Psychology enlightens
Falling in love doesn’t just happen – and it can be prevented
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The butterfly feeling in your stomach has flown? Love more routine than an exciting adventure? Does that really have to be the case in a long-term relationship?
Psychology has a wonderful answer for this: No! It doesn’t have to be that way in our love life. While love wanes for many of us over time, what we do with it is up to us. Whether passion walks out the front door or we invite it over for dessert has a lot to do with how we understand the shift from romantic love to more communal love.
Is cuddling that much worse?
Many of us long for one thing in our relationships: the fire! We remember what it was like to fall in love back then. How excited we were and how we literally just wanted to rip our clothes off. In psychology, the experience of falling in love is also understood as romantic or passionate love. It is characterized, for example, by intense sexual passion, fantasies and arousal with the new partner. But as time goes on, that kind of raw lust for each other fades away. And maybe it doesn’t have to be that intense. Because what we often suppress is that in this phase we are often blind with lust and still know little about our partner. Of course, sexual attraction isn’t everything we need in a happy relationship.
The stuff of which relationships are made
One approach to the problem in psychology is a model by Robert Sternberg. According to the psychologist, relationships can be broken down into three main components: passion, intimacy, and commitment. The absence or presence of these factors can manifest itself as follows:
- Passion: The physical, sexual, and emotional attraction that your partner creates in you. These feelings can be both positive and negative, such as sexual desire or jealousy.
- Intimacy: This includes the warmth you feel when you are together and the desire to do something good for him or her and to take care of him or her. This also means that the partners open up in the relationship and share things with each other. The basis here is a kind of friendly love.
- commitment: How willing are you to invest in the relationship, work on it, and not risk your time together over arguments? All such things have something to do with the commitment to the partner, especially in long-term relationships. Instead of looking for something new, we prefer to stay with the person we know, who we love and with whom we sometimes have to work on ourselves.
Romance vs. feel good
If you read through the points above, you quickly realize that not everything is covered directly with romantic love – or even with the communal form of love. Instead, one causes the other or both forms complement each other and must be reconciled. Romantic love stands for intimacy and passion. But we don’t find the commitment there. For that we need a sense of togetherness and community. So not ignoring both is the most important quality to be happy in our relationships.
Can we control this or is it biological?
In the romantic phase, cortisol and adrenaline are primarily responsible for our lively and passionate time with our partner. Hormones that also play a role in stress and can even harm us if the dose is too high. When these hormones eventually decrease, the body allows itself to regulate itself again with other hormones. This also makes a more adapted form of passion possible. For example, through the hormones vasopressin and oxytocin, which play a role in sexual attraction and the feeling of attachment to the partner. Studies have also shown that it is possible to remain passionate in long-lasting relationships. What exactly these couples are doing right, however, cannot be deduced from research.
The psychology behind it provides the chemistry
In his theory, Robert Sternberg assumes that passion both increases sharply and quickly decreases again. And this in a period in which the other factors such as intimacy and commitment are developing. Because it takes us longer to get to know a partner than it does to feel attracted to someone else. The passion can often be rather blind and lead us to fantasies and ideas about our new relationship that in the end do not apply to our partner at all. Which in turn can lead to less passion. Scientists assume, however, that it is possible to develop the romantic phase further – with a mixture of romantic and communal or friendly love: A colorful mix of passion, a sense of community and affection and an open togetherness is probably enough.
Source: Psychology Today