Physiologically, love has a shelf life. When the chemistry of love slowly fades away, both sides of the relationship will have a sense of loss of passion. But the difference is that some people choose to laissez-faire, let the feelings become weaker and weaker, while others choose to work hard and continue to extend the freshness of love.
Some researchers have given an answer: 18 to 30 months. Cindy Hazan, a professor at Cornell University in the United States, surveyed 5000 couples from 37 different cultural backgrounds around the world. After conducting medical tests and face-to-face interviews with these couples, he concluded that 18 to 30 months is enough time for men and women to meet, date, even marry and have children. At the end of
this series of processes, both parties in love will no longer have heartbeat and sweating. Love, says Cindy Hazan, is actually a “chemical cocktail” in the brain made up of the chemicals dopamine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin. After a long time, the human body will produce antibodies to these three substances, and the “cocktail” will “expire.”. After that, if men and women do not break up, they should not let love become a habit.
This answer may disappoint us-if you still believe in love. What will
we do? Lamenting that love is as fleeting as cherry blossoms. After a relationship loses its initial passion, it turns to the embrace of the next relationship? Or force yourself to stay in the dull feelings, day after day to *** a habit?
Hey, you’re wrong.
Your love has not changed. What has really changed is you!
It’s not that love has changed, it’s that you have changed:
the “Fechner’s Law”
of love still says good night to you every day before you go to bed, but you feel less gentle and passionate.
You still hug before each parting, but instead of blushing and beating your heart, you seem to be fulfilling your obligation to eat and brush your teeth.
You complain that love is less and less intense, less and less like the beginning, full of excitement, sweetness and excitement. But in most cases, love has not changed, but you are becoming less and less sensitive. In
psychology, there is a phenomenon called “Sensory Adaptation”: If you apply the same stimulus for a long time, you will feel the stimulus smaller and smaller.
Think about what it’s like every night. Late at night, you struggle to get out of bed. You open your eyes, but it’s dark and you can’t see your hand. After a few seconds, you feel the room light up. You begin to see that the wheels of the table and the wardrobe in the room don’t hit their heads against the wall. This is an example of “sensory adaptation” –adaptation to darkness. WeberE. H., a
German psychologist, has conducted a series of experiments and studies on human perception at Leipzig University since 1830. Weber’s research began with “muscle sense.”. He recruited four volunteers to participate in the experiment and asked them to weigh three sets of objects of different weights.
For example, we first press a 30g weight on the subject’s hand, and then change to a 31g weight. The weight difference between the two weights was 1 G, and the subjects were able to distinguish between different objects. However, when the weights of 60 G and 61 G were replaced, the subjects could not distinguish them, but could only distinguish the weights of 60 G and 62 G. The ratio of the added weight to the original weight is a constant, 1 & # x2F; 30.
Weber concluded with surprise that when we observe the difference between two objects, what we perceive is not an absolute difference, but a relative difference. This is an observation that has been confirmed in several senses.
His student Fechner developed this conclusion. He designed a series of experiments to measure the intensity of physical stimulation and the amount of psychological change it caused. He came up with a formula from his research: the intensity of a person’s sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the intensity of the stimulus.
This formula is known as Fechner’s law. To translate in popular language, when physical stimulation exceeds a certain intensity, people will feel more and more numb.
Unfortunately, Fechner’s law also applies to love. With the extension of love time, the other party makes the same love action, but your feeling is getting weaker and weaker.
When the other person sends you beautiful flowers for the first time and says sweet words of love to you. You are so excited that your eyes are filled with tears and your heart is beating. But with the extension of love time, the other party still pays the same time and energy to prepare these love gifts for you, but your feelings become more and more numb, without the initial blush and heartbeat. The ability of
sensory adaptation is formed in the long-term evolution of organisms. Adaptive mechanisms help us to accurately perceive things in the outside world and thus adjust our behavior. The change range of the external environment is very huge, for example, under the starlight at night and under the sunshine in the daytime, the brightness difference is up to a million times, if there is no adaptability, people can not carefully analyze the external things in the changing environment and make a more accurate response.
But in love, “sensory adaptation” has become one of the killers of love. With the extension of love time, we are more and more difficult to satisfy. Even if the other person keeps the same emotional heat all the time, we will feel that love is cooling down and eventually becomes dull.
Is there no way to maintain the long-term concentration of love?
The good news is, there is. Have you
noticed? Fechner’s law applies only to the same stimulus. This gives us a secret to breaking Fechner’s Law: in love, new stimuli are constantly introduced.
We’ve come up with a few smart ways for you to do this:
1. Set every weekend as your regular “day of exploration”
you can take one day out every weekend to explore the city with each other and engage in fun activities together. Try a new three-star Michelin restaurant, listen to a violin concert, participate in a performance art exhibition by avant-garde artists, or take a short trip.
In this way, you will always be full of new experiences when you are with each other. And our feelings will automatically connect this beautiful feeling with each other.
2. Surprise each other from time to time there are only a few anniversaries
you celebrate together every year: Valentine’s Day, your birthday, his birthday. Every time you have the same celebration, go to the restaurant for dinner. You give each other the same gift every time, either flowers or chocolates.
No wonder you get bored in love. One of the secrets to
creating freshness is to make the other person unable to anticipate your behavior. When you give the other person an unexpected sense of surprise, what you do will bring more powerful stimulation to the other person. To produce this effect, you can not let the other side predict your time, or do not let the other side predict your action.
You can randomly choose to prepare a romantic dinner after work one day. Or be a little mean and tell each other that you can’t come before you celebrate your birthday together. Then, when he was extremely depressed, he suddenly appeared. This is sure to make the other person give you a big hug in surprise.
3. Take the initiative to learn new things and let the other person discover that you are different. In love, we always enjoy the process of getting to know each other a little bit at the beginning. This feeling is like reading an interesting book. We are always full of curiosity, always wondering what else I don’t know?
But as the time of love goes on, we reveal more and more things to each other. In the end, even the two sides have no secrets that the other side does not know. It’s like we’ve read a book to the end. No matter how good a book is, it will lose its charm after reading it thoroughly several times.
If we can keep learning, let ourselves always grow, always learn new skills and thinking. We are continuing to write our own book. And we should also remind ourselves to take the initiative to let the other party feel the new changes that have taken place in us. For example, if you are promoted to a new position, you might as well talk to the other party about your new job and new thinking. If you learn to cook a new dish, you might as well show off your skills in front of each other. It’s like the other person is chasing an unfinished story. He will be interested and eager to read your story book that will continue forever.
Have.
Because the lack of freshness is indeed an important reason for the decline in love concentration, but in real love relationships, there are still many other factors that affect our love satisfaction. For example, we often hear a helpless reason: Ta has changed.
1. Is it useful to change Ta back to the old Ta?
Sorry, it’s not very useful.
People often think that their feelings for a loved one have faded because the other person has “changed.”.
“He’s changed. He’s not the same person he used to be.” There are always people who say to their girlfriends, “You know what?”? When we first got together, if he found out I was wearing new shoes, he would have a band-aid in his pocket for me when he went out.
But he did not do so more and more; after the period of love was over, he was less attentive to his lover than before, and his lover was more distant from him. There are plenty of psychologists who
would agree. For example, Kelley et al. Suggest that at the beginning of the relationship, it is the behavior that affects the change of the relationship between the two parties. They are defined as “lovers” because they engage in these behaviors that are defined as “love”, and what they do, such as flirting at the beginning, confessing, and communicating, also affects their perception and feelings for each other.
Therefore, when couples drift apart, when they fall out of love and relationship satisfaction declines, it is also their behavior that is at work. That is to say, when they “change” and no longer “pay attention” to each other as before, they reduce their love behavior, and the love between them disappears, and the satisfaction of the relationship drops sharply.
So, is it that couples change their current behavior and do what they did before, and the feelings of love will come back and relationship satisfaction will rise?
It’s not that simple. In a study published in 2016, Lavner et al. Pointed out that there was no correlation between whether newlyweds changed their behavior in the relationship within three years of marriage and changes in their relationship satisfaction.
Williamson et al. Also reported in the same year that they had successfully improved the communication behavior of more than a thousand couples in relationship counseling, but the improvement of communication behavior could not reflect the change of relationship satisfaction of these couples; before that, behavior, especially communication behavior, had been regarded as the key to improving relationship satisfaction.
Of course, behavior is very important to the change of people’s relationship form, but in fact, when the relationship has been formed, the effect of the other party’s behavior has become less immediate.
Therefore, the feeling of passionate love will not simply slip away because “he has changed,” nor will it simply return because “he is the same as before.”.
2. My head secretly decides to love you
and secretly decides not to love you anymore.
In fact, compared with these explicit behaviors and people’s perception of these explicit behaviors, what really affects our feelings and attitudes towards a thing or a person is our implicit social cognition.
Usually our perceptions can be tested and summarized by ourselves: he is a good person because he is kind, she is smart because she got full marks in the exam, and so on. But many cognitive and behavioral choices are automatic, based on our years of life experience, and can not be easily detected by us.
For example, when we see rotten food, we don’t need to think about it, we will choose to throw it away or stay away from it. The process of this behavior is automatic, because the message that “rotten food is harmful to health” has long been written in our implicit cognition
, and “rotten” and “bad” have been automatically linked together, so when we see rotten, we will automatically avoid it without thinking.
It’s like there’s another you in your mind. He’s the person who knows you best in the world. He remembers all the things you forget, ignore or take for granted, and silently makes choices for you. To analyze love
from this perspective is that before you realize that love is coming, the little people in your brain will know it first. The little man in the brain secretly makes your heart beat faster, makes your blood flow faster, makes you fascinated, and makes you want to get close to this person. Only then do you know that you have fallen in love.
Most of the time, the decisive factor that makes us fall in love with someone is not what kind of person he is, but what kind of person you need. The influence of
implicit cognition on our behavior is often manifested in the form of “approach-avoidance.” If you like it, approach it; if you hate it, avoid it. If your implicit knowledge tells us that the person in front of us is the “right person,” we subconsciously want to approach that person.
And we usually don’t resist implicit cognition (it’s hard to realize, how to resist), so when love comes, it seems so unreasonable.
But as you spend more time together, you experience more life events together, and he shows you other parts of his personality that you don’t know, all of which silently affect your implicit perception of him.
If he gradually becomes associated with bad things, or if he no longer has too much association with good things, you will begin to unconsciously want to approach him less, and the relationship between two people will be alienated. The change of the
other person’s behavior can not be immediate, can not make you change your mind overnight, because the new implicit cognition is constantly generated and solidified in three, five, ten years, and it will take at least that long for him to change his implicit cognition in you.
So sometimes it’s not that he has changed, he is still him, his behavior may not have changed, but you have changed, your perception has changed.
3. Small ways
to keep love fresh are real and operable. In a study published in 2014
, McNulty et al. Pointed out that when the implicit cognition of someone has been formed, the behavior of that person will only change the intensity of our “approach-avoidance” to him, but not directly change the direction.
Therefore, if you want to find ways to improve relationship satisfaction, the most important premise is that you really want to continue to love this person and want to maintain the relationship, not for other reasons. This will be the driving force for you to seek and try all kinds of methods.
Repair your emotional connection
. Psychologist Arthur Aron has a famous study. He had two heterosexual subjects, a man and a woman, sit across from each other and take turns asking each other questions such as “When was the last time you cried?” Or, for example, “Have you done anything particularly humiliating?” Subjects shared moods, emotions, and secrets, all of which reflected high levels of self-disclosure. They were then asked to gaze into each other’s eyes for up to four minutes. Miraculously, at the end of the experiment, many of the subjects reported that they were “deeply attracted to each other” and “in love.”.
Emotional bonding is the most powerful bonding. Feelings between us are best strengthened and consolidated when we share emotions, concerns, and secrets.
Most of the time, our estrangement from each other begins when we no longer share our feelings. If you want to repair the relationship, try to continue to share your feelings with each other as before. Associ
ating the other person with positive things
As mentioned earlier, sometimes the other person’s behavior is not very effective in immediately affecting our implicit cognition, but our own behavior can.
In addition to the aforementioned initiative to confirm our thoughts and share our emotions and worries, we can do some small things to adjust our automatic cognition.
McNulty et al. Successfully confirmed in an experimental study published in 2017 that, as long as we want, we can actively control our implicit cognition and effectively improve relationship satisfaction by associating each other with things that can bring positive feelings.
For example, they suggest that we associate each other with cute animals or anything we want to be close to. This will bring back the feeling that you wanted to get close to him uncontrollably. Try giving each other cute nicknames or doing cute things together. The purpose of this is to reconnect the other person with “proximity” in your perception. Of course, this also requires the cooperation of the other side.
Love is a work of art completed by two people, and everlasting love is even more so.
As the writer Catron said in his speech, “Don’t always think about yourself, and don’t always care about the gains and losses in love.”. Think about what you can contribute to the relationship. Have a good conversation with your partner about what you want to create together in this relationship.
Love is a joint creation between you and your lover, not just an abyss that draws you down; it is a work of art that requires you to be prepared, and your lover to be prepared, to create together.
Profile. You can even see the color of the objects around you through the starlight from the window. Now, you can easily walk out the door without turning on the light.
