It’s Valentine’s Day. When it comes to your job, are you ‘married’ or ‘in a relationship’?

My wife Bethany and I have been together for a long time. Today is our twenty-ninth Valentine’s Day as a couple. Twenty-nine years. That’s long past the candy-and-flowers stage. Past even the Valentine cards stage.

Ours was never a storybook romance. We married young and started a family early. A child with special needs. Job changes. Career changes. Interstate moves. All throughout it’s felt like so much hard work.

Complaints. Arguments. Hurting and being hurt, whether through ignorance or indifference. There have been moments when one or both of us wondered if the whole thing had been a mistake, if it’s worth all the heartache to stay.

Yet here we are, after nearly three decades. We didn’t leave. We each had to learn how to communicate openly: to speak our own truth, and to really listen to the truth of the other. We had to care enough about each other, and about the connection between us, to hang in there when the going got tough.

As a result, we figured out what we’d been building together all that time. And we realized all that we’d be losing if we quit now.

There’s a social-scientific model that helps explain my marriage. Economist Albert Hirschman called it Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When confronted with an unsatisfying or untenable situation – a relationship, a job, a political regime – we have two basic ways to respond. One is to leave. The other is to stay and try to make things better.

We usually do a cost-benefit comparison of leaving versus staying. When the costs of staying outweigh the benefits, most of us leave.

But loyalty complicates things. Loyalty can compel someone to stay even when the costs outweigh the benefits. Loyalty can even compel someone to risk incurring additional costs by speaking up in the hopes of making things better.

In terms of exit, voice, and loyalty, then, being ‘married’ is different from being ‘in a relationship.’ A legal marriage can affect both sides of the dynamic. First, it can raise the costs of exit beyond what they’d be for an unmarried couple. And second, the cultural weight that marriage still carries – as an ideal to aspire to – potentially increases the loyalty of one or both marital partners.

I can’t help but see my current employment experience through this same lens. Even though I’ve only been there about one-tenth as long, my job at United Parcel Service already feels a lot like my marriage. Through its words and deeds, the company promotes loyalty and encourages voice.

Let’s look at the loyalty side. For starters, like other places I’ve worked at, UPS publicly recognizes its employees’ work anniversaries. This is a very inexpensive way to reward people for staying.

Another loyalty-builder is the practice of promoting-from-within. This often involves additional training, which can be costly. Businesses invest in workforce development if they expect a return on that investment in terms of future productivity. It must be cheaper for UPS to grow its own talent than to start fresh with someone ‘off the street.’

Perhaps the biggest lever UPS wields in motivating its people to stay is its substantial financial contribution to employee retirement and health benefits. I’m not vested in my defined-benefit pension until five years of service, and the longer I stay, the bigger that guaranteed monthly benefit becomes. Meanwhile, a job elsewhere would have to pay me considerably more to offset the loss of my UPS health coverage for which I pay no premium and very little out-of-pocket.

None of these practices is unique to UPS. Plenty of other employers provide more or less competitive incentives to attract and retain talented employees. (Still, UPS can feel like a throwback to an earlier, quainter era.)

But it’s the capacity for employee voice at UPS that’s unrivaled anywhere. There are very few workforces that are as large, and fewer still that are represented by any union, let alone a single union. Without union representation, complaining, protesting, or whistleblowing could be job or career suicide. Instead, UPSers feel empowered to be vocal – and vocal they are. There’s a lot of complaining at UPS, and that’s a good thing, because it’s the most direct path to positive change.

By contrast, so many jobs in our economy today feel like being ‘in a relationship.’ That’s due in large part to the breakdown of employer loyalty since the 1970s. With so many companies being bought and sold, going bankrupt, outsourcing positions and offshoring operations, more and more of the workforce is contingent or job-insecure.

It doesn’t pay to be loyal to an employer who isn’t loyal to you in return. In fact, that’s a prescription for exploitation. Whether for career advancement, self-actualization, work-life balance, or simple self-preservation, workers are not just exiting jobs, they’re exiting entire industries and professional fields.

There are plenty of workers ‘in a relationship’ with their employer who would prefer a more ‘marriage’-like situation in their jobs. More people want the security – and satisfaction – that comes with staying and having a voice.