Please use this thread going forward: Romantic Relationships decay/become negative fast with no interaction | EA Forums - 4947168
Since the Lovestruck pack came out, I've had pretty significant issues with my Sims losing romance with their partners at a quicker rate. I know this is partially because of the new features, but it's gotten to an extreme level. My current Sim has 5 romantic relationships and right now, all of those relationships are going well. They're all satisfied and I've worked hard to build the romance up, yet in a matter of in-game hours, the whole romance bar vanishes. And I'm not exaggerating. I spent a full day building the romance bars back up with all partners after first noticing that they were getting low, and then sent my Sim to bed. The morning after, two bars were suddenly in the negative and one was getting close. Two were fine. I cheated the bars back up to 80% so I wouldn't have to repeat all that work, but literally two hours later (in game), the bars were completely depleted again. It's really frustrating not being able to keep them up when there's no reason for such drastic decay, and it's weird that it only happens with 3 of 5 relationships when they all have similar dynamics and satisfaction levels.
Here is the chronology of the issue I observed:
1. A sim will suddenly declare lost of romantic interest to the partner, threatening to divorce. At this time, the notification will pop up and the romantic lesson tutorial is available but it is not helpful.
2. Over the course of sim time, the romantic relationship will decay very fast.
3. Multiple romantic interaction can build the relationship but it is useless because the decay rate is fast.
The main problem is:
1. Lost of romantic relationship seem to be random occurring (at least to me) and it cannot be controlled by player. At this point I don't know what triggers it.
2. There is no "solution" to this decay. Somehow strings of Cupid Counselling doesn't seem to help. Online romance research also doesn't help.
So yeah, this is infuriating because THERE IS NO CONTROL OVER THIS AND THERE IS NO SOLUTION!!!
So I dont know if its related or might be a clue why this is happening, but I noticed a couple of times already sims who are in a romantic relationship will react very negatively if they see your sim just casually talking and using friendly interactions on their spouse/partner... even though the sim dont have the jaelous trait or even if any romantic interactions were used... this is weird and might explain why they loose their romance bar so easily if simple friendly interaction affect their couple, even if those interaction are directed to some other family members... I saw that many times and its suspicious.
It's not quite making sense when my married Sims have a relationship thats above halfway pink and they both start talking about divorce. Especially as their friendship is maxed. They immediately become sad too and their relationship interactions become more difficult. Friendship should count more because how many couples do nothing but romantic interactions for hours and hours and that's exactly what I have to do to keep my Sims in happy relationships.
I edited their preferences in CAS to include each others hair colour, way of life and clothing colour, etc and took away anything that didn't match each other. That helped with their attraction levels but family gameplay is difficult enough unfortunately without couples having to constantly maintain the romance every day. If they don't it drops after a couple of days again and they talk about divorce again. It's quite unpleasant. Sentiments don't count at all either, this couple has really loving sentiments and are best friends too.
Also when they are both satisfied in the relationship it's supposed to build automatically but it definitely isn't. It's dropping instead.
