Why feelings cool over time and how to prolong love

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Strong feelings are really fleeting, but neuroscience offers several ways to revive them.

Where do vivid feelings come from?

Dopamine plays the most important role in generating passion and vivid romantic feelings, writes Semir Zeki, professor of neurobiology at University College London. By acting on specific receptors in the brain, this neurotransmitter motivates Mesolimbic Dopamine Signals the Value of Work to fulfill our desires and achieve goals - usually associated with something useful for life. For example, with reproduction (respectively, with the desire to get an object of passion) or with the acquisition of new knowledge, impressions, experience: the better you know the situation and the more you can, the higher the chances of survival.

Dopamine is associated with the joy of new experiences, travel, overcoming danger, the desire to grow in salary and my desire to finish this article. Dopamine and monogamy receptors for dopamine D2 are responsible for our love impulses - they are insured by D1, which block interest in other potential partners.

So, we abandon friends, lose productivity, cannot tear ourselves away from each other, orgasms darken our eyes. But this is temporary.

Why does the feeling cool down

Over time, the feeling of novelty dulls. And also a familiar partner is always at hand - there is no longer a need for dopamine motivation to win him over. This neurotransmitter, of course, continues to be released, but not in those quantities.

As a result, the passion fades somewhat, the feelings are no longer so burning, and someone may even be drawn to flirting with someone else.

Sex training presenters speculate on this topic, urging them to act out inaccessibility. There is a grain of truth in these words, except that in close relationships you usually do not bother and do not arrange an obstacle course on the way to the bedroom.

It is important that dopamine-induced activity in some areas of the brain is associated with a decrease in the work of others: for example, the ability to critically evaluate a partner is suppressed. When love euphoria passes, you yourself know what happens.

How love changes over time

If the dopamine wave that has subsided has not revealed a heap of garbage on the shore out of misunderstanding and disappointment, then it makes sense to talk about vasopressin and oxytocin. They are your invitations to a cozy family life.

These social molecules form a kindred warmth, tenderness, and give a feeling of calmness and security around loved ones. Oxytocin is thrown out even at the stage of dating, plays a large role in the formation of attachment and, unlike dopamine, does not leave you after a year of relationship.

Oxytocin is especially active in women (it is associated with maternal feelings and is involved in lactation), and in men, vasopressin, chemically similar to it, plays an important role. He forms paternal feelings and "includes" care, as well as aggression towards other applicants for a partner. Women are also familiar with the feeling of vasopressin ownership, albeit to a lesser extent.

The big jump in oxytocin and / or vasopressin is detrimental to dopamine, according to Daniel Lieberman, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine: The Most Needed Hormone. This is partly why immediately after the birth of a child, you usually do not really want sex. But the moderate concentration of these substances just promotes the release of SERIAL MONOGAMY AND CLANDESTINE ADULTERY dopamine, which is associated with arousal, says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher.

In long-term relationships, the areas of the brain associated with sympathy are also activated. The Anatomy of Friendship relies on them, which is accompanied by the release of opioids and endorphins (they act on endorphins on opioid receptors).

Like vasopressin with oxytocin, in moderation, these substances additionally activate dopamine (and with it sexual desire) Oxytocin Enhances Brain Reward System Responses in Men Viewing the Face of Their Female Partner. Therefore, strong friendship is a component of passion. And also loyalty. According to the article The Influence of Endogenous Opioids on the Relationship between Testosterone and Romantic Bonding by researchers at the University of Oklahoma, friendship-related opioids appear to lower testosterone levels in both, but are especially noticeable in men because they naturally have more testosterone. (By the way, vasopressin and oxytocin have a similar effect). Meanwhile, this hormone is tightly intertwined with sexual desire and supports the desire to find someone to procreate. Those who are in successful relationships, and especially raising children, have lower testosterone levels in Pair-bonding, fatherhood, and the role of testosterone: A meta-analytic review than singles.

But in men (less often in women), who lack something in the family, testosterone rises, they begin to desire sex more. And if we consider that not everything is safe in the relationship, they often resort to connections on the side, experts conclude.

This should not be taken as an excuse for cheating.

After all, well-married and married people can cheat with low testosterone, and those with high testosterone concentration can still be faithful. Because cheating is primarily a choice, not biology.

What keeps long-term love

Apparently, it is thanks to friendship that science knows people who celebrate a pink wedding in a semblance of dopamine euphoria. A group of scientists from the already mentioned Rutgers University studied Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love couples who have preserved love and passion almost in their original form over the years, and analyzed their relationship. It turned out that the partners were connected by close friendship and the ability through it to influence the personal growth of each other.

This implies not just a comfortable existence, but the presence of common interests, views, a desire to do something together, to develop in one direction.

The logic is simple: the release of dopamine, which induces passion, is facilitated by many pleasant, interesting and useful things that you can do with a like-minded partner. He's also usually fun with him.

How common hobbies transform into desire

According to the two-factor theory of emotion, Wikipedia's two-factor theory of emotion and the Excitation-transfer theory, the brain has an interesting tendency to interpret average intensity sensations depending on the context. This was first proven in an experiment with two bridges. Two groups of men walked on different bridges: stable and wobbly. Both there and there the participants were met by an attractive girl - she asked questions from the questionnaire and left her number. Men who met the girl on the dangerous bridge called and made dates more often.

Researchers believe that in a relatively safe situation, the brain is able to mistake a slight fear for arousal (if someone is nearby) and happily spend the produced dopamine on it. It can work with other stimuli and neurotransmitters as well.

In another experiment, Enhancement of Experienced Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Stimuli Through Misattribution of Unrelated Residual Excitation, subjects from different groups first received physical activity - light, medium and strong - and then watched erotica. The participants in the second group got excited the fastest. The remnants of arousal caused by sports, at the opportunity, were transformed into sexual desire.

How to revive passion and strengthen feelings

So, here is a list of the main factors that influence the formation of dopamine cravings. Pay attention to how often these things happen in your life. If not, use the list as a guide to improving your relationship.

1. Create, develop and share experiences

As mentioned earlier, researchers note that personal growth plays a role in long-term happy relationships, in addition to friendship. This idea has even been turned into a whole theory of self-expansion Self-Expansion Theory (Self-Expansion Theory). According to her, if a partner contributes to a new experience, it strengthens love and passion. You can take the theory literally: a person expands your knowledge and skills, opens up new horizons for you, brings something new to life, supports your ideas and helps to realize them. Biologically, this raises your awareness of this world and how to make life safer and more prosperous to a new level.

So travel (our evolutionary roots encourage the development of new territories), learn something together, helping each other (it is important that it is really interesting for both), run a common business, and so on.

2. Focus on novelty

Everything new is also surrounded by a dopamine flair - this is also a new experience for the brain, even if it does not develop you as effectively as a new book, a startup, or a trip abroad.

Give gifts, change your favorite places for walks with new locations. Dress-up RPGs also taste new, don't they?

3. Indulge in extreme (but in moderation)

With very vivid sensations, the brain no longer confuses the stimuli - in the experiment described above, the men just walked along a bridge swaying in the wind.

In the movies, we often see a couple who survived a scrape together in a kiss. In a moment of danger, we have no time for romance, but when it recedes, dopamine takes over. It is needed in order to calm the Dopamine neurons drive fear extinction learning by signaling the omission of expected aversive outcomes a feeling of fear when everything is over. If not for him, we would have been shaking for hours after the harmless rustle that frightened us.

4. Solve common problems

This activates THE ROLE OF OXYTOCIN AND VASOPRESSIN IN ATTACHMENT oxytocin and vasopressin, which enhance attachment. According to the theory of self-expansion, close people perceive the partner's problems as their own, which means they are ready to participate in solving them.

Don't blame your partner on your common troubles. Help him cope with difficulties and seek help yourself.

5. Laugh

Many people tend to fall in love with those with a good sense of humor, and there is an explanation for this. “Dopamine is associated with positive emotions that correlate with novelty, creativity, and humor. A joke is also a kind of simulated situation in which there could be a banal way out, but you were offered an unusual solution, and you laugh,”says Vyacheslav Dubynin, Doctor of Biological Sciences, an expert in brain physiology, Dopamin. Thus, humor indirectly echoes the desire to learn about the world.

It is not even necessary to joke on your own - it is enough so that you can laugh at something together. Funny movies and videos from YouTube, funny games like "Twister" or "Imaginarium" will do.

Look for things that both of you like, that bring you closer and that excite. After all, science knows not everything about your love.