{"id":339,"date":"2008-12-07T12:06:30","date_gmt":"2008-12-07T12:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2008\/12\/can-romantic-love-last.html"},"modified":"2008-12-07T12:06:30","modified_gmt":"2008-12-07T12:06:30","slug":"can-romantic-love-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/12\/can-romantic-love-last.html","title":{"rendered":"Can Romantic Love Last?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was scrolling through the psychology news in\u00a0my Google Reader last night and came across a study finding that “some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage.”<\/a>\u00a0 Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine\u00a0compared the brain activity of people who claimed to be in love for just a few months to\u00a0long-term lovers who had been together for an average\u00a0of 21 years. To many people’s relief, they found similar activation in the ventral tegmental area of the brain in both groups. (Apparently this is the area of the brain responsible for triggering the feeling of “romantic love.”) A difference that emerged was that the long-term lovers showed more activity in the part of the brain\u00a0correlated\u00a0with calmness and pain suppression, while the new\u00a0lovers had more activity in the area associated with obsession and anxiety. Though these\u00a0madly in love long-term partners are thought to be\u00a0“outliers”, the findings\u00a0seem to suggest that the feeling of romantic love can last.
\nMy first reaction to reading this, was “great- it is possible”, but then I started wondering about impermanence and our tendency to grasp for people and experiences, to want to pin them down somehow. This study seems to appeal to that part of me- the part that wants to believe certain things can last. It would be interesting to hear more about these “outliers”, about what makes their relationships different. Perhaps they grasp less and are able to “just be” more often. I think relationships require a certain amount of freedom to thrive. It can be hard to not have expectations, but I think that if we can remain in the present and not assume that anything will (or should) last forever, that might be a step in the right direction. I like the idea of choice when it comes to relationships- that if it’s always a choice, it means more to be chosen. I think where a lot of\u00a0 long-term relationships get into trouble (and perhaps lose the feeling of romantic love) is when the commitment is taken for granted. Though\u00a0maybe my\u00a0fondness of choice has something to do with wanting to sustain a bit of the anxiety\u00a0I associate with early love. What do others think about this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was scrolling through the psychology news in\u00a0my Google Reader last night and came across a study finding that “some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage.”\u00a0 Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine\u00a0compared the brain activity of people who claimed to be in love for just…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-media"],"yoast_head":"\nCan Romantic Love Last? - One City<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/12\/can-romantic-love-last.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can Romantic Love Last? 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