Love Resembles Addiction
I&#x27;d love to see if these MRI studies hold up if you select participants who are happily married or in long-term relationships of &gt; 3 years length.  The author&#x27;s study selected participants with a maximum relationship length of 7.4 months.  I dug up the Bartel&#x27;s study referenced by it, and it had selected participants by putting out posters &amp; Internet posts looking for people &quot;truly, madly, and deeply in love&quot;, and got people with a relationship length of 2.4 +- 1.7 years:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf</a><p>FWIW, I can recall crushing hard on girls up through college, with exactly the same drug-like intoxication that the article describes.  But as I got more secure of myself and comfortable in my own skin, the crushes moderated.  When I met my wife, there were no massive can&#x27;t-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts.  It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together.<p>This was really disconcerting at first, like maybe it wasn&#x27;t love after all, but I checked with a number of friends who were happily married for long (sometimes &gt;10 years) periods.  Very often, they mentioned the same feeling of <i>not</i> having the trumpets and whistles blow, and instead they grew together  and found that love developed later on.  Indeed, the people who were always &quot;truly, madly, deeply in love&quot; were usually broken up 2 months later.<p>I&#x27;ve heard a theory circulated round that when we feel that huge deep rush of intoxication, we&#x27;re actually reading our &quot;completion&quot; into personal characteristics that the other person possesses.  We&#x27;re not so much in love with them as in love with the <i>idea of being with them</i>.  And that limerence persists as long as the idea does, but eventually we all have to face the reality that we are not our partners, and we are not going to somehow become more or better than ourselves just by being with them.  That huge mind-blinding rush of dopamine when you meet a new person might be an antipattern, because it blinds us from seeing the real them.