Why Feelings Cool Down over time and How to prolong Love

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

Where do intense feelings come from?
The most important role in the generation of passion and intense romantic feelings is given to dopamine, writes Semir Zeki, professor of neuroscience at University College London. By acting on certain receptors in the brain, this neurotransmitter motivates us to fulfill our desires and achieve goals - usually they are associated with something useful for life. For example, with reproduction (respectively, the desire to get the object of passion) or with the acquisition of new knowledge, impressions, experience: the better you know the situation and the more you know how, the higher the chances of survival.

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

Why feelings get cold
Over time, the sense of novelty fades. 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.
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 drowned out. When the love euphoria passes, you yourself know what happens.

How love changes over time
If the subsided dopamine wave did not expose a pile of garbage on the shore from misunderstanding and disappointment, then it makes sense to talk about vasopressin and oxytocin. They are your invitation cards to a cozy family life.

These social molecules form kindred warmth, tenderness, give a sense of calm and security next to loved ones. Oxytocin is released at the dating stage, plays a big 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, which is chemically similar to it, plays a large role. It forms paternal feelings and “turns on” care, as well as aggression towards other contenders for a partner. The feeling of vasopressin ownership is also familiar to women, albeit to a lesser extent.

A strong surge in oxytocin and / or vasopressin is detrimental to dopamine, according to Daniel Lieberman, a psychiatrist and author of Dopamine: The Most Needed Hormone. But a moderate concentration of these substances just contributes to the release of dopamine, which is associated with arousal, notes Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher.

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

Like vasopressin and oxytocin, in moderate amounts these substances additionally activate dopamine. Therefore, strong friendship is a component of passion. And also loyalty. According to a paper by Oklahoma State University researchers, friendship-related opioids appear to lower testosterone levels in both, but especially in men because they naturally have more testosterone (vasopressin and oxytocin, by the way, have a similar effect). Those who are in successful relationships, and even more so raising children, have lower testosterone levels than those who are single.

What keeps long-term love
Apparently, it is thanks to friendship that science knows people who celebrate a pink wedding in a kind of dopamine euphoria. A group of scientists from the already mentioned Rutgers University studied couples who have kept 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 to influence each other's personal growth through it.

The logic is simple: the many pleasant, interesting, and rewarding things you can do with a like-minded partner contribute to the release of dopamine that causes passion. He's usually fun to be around too.

How common hobbies are transformed into desire
According to the two-factor theory of emotion and excitatory transfer theory, the brain has an interesting tendency to interpret average sensations in intensity depending on the context. This was first proven in an experiment with two bridges. Two groups of men walked on different bridges: stable and shaky. Both there and there the participants were met by an attractive girl who asked questions from the questionnaire and left her number. The men who met the girl on the dangerous bridge called and made appointments more often.

Researchers believe that in a relatively safe situation, the brain is able to take a slight fright for excitement (if there is someone exciting nearby) and gladly spend the produced dopamine on it. This may work with other stimuli and neurotransmitters as well.

How to revive passion and strengthen feelings
So, here is a list of the main factors that influence the formation of dopamine passion. Notice 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 experience
As already mentioned, researchers note that in a long happy relationship, in addition to friendship, personal growth plays a role. This idea was even turned into a whole theory of self-expansion (Self-Expansion Theory). According to her, if a partner contributes to a new experience, this strengthens love and passion. You can understand the theory literally: a person expands your knowledge, skills, opens up new horizons for you, brings something new to life, supports your ideas and helps to realize them. From a biological point of view, 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 exploration of new territories), learn something together, help 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 - for the brain, this is also a new experience, even if it does not develop you as effectively as a new book, starting a startup, or traveling abroad.

Give gifts, change your favorite places for walking with new locations. Role-playing games with dressing up also give off something new, don't they?

3. Go extreme (but in moderation)
With very vivid sensations, the brain no longer confuses stimuli - in the experiment described above, the men just walked along a bridge swaying in the wind.

In the movies, we often see how a couple who survived troubles unite in a kiss. At the moment of danger, we are not up to romance, but when it recedes, dopamine takes over. It is needed in order to calm the feeling of fear when everything is behind. If not for him, we would have been shaking for hours after a harmless rustle that frightened us.

4. Solve common problems
This activates oxytocin and vasopressin, which increase attachment. According to the theory of self-expansion, close people perceive their partner's problems as their own, which means they are ready to participate in their solution.

Do not blame your partner for your common troubles. Help him cope with difficulties and ask for help yourself.

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

It’s not even necessary to joke on your own - it’s enough 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, bring together and excite you. After all, science doesn't know everything about your love.