Before Wisdom

Romance addicts have been growing despondent over the last few years. Their daydreams of a happily ever after life has been encroached upon by science. Romantic love, so say brain scanning scientists, is a temporary alternation of the human brain. It lasts 1 – 3 years maximum, then it is back to reality where cooperation and hard work make a life.

Well, according to the New York Times, there is hope, for some people:

Even so, academic researchers have become increasingly fascinated with the inner workings of long-married couples, subjecting them to a battery of laboratory tests and even brain scans to unravel the mystery of lasting love.

Bianca Acevedo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies the neuroscience of relationships and began a search for long-married couples who were still madly in love. Through a phone survey, she collected data on 274 men and women in committed relationships, and used relationship scales to measure marital happiness and passionate love.

Dr. Acevedo expected to find only a small percentage of long-married couples still passionately in love. To her surprise, about 40 percent of them continued to register high on the romance scale. The remaining 60 percent weren’t necessarily unhappy. Many had high levels of relationship satisfaction and were still in love, just not so intensely.

In a separate study, 17 men and women who were passionately in love agreed to undergo scans to determine what lasting romantic love looks like in the brain. The subjects, who had been married an average of about 21 years, viewed a picture of their spouse. As a control, they also viewed photos of two friends.

Compared with the reaction when looking at others, seeing the spouse activated parts of the brain associated with romantic love, much as it did when couples who had just fallen in love took the same test. But in the older couples, researchers spotted something extra: parts of the brain associated with deep attachment were also activated, suggesting that contentment in marriage and passion in marriage aren’t mutually exclusive.

“They have the feelings of euphoria, but also the feelings of calm and security that we feel when we’re attached to somebody,” Dr. Acevedo said. “I think it’s wonderful news.”

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More interesting and perhaps more scary, is that this kind of happiness is not necessarily a lottery. What you and your spouse choose to do makes a difference:

Research from Stony Brook University in New York suggests that couples who regularly do new and different things together are happier than those who repeat the same old habits. The theory is that new experiences activate the dopamine system and mimic the brain chemistry of early romantic love.

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I would be interested to find out more about what this means. My intuition is that trying a new restaurant in a different city wouldn’t cut the brain stimulating mustard. Too ordinary. My non-expert intuition is that both people would have to feel as if they shared something intense or significant. That seems to be how new relationships and friendships form.

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A fascinating article in the Washington Post. People in marriages that last aren’t necessarily better matched than people in marriages that end. The big difference is in how couples manage their differences. The article goes on about how marriage education…….NOT THERAPY, might be saving marriages. These classes teach people techniques for managing disagreements that will not go away. At the root of it is letting the other person know that you listened, letting the other person know that you cared and not being toxic during the disagreement.

What Markman, Gottman and the others were finding undermined the basic principle driving romantic relationships in America: “That it’s about finding the right person. That if you find your soulmate, everything will be fine,” Sollee says. “That’s the big myth.”

It’s important to choose a spouse wisely, these scientists would say, but it’s equally important to be skilled in the convoluted art of conducting a marriage.

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More than 40 percent of first marriages end in divorce. The divorce rate for second marriages is above 60 percent, and it’s higher than 70 percent for folks making their third walk down the aisle.

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A few years later, in 1989, she sat at a conference listening to Gottman talk about the results of a decades-long study of couples at his “Love Lab” in Seattle. Gottman found that all couples — those who are happily married into their rocking-chair years and those who divorce before they hit their fifth anniversary — disagree more or less the same amount. He found that they all argue about the same subjects — money, kids, time and sex chief among them — and that for the average couple, 69 percent of those disagreements will be irreconcilable. A morning bird and a night owl won’t ever fully eliminate their differences; nor will a spendthrift and a penny pincher. What distinguished satisfied couples from the miserable ones, he found, was how creatively and constructively they managed those differences.

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