Falling in love is easy, but relationships are always hard.
Love can be dazzling, but those long-term partners who have been with you for many years have become some kind of mysterious mixture of family, friends and comrades in arms, related to firewood, rice, oil and salt, and children’s school district housing. About, only the romantic love is dissipating completely in tacit understanding.
Romantic love is unsustainable and has become a proven empirical statement. After all, the wisdom contained in “living” also includes a certain stability after love is removed.
What is love? Is there some love that can withstand the wear and tear of “days”?
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Romantic love, under NMR
What is love?
Some people say it’s the heartbeat, the passion, the butterfly in the body, the “kiss at six in the morning”, or the more apparent body warming, faster heartbeat, faster blood flow Faster, even the pupils will dilate a little.
What if you put love under NMR?
Someone did a neurobasic study of romantic love, comparing pictures of lovers with pictures of friends, and after MRI scans, the subjects were found to be more sexually aroused:
Image source: Literature
More pronounced galvanic skin response:
(When the body is subjected to sensory stimulation or emotional changes, the blood vessels in the skin will contract and relax due to the emotional stimulation of the individual, and at the same time, the body’s sweat gland secretion will also change, It will cause changes in skin resistance and form galvanic skin response.)
Image source: Literature
When participants saw a loved one, specific brain regions were activated: such as the ventral tegmental area (VTA), and the caudate nucleus , these brain regions are involved in the “reward-motivation” system driven by dopamine, and their activity plays a non-negligible role in romantic love. “
Image source: Literature
This kind of flashy, addictive feeling is almost compulsive, occupying a lot of time, swallowing energy, but can’t stop.
One study even found that people who were in a relationship reported thinking about the other person 85% of the time they woke up.
Although I love so deeply that I can’t wait to rub each other into my body, it seems that all people in love have a sword of Damocles above their heads——
When will the chemicals of love dissipate? After dissipating, what will we become?
If love really only proves to be a temporary arousal of a biological desire to mate, then the establishment of love in passionate love, the giving of promises, the vows of eachother, What’s the point?
Some studies estimate that the euphoric phase of love can last from six months to three years.
That is, romantic love does have a time limit. This term is cold, like a scientific sentence for love.
It rules us that if we want to pursue romantic love, we should be in different relationships, the length of which is determined by the sentence of romantic love.
Should humans not seek romantic love in long-term intimacy?
No, there is a lucky handful of people who are still in love—even after six months to three years of euphoria, five, 10, 20 years later.
How are they different?
Long-term lovers
Brain areas are really different
Yes, this time the researchers stretched the MRI’s “claw” a little further, and they put the romantic love in long-term relationships under the NMR as well.
“Are you still madly in love with your long-term partner?”
The researchers put out such a recruiting advertisement, and 10 women and 7 men passed the screening.
The researchers first compared them with four sets of photos: photos of loved ones, photos of close friends, photos of acquaintances, and photos of people they knew.
The emotional intensity evoked by each stimulus was scored for empathy, friendship, happiness, pride, love, passion and sexuality and found:
For these people, long-term intimacy does not rip off romantic love and becomes a substitute for family and friendship.
To them, the feelings of joy, love, and passion that a lover evokes are very different:
Source: Literature
Next is another scan.
The researchers also compared them to those who had just recently been in a relationship.
Surprisingly, long-term, intense romantic love and couples in early romantic love have similar activity in specific brain regions.
Activities in these specific brain regions may be the clues that some couples are still insanely in love years, or even decades later.
In a word, these data suggest that long-term romantic love exists, even in terms of only biological, brain activation levels.
Compared with short-term romantic love, the brain regions affected by long-term romantic love are more complex. In addition to the dopamine-related reward system activated in short-term romantic love, it also involves attachment, Areas associated with intimacy and analgesia.
In other words, there is greater peace and relief in long-term romantic love than passion and intimacy.
Image source: giphy.com
Happy marriages are always similar
People who have been in love for a long time, what is the right thing to do?
There are a few studies that can help you maintain longer, more satisfying long-term relationships.
A five-year study analyzed couples’ interactions, coding their interactions into positive codes (laughing, agreeing, and others) and negative codes (complaining, criticizing, defensive, and others). ).
Based on these behavioral ratios, researchers predicted their future marital status. The results found that the success rate of predicting divorce or stability was as high as 93.6%.
This study can suggest that in order for a marriage to last, couples must have a high-quality marriage time. Marital stability is not a given, but requires continuous effort.
Image source: giphy.com
In another study, researchers asked, “How exciting would it be to do this with your partner? How enjoyable would that be?” A list of exciting experiences.
It was found that couples who completed more exciting and novel tasks from the list were significantly more satisfied with their relationship. And “boring” is very damaging to marriage. Doing novel things together may activate the brain’s dopamine system and help maintain romantic love.
Similar studies are many, sociology, anthropology, endocrinology, literature, neurobiology, psychology…Almost all disciplines have been ambitious I’ve studied romantic love, but to practice love, experience love, and create love doesn’t require formulas, and it doesn’t require NMR.
Love and time are not entirely opposites, and couples who are lucky enough to spend time together are enviable, but those who have truly loved are also very, very lucky.
Love is communism at its smallest, a very personal experience for everyone, every moment. It’s not just about love, attraction, and sexuality, it’s also a lamp for a late night, an umbrella for a rainy day, and it may not be able to conquer time, or it may becomeFor the heartache experience.
Luo Dayou also sang, “I know love, but what is it forever?”
If forever is too far, take today’s porridge and rice seriously.
Finally, I would like to ask you, if you have seen lovers who have been together for a long time in your life, can you still maintain a close relationship that is close to passionate love?
If so, how did you see it and what did they do right?
This article reviewer
References
[1]Bianca P. Acevedo, Arthur Aron, Helen E. Fisher, Lucy L. Brown, Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 7, Issue 2, February 2012, Pages 145–159, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsq092
[2]Fisher HE, Xu X, Aron A, Brown LL. Intense, Passionate, Romantic Love: A Natural Addiction? How the Fields That Investigate Romance and Substance Abuse Can Inform Each Other. Front Psychol. 2016 May 10;7:687. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00687. PMID: 27242601; PMCID: PMC4861725.
[3] Ling Youwei. (2019). Research on the application of skin galvanic indicators in personnel selection questionnaire. Northwest Normal University.
[4]Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of
personality and social psychology, 63(2), 221–233.
[5]Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D. J., Strong, G., Li, H., & Brown, L. L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. Journal of neurophysiology, 94(1), 327-337.
Planning
Planning: Tagay | Producer: Feidi
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