Or, did love evolve as a way of blinding you to what someone is really like long enough to have kids? New Love: A Short Shelf Life [0] By SONJA LYUBOMIRSKYPublished: December 1, 2012 IN fairy tales, marriages last happily ever after. Science, however, tells us that wedded bliss has but a limited shelf life. American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years. Then the special joy wears off and they are back where they started, at least in terms of happiness. The findings, from a 2003 study, have been confirmed by several recent studies.
The good news for the holiday season when families gather in various configurations is that if couples get past that two-year slump and hang on for another couple of decades they may well recover the excitement of the honeymoon period 18 to 20 years later, when children are gone. Then, in the freedom of the so-called empty nest, partners are left to discover one another and often their early bliss once again. When love is new, we have the rare capacity to experience great happiness while being stuck in traffic or getting our teeth cleaned. We are in the throes of what researchers call passionate love, a state of intense longing, desire and attraction. In time, this love generally morphs into companionate love, a less impassioned blend of deep affection and connection. The reason is that human beings are, as more than a hundred studies show, prone to hedonic adaptation, a measurable and innate capacity to become habituated or inured to most life changes. With all due respect to poets and pop radio songwriters, new love seems nearly as vulnerable to hedonic adaptation as a new job, a new home, a new coat and other novel sources of pleasure and well-being. (Though the thrill of a new material acquisition generally fades faster.) Hedonic adaptation is most likely when positive experiences are involved. It's cruel but true: We're inclined psychologically and physiologically to take positive experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful loft. Marry a wonderful partner. Earn our way to the top of our profession. How thrilling! For a time. Then, as if propelled by autonomic forces, our expectations change, multiply or expand and, as they do, we begin to take the new, improved circumstances for granted. Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation. Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: "The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine." There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day every day we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health. (To quote a line from the 2004 film "Before Sunset," about two former lovers who chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, "we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives." ) Indeed, the condition of being in love has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it will eventually exact a toll. WHY, then, is the natural shift from passionate to companionate love often such a letdown? Because, although we may not realize it, we are biologically hard-wired to crave variety. Variety and novelty affect the brain in much the same way that drugs do that is, they trigger activity that involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, as do pharmacological highs. Evolutionary biologists believe that sexual variety is adaptive, and that it evolved to prevent incest and inbreeding in ancestral environments. The idea is that when our spouse becomes as familiar to us as a sibling when we've become family we cease to be sexually attracted to each other. There's more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/opinion/sunday/new-love-a-short-shelf-\ life.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&
