediately.

If a husband should cause a minor car accident with his wife in the vehicle, she might berate him for the rest of the ride home and beyond. He fuels a long argument by blaming her for leaving the oven turned on when they went shopping last week. The argument then shifts from their accidents to attacks on each other’s character. There is no tail wagging from either of them for hours or even days. Forgiveness might never be requested and never be granted.

I remember a movie called “Love Story” from 1970. The iconic line from the film was: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” But we say we’re sorry anyway. Do we say it to mean it or do we say it just to stop a heated argument? Sometimes, that’s not easy to know from both sides of the quarrel.

In one of my favorite movies, “Good Will Hunting,” the actor counselor, Robin Williams, tells Matt Damon, who has an IQ of a genius but is a failure in his relationships, a few poignant remarks about the things he misses most about his deceased wife, her idiosyncrasies, her personal habits that can end a relationship.

“That’s what made her my wife,” he says. “She knew all my peccadillos, too. People call these imperfections, but they’re not. That’s the good stuff. You see, we get to choose who we let into our weird little worlds.”

He gives advice to the young man who is wondering whether he should keep seeing a girl he’s been dating. “You’re not perfect,” says Robin. “This girl you met; she isn’t perfect either. The question is whether you are perfect for each other. That’s what intimacy is all about.”

This may not be a topic that we like to read about, but that’s because we either don’t know how to fix our relationship problems or we just give up trying.

The truth be known, there is nothing that brings more happiness and peace of mind than a strong relationship with someone we deeply care about — not money, not status, not fame. We might acquire these materialistic things, but they only satisfy us temporarily. There remains a yearning for self-fulfillment inside our hearts that can only come from both giving and receiving love.

Every time Bella jumps up next to me on the couch and wags her tail, she reminds me why I had to write this column.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com