Scientists claim that they’ve found some folk for whom romance lasts a lifetime, defying the clichés and “common sense.”
A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.
Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.
The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.
The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.
The reactions of the swans to pictures of their beloved were identified on MRI brain scans as a burst of pleasure-producing dopamine more commonly seen in couples who are gripped in the first flush of lust.
Grrrraowrrrr …
“The findings go against the traditional view of romance – that it drops off sharply in the first decade – but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook. Previous research had laid out the “fracture points” in relationships as 12-15 months, three years and the infamous seven-year itch.
Aron said when he first interviewed people claiming they were still in love after an average of 21 years he thought they were fooling themselves: “But this is what the brain scans tell us and people can’t fake that.”
I can say — having long past those “fracture points,” (we’ll hit 14 years married this year, plus a bit of courting romance prior to that), I love — and am deeply attracted to (hubba-hubba!) — Margie as intensely as I was back then. Which is not to say that it isn’t possible to have a long-term, positive, pleasant relationship without being all googly-eyed toward each other all the time, but I’m glad (despite my daughter’s embarrassment) that’s the way we are.