atoms:longlivethequeen:haleywordeater:hamandheroin:
It appears that scientists have discovered true love. Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love. The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.
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.
“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.”
12-15 months? Double check. Three years? Almost check. Seven years? Not even close. But at the very least, it’s good to know that science has finally confirmed what I’ve known for the last three years to be true. Took them long enough.
if they made it available for you and your spouse to get a brain scan and see if you truely loved eachother, would you?
I was thinking this too, and I decided no. I’m sure whoever I picked as a spouse is going to be the one who actually reciprocates the feeling back.
but would you be curious how much YOU still love her?
If I picked her, that’s because I know I love her. :D
youloved her when you picked her, but what about 10 years after that?
I’ll look at her the same way I did during that first year. Unless I went blind in some sort of freak accident. :’(
or so you hope. you dont know
What a downer.
I think love has a lot to do with one’s own choices. I don’t think you just wake up one day and stop loving. I don’t believe in that. In fact, I think it demeans love. Sure, love changes, but I think when we love, really love, we have so much more control than we know.
I kinda think that love as a choice demeans love. It’s kinda special when I don’t have any control over it.
