metastability

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)An unstable but potentially long-lived state of a system; for example, a supersaturated solution or an excited atom.

   “Soloman's belief that love is necessarily paradoxical issues from his attempt to define it as what Sartre would call a dialectical metastability. Love must therefore be not a "state of the union but a never ending conflict of pushing away and pulling together."”