I have one friend who has been fairly consistently single all his life. I think his longest relationship has been around six months. Perhaps I should put this into perspective by adding that he’s in his late forties. When I’ve talked to him about it, he always says that he’d love to find the right person, but it would have to be a relationship for which he didn’t have to make sacrifices to fit into his life.

If you’ve reached your late forties without a serious relationship, I suppose you could think that made sense. I’ve certainly known lots of people who have held this view in their twenties and thirties. I’ve also known several survivors of unpleasant divorces who have taken refuge in this attitude.

However, if you’re lucky enough to have – or ever to have had – a really strong relationship, you’ll know that it doesn’t work like that. Or rather, what these people like my friend are trying to avoid is actually compromise, but they can’t tell it apart from sacrifice. So let’s just clarify the difference.

Sacrifice is when you give up something without making any personal gain, especially when your partner doesn’t reciprocate. That’s unhealthy in a relationship, and no decent partner would knowingly ask you to do this.

Compromise is when both of you give up something or adapt in order to find a central position that you can both live with. Crucially, it leaves you better off personally than a failure to agree would do. That’s because if it strengthens the relationship, and your partner is meeting you part way, then on balance you make a net gain. The trade-off is a beneficial one. You might both meet half way on something like how much money you spend on holidays, or you might balance up different concessions – one of you will do all the shopping if the other one does all the laundry.

A good relationship can’t survive without compromise, not only because it’s unrealistic to think that any two lives could mesh so exactly, but because it’s the very fact that you are having to adapt to each other that seals your commitment. If the two of you are walking separate paths, that’s not actually a relationship. You might as well just walk away from each other – you wouldn’t notice the difference. It’s the interweaving that creates the bond. That’s not to say that all compromises are worthwhile, or that every relationship that entails compromise will succeed. But no relationship, however strong its potential, can thrive without compromise.