You know the story: boy meets girl, and after a passionate courtship fraught with misunderstandings and kissing in the rain, they fall madly in love and live happily ever after. Pack it up and tie with a bow—that’s how relationships work, right? Well, that’s how romantic comedies work. But some of us may have taken the stories woven by Jane Austen and Jennifer Aniston a little too seriously.
In fact, it turns out that human beings may well be wired to stray. We’re wired, at any rate, to fall desperately in lust, mate, make a baby and move on. This is the way it works for about 95 per cent of the mammalian world. But our culture currently prizes the idea of committed, long-term love as one of the Holy Grails of happiness, based on ideas of fate and destiny fuelled by syrupy love songs. Uncertainty often starts to flicker through someone’s mind—maybe a few months in, maybe a few years down the road—and many end up wondering “Did I make the wrong choice? Is this the right person for me? Is this what love is supposed to feel like?” Never mind the hints of panic we might feel when some flirty fellow at the gym or the bar elicits that intoxicating flutter in the chest while boyfriend or husband sits at home, completely unaware. Or, perhaps darkest of all, after so many losses, there’s the fear that we might never find real love at all.
It’s worth noting that the oft-quoted stat that 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce is wildly inaccurate (the latest available data says it sits at about 37 per cent in Canada), but most of us need look no further than our social circles or our own love lives to see that the path to happily-ever-after never did run smooth. Is dreaming about a passionate, committed love affair that will last a lifetime too much to hope for? Does “happily ever after” exist? The short answer is: yes. People can stay passionately in love for a lifetime. But it doesn’t come without work and it doesn’t come without conditions.
For all of us, with very few exceptions, the early stages of falling in love feel the same. The butterflies come first. Then the daydreams. Eventually, the object of your affection becomes the very centre of your world, and you are but a helpless satellite caught in their orbit. You can attribute this early lovesickness to a little chemical in your brain called dopamine. This is the hormone associated with elation, obsessive thoughts, focus and romantic love. The early stage of falling in love was coined in 1979 as “limerence” by the late independent science critic Dr. Dorothy Tennov, who described it as a sort of involuntary love madness. If it is requited, she asserted, it’s accompanied by a “euphoric honeymoon period, followed by a slow decline in experienced intensity.”
“Romantic love is one of the most powerful brain systems on earth,” says biological anthropologist and author Dr. Helen Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University. “When it hits you, it’s very difficult to control.” That may be an understatement, when you think about the lengths some people go to for love (crimes of passion and that kind of thing). It turns out that love is, as Roxy Music so accurately sang, the drug, in a very literal sense. Research done by Dr. Fisher and her associates has shown that the area of the brain activated by dopamine when you’re falling in love is also activated by cocaine.
Evolutionary psychologists such as Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, co-author of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, believe that love and all of its trappings can be explained by one simple thing: a drive to produce babies. “The ultimate purpose of everything in life is reproductive success,” he says. “The entire field of evolutionary psychology, and all the empirical, experimental studies conducted by evolutionary psychologists in the past two decades support this conclusion.” When asked about homosexual love, Dr. Kanazawa explains that they still don’t have all the answers, but says, “Just like straight men prefer young and attractive female partners, gay men prefer young and attractive male partners. So, apart from one aspect of mate selection—sex of the preferred mate—gay men still act as if reproductive success is the ultimate goal.” It appears, then, that the feelings some of us attribute to romantic destiny may actually be much more practical—they’re meant to help us find genetically fit partners to mate with. And if someone comes along who shows signs of better genetic fitness, our instincts will make sure we turn our heads. If we’re dealing with addictive hormones and millennia of evolution, what hope do mere mortals have against the seductive qualities of the early stages of love? Are we ever going to be fully satisfied with what comes after the honeymoon is over? “All of us are subject to evolutionary forces, which produce drives and impulses in us,” Dr. Kanazawa says, “but we are not at the mercy of them.”
We have all heard sad tales of fading passion and diminishing attraction after years of commitment. After the kids come along, after years of snoring and farting and letting it all hang out, the mystery fades and the passion is gone. In passion’s place comes comfort and ease—a different kind of intimacy. This, again, is related to hormones. Oxytocin, also known as the “cuddle chemical,” and vasopressin are both related to long-term pair bonding. Affectionate touch and intimacy stimulate the release of oxytocin, and orgasms release both, but these are not associated with the desperate ecstasy that dopamine can produce. (Though, really, thank goodness we come out of the obsessive, anxious days of early love—how would anyone get anything done?) But does this mean we have to just accept that our storybook endings come with depleted excitement? Cory Silverberg, certified sexuality educator and sexuality writer at about.com, is quick to point out that passion, no matter how long it lasts, is going to have its ebbs and flows. “Our capacity for eroticism is unending,” he explains. “There’s this idea that we should be in mad, passionate love all the time, and it’s no one’s experience. It’s never been someone’s experience through the history of humanity. Sometimes, relationships become boring and routine simply because we treat them as routine. So for some people, what’s needed is a little shaking up.”
Dr. Fisher, along with colleagues including Dr. Arthur Aron, social psychologist at State University of New York Stony Brook, found individuals who had been in long-term relationships for decades and professed to still be passionately in love, and took MRIs of their brains, studying what was going on when the subjects looked at images of their loved ones. “There was new activity in regions associated with calm, and no longer in regions associated with anxiety,” explains Dr. Fisher. But aside from that one difference, the brain activity was similar to that of people in the mad early days of romance.
That couples can stay passionate for decades is, naturally, wonderful news, although those who have already settled for a close, comfortable bond where once there was a raging, passionate attraction, or who have ended a once-spicy relationship that had cooled, may feel cheated. But there’s more good news: “Virtually any couple can improve their relationship,” explains Dr. Aron. “Intense love is associated with the dopamine system, and when people do exciting, challenging, novel activities together, dopamine is released.” These “exciting, challenging, novel activities” don’t have to be things like scaling mountains or swinging from chandeliers. It could be as simple as having dinner in another part of town or taking up a new hobby. According to Dr. Aron, trying new things together and—get this—learning to be genuinely happy for your partner’s successes (even if it’s just a case of finding a lost set of keys) are two of the most powerful predictors of a lasting relationship.
If you’re not an entirely hopeless romantic, you’ve probably already rejected the idea that there is an all-powerful “one” for each of us out there. More likely, there are multiple “ones” with whom you could have a happy relationship. Assuming there’s the necessary attraction to get to the relationship stage, would you believe that almost anyone could be a “one”? “The match doesn’t matter too much,” says Dr. Aron. “There are three things that make for a relationship that is reasonably satisfying and likely to last.” These are: The couple have developed excellent communication skills and are able to express their feelings and resolve conflicts; neither of the parties involved is suffering from anxiety or depression; and the couple is not under heavy external stressors, such as family pressure or war. “Romeo and Juliet were very much in love,” says Dr. Aron, “but they’d have had a very hard time making a marriage work.”
If you think that everlasting love is simply written in the stars and will stay perfect for all of eternity, give your pretty little head a shake. Fulfilling, committed and passionate love is possible, but it takes work. But despite what science and history might tell us, finding a happily ever after shouldn’t be reduced to an exercise in biology (even if that’s really what it’s about). Talking about the science of love without acknowledging the art of it—the poetry, the emotions, the suffering, the elation—really doesn’t do it justice. Science can’t capture the devastation of heartache, or the overwhelming release you feel when you’re wrapped up in a partner’s loving arms after a horrible day. As Silverberg points out, “Talking about love in terms of hormones is like talking about a beach by counting grains of sand.”
First published in FASHION Magazine February 2010
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