PASSIONATE LOVE: A SHORT LIFE

In fairy tales, love and marriage lasts happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that love has a limited life.

Western researchers tracked 2000 couples who stayed married over 15 years: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they began, in terms of happiness. 

The good news is, if loving couples stay together past that two-year slump - for another couple of decades - they may recover the excitement, discovering each other and their early bliss, once again. 

When love is new, we are in “passionate love” -- intense longing, desire, attraction. This love changes into “companion love” -- deep affection and connection. Or love disappears forever. 

We take positive good experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful home. Make more money. Fall in love. Then our expectations change, multiply, and continuously expand.

Sexual passion will change. Men and women are less aroused after they have sexual fantasies more than a few times. Familiarity breeds indifference. As Raymond Chandler wrote: “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”

There are evolutionary, physiological, and practical reasons that passionate love is unlikely to endure. If we obsessed endlessly about our lovers, we would not be productive at work, or pay attention to our friends or health. (In “Before Sunset,” two former lovers meet again after a decade. They realize that if their passion did not fade, “we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives.”) Being in love has a lot in common with addiction and narcissism.

We are biologically created to crave variety. Variety and new experiences affect the brain a similar way as drugs.

Sexual variety evolved to prevent incest and inbreeding.

Sex in a long-term committed monogamous relationship involves the same partner, day after day after day. No one who is human (or mammalian) can maintain the same lust and ardor experienced when love was new.

We may love our partners deeply, idolize them, and even be willing to die for them, but these feelings rarely translate into long-term passion. Studies show that women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex, and to lose it sooner.

When couples reach the two-year mark, many mistake the natural shift from passionate love to companion love as incompatibility and unhappiness. Then the possibility that things might be different - more exciting, more satisfying - with someone else is difficult to resist.

Adding variety and surprise into even the most stable relationship is a good idea. Key parties, such as in “The Ice Storm” aren't what is needed. Couples who do “exciting” (surprising) activities together have greater satisfaction in their relationships than those who only do “enjoyable” (pleasant) things together.

Although variety and surprise seem similar, they are quite different. It’s easy to vary things you do together, without there being much surprise. Both are necessary to maintain a strong, healthy relationship. In the beginning, relationships are endlessly surprising. As we know our partner better, they surprise us less.

Surprise is a powerful force. When something new occurs, we pay closer attention, fully appreciate the experience, remember it. We are unlikely to take our relationship for granted when it continues to create strong emotional reactions in us. Uncertainty enhances the pleasure of positive events. Surprise is often more satisfying than stability.

In “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen said: “A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” 

A marriage or a relationship is likely to change shape many times during its lifetime; it must continually be rebuilt if it is to survive and thrive.

(Adapted from an article by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Riverside....She wrote: “The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does.”)