Is it love or just habit?
The days go by in a shared rhythm. Nothing is wrong, and yet the question keeps coming back: is this still love, or have we simply got used to each other?
The usual answer is a list of signs to check against your partner. Alexander Pushkin looked at habit differently in the second chapter of Eugene Onegin, published in 1826.
Two lines about habit
In the stanza, a young woman is married to a man she did not choose. At first she resists. Then she takes up the household, and in the end she is at peace. Pushkin closes the stanza with a couplet:
"Habit was given us in distress / By Heaven in lieu of happiness."
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, tr. Henry Spalding, ch. II, st. XXXI
The lines are often quoted with a smile, as if habit were the dull opposite of love. In the poem it is not an enemy. It arrives where a hoped-for happiness did not, and it consoles.
What the question is about
Read this way, "love or habit" says less about the partner than about the one asking. Habit grows over a place where something was once expected.
So the question moves: what was I waiting for, and when did I stop? The answer may be about the relationship. It may also be about a life that was meant to look different.
What the poem leaves
Pushkin does not say whether the consolation is enough. He leaves a question: what expectation have I replaced with habit?
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This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.