There you are, wrapped in the warm blanket of love bliss. You’ve found the perfect person for you, and you’ve made a commitment to each other. Maybe you’ve even made a commitment that included “until death do we part.” The past several months together have been amazing, to the point of annoying a few friends with your cooing and cuddling.
But then one day, you wake up to notice that something has changed. You start noticing things about your beloved that you had missed before. Maybe it’s the first time you heard him snore, or the first time you disagreed on what to eat, or maybe you saw him smacking his lips when he ate his cereal. You find this new behavior quite irritating.
Slowly, your magical haze of ecstasy begins to fade. You might even notice the Pharrell Williams Happy song has stopped playing. As the days go on, you realize it’s not as simple as a few new, unpleasant behaviors. It appears that your love bunny may have changed. That little thing he used to do that was so endearing just embarrassed you in front of your friends. In fact, some things that you previously thought were charming have now become alarming.
You start to have doubts and ask yourself, What’s happening? Is our love over? Is he not the one? Have I made a mistake? No, you’ve just begun the transition into the next phase of love. Didn’t realize there was another phase after falling in love? What? You bought that line that says all you had to do was locate “the one” and you’ll live happily ever after? Yeah, a lot of us do. We thought you fell in love and stayed in that ecstasy forever. Damn Hollywood and romance novels!
HOW LONG?
A friend of mine recently got married. A couple of weeks after the ceremony, I ran into her. She knew about the work I was doing and asked if she could ask a question. I said, “Sure.” Then her body language changed. She looked around like she didn’t want anyone to hear and then whispered, “How long?”
“How long what?” I whispered back.
“How long do we have?”
She had heard me talk many times about how falling in love is temporary insanity. She was still basking in the glow of her recent nuptials and didn’t want it to end.
“You have about two years,” I said. She looked disappointed.
I then said, “Don’t worry. This is just the end of one phase. There’s a better stage waiting if you choose it.”
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
In a study on the hormonal changes that happen when people fall in love, Donatella Marazziti, professor of psychiatry and director of the psychopharmacology laboratory at the Department of Psychiatry, Neurobiology, Pharmacology, and Biotechnology at the University of Pisa, measured the initial hormone levels of people who had fallen in love and then later measured those levels again. She wanted to see if the hormone levels had changed after a certain period of time and, if they had, what the time frame was.
She went back to her original couples and measured the cortisol levels of couples who had stayed together. All of the couples had been together between twelve to eighteen months and reported that they were no longer feeling the crazy initial mental state. The couples were now feeling calmer and no longer obsessed.
Marazziti’s new measurements showed that the couple’s hormones had returned to normal. These new hormone levels were no different than those levels observed in the control group. In fact, Marazziti discovered that in all those tested, all hormonal differences dissipated when the subjects were retested between twelve to twenty-four months later.201 Because of this, she concluded that “falling in love seems to have a precise time course, with an average duration of between 18 months and 3 years.” 202
In addition to the hormone analysis, researchers at Stony Brook University performed fMRI brain scans on individuals who were in a long-term relationship and compared those scans with early love. They chose couples who had been together for at least ten years. They found that some of the neural activation was the same for both early and long-term love. However, there were some important differences between the brain scans of early-love couples compared to couples in long-term love. These differences were observed in the previously deactivated areas of their brains.
As we discovered earlier, when you fall in love, brain scans show deactivation of parts of your cortex, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (your Judge) and the amygdala. Now all this changes. Where early love showed deactivation of the amygdala and the Judge, long-term love not only showed reactivation, it showed significant activation.203 This means that when these two structures come back online, they may start trying to make up for lost time. You go from being peaceful and quietly nonjudgmental to being superanalytical and critical.
In addition, remember those huge chunks of your neocortex that were deactivated when you fell in love? Well, they’re back. Recall that one of the sleeping parts of your brain was in the “theory of mind” area that separated your dreams and goals from your beloved. This area is now alive and active. This means that all those dreams you were sure you two shared as you were sitting up all night talking about the future begin to show some separation. You start to notice little fractures in cohesiveness.
He might not be as wild about painting the house lavender as you are. Or you might not be as keen to cash out the 401(k) to invest in vintage muscle cars as he expected. Slowly, you both might realize that you really are two separate people. The soul-mate image of two people sharing one heart begins to wither. In some couples this new reality can be too much. In fact, Helen Fisher found in her research that the majority of divorces in the United States happen around two years of marriage.204
THE RETURN
When your Judge starts making negative verdicts about you or your beloved, it can trigger your amygdala. This increasing anxiety can cause you to start having doubts. You might begin asking yourself, Was I wrong about him? You may start getting nervous. You might even call a friend and voice your concerns out loud. Slowly, your conviction and trust, which were so strong not that long ago, begin to erode.
Maybe you find yourself snooping around his computer or Facebook page. You find yourself straining to see his screen when his phone rings. It can get so bad that you might start think about tracking him with GPS. Or maybe things have changed in a different way. You start noticing that he’s not trying as hard as he used to. Maybe you’ve married or moved in together and his personal habits are not to your liking.
After the publication of my first book, I had a group of women who met at my house. Every week they would bound in, ready for a new evening—all except for one. Nikki, a thin woman with long, dark hair, would trudge to her usual location on the couch and sit in bristling silence.
Every week I would ask her how she was doing and every week she gave the same reply: “How could he do this?” she would say through pursed lips. “He was such an asshole. I tried to tell him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Nikki met her soon-to-be ex-husband, Dick, through a mutual friend. I’m not sure if that was his real name or her pet name for him. Anyway, Dick was divorced with two children. They had a whirlwind romance, marrying within the first year of dating. However, cracks began to form during the second year. Dick was just not behaving appropriately, and Nikki told him so. In fact, the way Nikki put it, the poor man couldn’t do anything right. He didn’t spend enough time with the kids, but he also didn’t spend enough time with her. He didn’t do enough around the house, yet at the same time he didn’t do enough fun stuff. Nikki complained about finances but also complained if he worked overtime. It seemed like whatever Dick did wasn’t good enough.
By the second year together, Nikki’s Judge was alive and active. Her judgments of Dick were searing. And although she said he didn’t seem to respond, he apparently was absorbing all the scolding words, because by the start of the third year of marriage, he was all but gone. Nikki eventually found out that Dick was having an affair. They broke up and Nikki was devastated. She felt like she had been lied to for years. Unfortunately, she had. But who the real liar was may surprise you.
In 2000, Bartels and Zeki, at the University College London, reported that fMRI studies of people in love showed massive deactivation in the individual’s right hemisphere.205 In other words, when you fall in love, you’re almost entirely operating from your left hemisphere.* This is significant because your left hemisphere does something your right hemisphere wouldn’t even (pardon the pun) think of doing—your left hemisphere fibs. That’s right, that sweet, innocent-looking lump of gray matter is a pants-on-fire liar.
In his book The Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran explains that the left hemisphere is egocentric and focused on self. Not only is it fixated on what it likes, it also wants to look good. It’s so concerned with how it’s perceived that it might make up things to preserve harmony and the overall view of itself. This wild concocting of tall tales is a process Ramachandran calls “confabulation.” 206 This is almost like lying, except it can be done without conscious intent. In other words, your left hemisphere has been known to tell a fish story if it will make itself look better, and you might not even be aware of it.
This means that for those last couple of years, you’ve been living in a true fantasyland. Not only could you not see clearly, your own brain has been lying to you.
*They found deactivation of the right prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal cortex; also the posterior cingulate gyrus and medial prefrontal cortex.
WHY? FALLING OUT OF FALLING IN LOVE
Why does Mother Nature do all this to you? Why would she shut down important parts of your brain while making you obsessed? Why would she make your own brain lie to you? And why, after engineering all this, would she stop?
Love is about making yourself vulnerable to another person. This goes against your own nature. Being vulnerable is risky. Therefore, you naturally become protective of yourself. This protection can prevent you from finding love. Therefore, Mother Nature gives you a little assist by manipulating your brain.
However, that neurological shake-up you experienced when you fell in love can’t last. Eventually your brain needs to return to homeostasis, or the state of relative stability. You can’t walk around obsessed with your beloved indefinitely; you wouldn’t get anything done. If your serotonin level stayed low, you would sink into depression. And if your cortisol level stayed high, it would depress your immune system, which would make you more susceptible to diseases like cancer. As wonderful as falling in love is, I’m afraid it must end. But its ending is really about real love.
When I was a little girl, my father bought me a hot pink Schwinn girl’s bicycle. It had a long banana seat with bright flowers, a basket, and pink tassels that flowed off the handgrips and fluttered in the wind. Once I saw my shiny brand-new bike, that old plastic Big Wheel became a distant memory. This was the big time, but I wasn’t really ready for it yet, so my dad added training wheels. I loved that bike and rode it every day. But with the training wheels on, I still felt like a little kid. I wanted to grow up, so I pestered my dad to remove the little wheels. Finally, the day came. I had arrived in Big Girlville. Those sissy baby training wheels were finally coming off.
Although I wanted the training wheels removed, a part of me still had fear. What if I fell down and hurt my bike? What if I fell down and hurt myself? Excitement and fear mixed as he stood the bike up without the little wheels. This was going to be it. I jumped on and gave my dad a reluctant smile. That’s when he said, “Don’t worry, stink [his term of endearment for me], I’ll be right here.” As I slowly started to pedal, I looked up. My dad was standing next to me, holding on to the silver loop on the back of the seat. I knew he wasn’t going to let me fall.
I pedaled down the block with my dad running next to me holding me up. He stayed next to me so I could feel what the bike felt like to be balanced. On the way back, he would remove his hand but stayed near in case I started to fall, then he would put his hand back to set me upright. He did this over and over again until he was sure I knew what it felt like to have a steady bike that I could ride on my own.
Why do I mention this story? Because that’s what Mother Nature does when you fall in love. She’s showing you what love feels like. Like my dad running next to me, she’s holding you in position until you get your balance.
You know what white-hot, got-to-have-it passion feels like. You now know that love is about closeness and understanding. Love is about seeing the other person in the best possible light. She shows you how to lovingly talk to each other and sometimes even helps you pick out cute little names like “sweetie pie” and “snookums.”
This is the love that happens when Mother Nature breaks down your resistance long enough for you to get close to another person. When you fall in love, Mother Nature makes you artificially vulnerable to the other person. You’re vulnerable, but because your alarm system is off-line, it doesn’t feel like it. She’s showing you that love trusts.
She lets you know that love is not supposed to judge. She shows you how to adore someone, how to be kind and caring. She holds you in this glorious, euphoric state until you know what real love is.
However, Mother Nature can’t leave you like some brain-damaged, love-struck sufferer, unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks. She doesn’t want to leave you wandering aimlessly, picking flowers and dreamily thinking of the moment when you can be with your beloved again. She doesn’t want you to be so distracted that you will walk out into traffic or go flower picking in a bear’s territory. Like a loving mother, she slowly returns your fully functional brain so that you can properly manage your life. It’s as if once you have your balance, like my loving father, she lets go. Now that you know what love is supposed to feel like, she sets you free to love on your own.
A HIGHER LOVE
Now that you have full functioning of your brain back, you have two choices. You can end the relationship or you can move into real love. If you choose to move into real love, the neural activity will begin to shift. When you fell in love, the majority of your brain activity was in your reward center, the part of your brain concerned with what feels good. When something feels good, you naturally want to do it again. When something feels bad, or takes more effort than is believed to achieve the perceived reward, you can lose incentive and the behavior ceases. This type of system is more selfish, focusing on the more immediate and the individual versus the bigger, longer-term picture.
If you choose to continue, everything changes. Shifting into a new type of love, your neural activity moves into the more evolved region of your brain. Researchers at Stony Brook University looked at fMRIs of individuals in long-term love. Unlike early love, where there was deactivation in the cortex, long-term love now shows activity in this part of the brain. In fact, they found significant activation in part of the orbitofrontal cortex.207 This is the part of the brain involved in decision making. Here love now turns from a crazy emotion that hijacked your brain to a choice that you get to make. In the beginning, men chase and women choose. Now both choose.
Love starts as a feeling and then becomes a choice.
But it’s not just a decision based on what feels good. This is a decision based on principles. The neural activity has moved into the region of the brain that houses more noble qualities. This type of love shares space with other giving types of love, such as parental and unconditional love. The Stony Brook researchers found that long-term love showed common neural activity with that of maternal love.208 And a study out of France found commonality between long-term romantic love and unconditional love.209 These types of love give without expectation of reciprocation. Real love becomes less concerned with me and more concerned with we.
Real love activates parts of the brain concerned with honorable thoughts like morals. The orbital and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex, which are active in real love, have been found to play a central role in moral appraisals.210 Now you choose to love and live based on ethics, principles, and what you believe to be the right thing to do. In a sense, this shift makes real love a higher love.
A study out of Japan looked at the brain areas associated with human virtue, specifically, for something they called “moral beauty.” Moral beauty is the emotion elicited by others’ acts of virtue. When people observe others’ virtuous, commendable acts, they feel a warm, pleasant, and “tingling” feeling. This feeling in turn can motivate them to help others and to become better people themselves. They describe this feeling as being “elevated.” In other words, you feel lifted and lighter when you perceive virtues.
The study produced several interesting findings. Moral judgment starts by recruiting both the Judge and the amygdala. This would be expected because you’re deciding if what you’re looking at is moral or immoral. However, it’s what happens next that’s significant.
If an act, word, or deed is judged as immoral, it then activates the superior temporal sulcus, or the “theory of mind” area. When you consider something as immoral, you process it as being different from yourself.
In contrast, if an act, word, or deed is judged as moral, it takes a different route. A moral act or moral beauty activates regions associated with positive emotions, like the orbitofrontal cortex.211 This is the area of the brain that houses kindness and understanding, the same area activated by real love.
This makes real love a more empathetic and compassionate type of love. To test this theory, researchers in Sweden asked Tibetan Buddhists to participate in compassion meditation, a technique that generates feelings of compassion and benevolence. While the Buddhists meditated, the researchers conducted fMRIs on them to determine which part of their brains became active. The researchers found that focusing on compassion activated the medial prefrontal cortex.212 This confirmed that love and compassion activate the same area of your brain, which suggests that when you initiate one, the other naturally follows.
This new love is changing and evolving. This is a greater love, a more noble, principled, and caring love. It’s not a crazy, obsessed feeling, but now it’s a grand decision that you make based on morals and virtues.
REAL LOVE IS PROTECTIVE
This neural area where love now lives can help a relationship last a lifetime. To test if this new location helps relationships last, researchers at the University of California and eHarmony (the dating site) researchers set out to determine if real love helped people stay committed. They wanted to test if real love engages cognitive mechanisms associated with the preservation of the relationship. In other words, when you think about your beloved, would those thoughts help you to avoid the temptation to cheat?
In the study, an attractive other was presented to the participants. Next, the researchers focused the participants’ emotions by having them write about love. To encourage sexual desire for their partner, one group wrote about that. Another group had a random writing assignment. The researchers then measured how many times the participants thought about the attractive other to find out if activating love by writing about it helped suppress the thoughts of the attractive alternative and the potential to cheat.
The results confirmed what the researchers suspected—love did suppress thoughts of attractive others. They didn’t find the same results for sexual desire with those who participated in the random writing assignment, which suggests that the quashing effect is specific to love. In fact, the stronger the participants’ commitment to their partner, the less they thought or remembered the attractive other.213 It looks like this type of love has a protective effect that helps preserve the relationship.
However, this protective effect differs from individual to individual. This part of the brain is also involved in something called “executive functioning” or “cognitive control.” People have differing degrees of cognitive control. Greater activity in the orbitofrontal cortex usually means greater cognitive control. It’s this cognitive control that protects the relationship. A study from the Netherlands found that romantically involved people with a higher level of cognitive control experience less difficulty staying faithful. The researchers found that individuals with greater cognitive control showed less relationship-threatening behavior, like flirting, and have a greater tendency to keep themselves out of situations where they will be tempted.214 In other words, the more active the part of your brain that houses love is, the less likely you are to put your relationship in harm’s way. The stronger, more principled, and less impulsive someone is, the more likely they are to have a strong relationship. Not only is this a love that can last a lifetime, it appears it can also make your life last longer.
BENEFITS OF HAPPY LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS
A study out of Japan showed that love could make you healthier. In the study researchers found that the sight of a loved one can induce natural killer cells (NK) in some people.215 Natural killer cells are immune system cells that fight viruses, bacteria, and tumor cells. An increase in natural killer cells can protect you against infection.
An improved immune system might be one reason that married people, on average, enjoy better mental and physical health than unmarried people. One study found that nonmarried women had a 50 percent greater death rate, while men had a 250 percent greater death rate.216
Research also suggests that love can have a protective effect against addiction. For example, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that rats that showed a slower response to self-administered cocaine, an indication that rewarding effects of cocaine were decreased, had a higher level of brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), which blunts the behavioral effects of cocaine.217 BDNF increases when you fall in love.
Love also makes you more stable. Psychologists at the German universities of Jena and Kassel discovered that a loving, romantic relationship has a positive effect on one’s personality. They followed 245 couples for nine months, interviewing them every three months over the course of their relationship. What they found was that a loving relationship had a stabilizing effect. Even people who were anxious, insecure, easily annoyed, depressed, and who had a low self-esteem and a general dissatisfaction with life showed positive improvements when in a loving relationship.218
Functional MRIs of long-term romantic love found recruitment of opioid and serotonin-rich neural regions. These systems have the capacity to modulate anxiety and pain. They are also the brain regions targeted for treatment of anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression.219 When you fall in love, your serotonin level drops in order to promote partner obsession. But now, in an ironic twist, long-term love is protective, guards against obsession, and safeguards you from depression and anxiety.
The benefits of long-term happy relationships are numerous. Relationship satisfaction predicts global happiness, above and beyond other types of satisfaction.220 In other words, it appears that the true key to happiness is a happy relationship. A happy long-term relationship also predicts psychological well-being and physical health, and may help buffer stressful life events.221 In other words, if you guard against stress in your relationship, your relationship will guard you from stress.
But the true purpose for real love might be much more than this. Real love is about growing and evolving as a human being. Some believe love is about self-expansion.
SELF-EXPANSION
Arthur Aron, a professor at Stony Brook University, proposes that the true purpose of romantic relationships is self-expansion. The self-expansion model is a theory that humans have a yearning to grow and develop. This is what motivates people to try new, exciting, and challenging activities. It’s also one of the reasons you tend to be attracted to people with opposite characteristics. If you fall in love with someone just like you, there is no real growth. However, if you fall in love with someone who’s different from you, you’re exposed to new ideas and beliefs.
You also get to grow by learning acceptance and inclusion. Your partner may have ideas that don’t fit with yours. Maybe he has a political view that you don’t like. Your willingness to continue to be loving despite your differences softens you. Those hard lines that separated you from everyone else begin to blur. This inclusion of “others into self” creates an interconnectedness of self and others. This is believed to be the key to intimacy and the key to healing. Aron believes it has two dimensions, one of behaving close and one of feeling close.222
When you behave close, or in a loving manner, you choose to get past your own natural defenses. This can be scary at first, but also liberating. When you choose to be loving, you keep the neural activity in your more evolved brain instead of shrinking back into your primitive brain. This allows your brain to continue to expand.
When you fall in love, your brain produces BDNF and NGF. These act like fertilizer for your brain, growing new neurons and making new connections. Researchers in a study conducted in the Netherlands found that love broadened a participants’ perceptual scope and led to increased performance on creativity tasks.223 When you’re in love, you tap into new areas of your brain and have new ideas and a sense of new opportunities. This supports the idea that falling in love is about self-expansion. You become more than you were as a single person. Now that you are two, you have more resources, more talents, and more brainpower.
BDNF helped you get past your natural defenses and avoidance behaviors to get closer to your beloved.224 Unfortunately, now those levels have returned to normal. This means your defenses can come back. It’s now up to you to continue to keep your defenses low and stay close to your partner. You’ve been together long enough that it shouldn’t be a problem. But fear can easily bring those once-at-bay defense mechanisms to the forefront, creating a distance where there wasn’t one.
It happened to me. Ed wanted to give me a treat. His ex-wife and daughters used to love going to the hair salon to be pampered and fussed over. They relished the massaging shampoo, the excitement of picking a new style, and the splendor of the indulgence.
One day as I was standing at the mirror doing my hair, Ed came up from behind me and gently wrapped his arms around my waist and put his chin on my shoulder. As he nuzzled me, he looked at me in the mirror and said, “How would you like to get your hair done, my treat?” Then he gave me a big smile that said he was sure I would love his gift. But instead of being delighted, I was devastated. I looked at his face, then to my own stringy, unworthy, spilt-ended mane, and my mind screamed, “He doesn’t like your hair.” My mind, which was trying to protect me, jumped to a crazy conclusion. I pulled back and asked, “What’s wrong with my hair?”
You should’ve seen that poor man’s face—the shock in the moment when good intentions meet bad internal voices. His hands dropped from around my waist as he backed up in horror. He backpedaled hard, saying, “No, no. Your hair looks great. Never mind.” Then he made a quick exit.
STRESS
Your reactivated brain can wreak havoc. Once your amygdala, judge, and defenses return, they can cause stress and drama. The problem is, little stresses can build up over time and have a devastating effect on your relationship.
In a joint study from Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, researchers found that stress was not perceived as a reason for divorce. However, when considering everyday stresses, participants reported trivial daily events to be one of the main reasons that contributed to their decision to divorce. The participants considered the accumulation of everyday stresses as a central trigger to divorce.225 In other words, when the couples were asked if stress directly caused their divorce, they said “no.” But after they took a closer look at all the factors, they realized it wasn’t one big stressful thing but rather a buildup of little stressors over time. This makes stress potentially the number one enemy of love.
Stress, even moderate stress, has been found to have major effects on your brain. Not only does it trigger your amygdala, it can cause the amygdala to increase in size.226 The stress of your amygdala coming back online can actually cause the amygdala to expand, creating more potential for stress. Just like the positive feedback loop where oxytocin causes more cuddling, which releases more oxytocin, which causes more loving, the amygdala has a feedback loop too. Here stress causes the amygdala to fire, which produces more stress, which causes the amygdala to fire more. Like a muscle, the more you use the amygdala, the larger it grows. This in turn makes it more sensitive to stress and more likely to be triggered.
At the same time, stress can shrink the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, decreasing their efficiency.227 This can change your behavior and outlook. For example, low self-esteem in humans has been associated with a smaller hippocampus, while impulsiveness and poor executive function have been associated with a defective prefrontal cortex.228
In a Yale University study, researchers found that changes during stress can rapidly switch off prefrontal function. Their work showed that neurons in the prefrontal cortex disconnect and stop firing after being exposed to a flood of stress hormones.229 Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that governs decision making. It can be considered the voice of reason. Without it, you can now be at the whim of your less civilized and more impulsive primitive brain. This can make you more vulnerable to urges like eating (particularly fatty or sugary foods) and impulsive and risky behaviors, like gambling, flirting, anger, and fighting to win.
Stress can make you more vulnerable to things like outside attention, anger, overeating, and disengaging.
The prefrontal cortex is not as strong as the primitive area of the brain. In fact, the first hint of danger and an automatic override occurs when the instincts of the primitive brain short-circuit the prefrontal cortex. This can make the process of true love precarious.
The more primitive part of your brain is concerned with survival. Without the prefrontal cortex moderating your responses, it can feel like every stress is a matter of life or death. Simple disagreements can escalate. Sometimes almost overnight your sweet union melts, leaving two individuals in their separate corners fighting over whose perception is right.
BREAKUPS
Sometimes the stress builds up or the defenses are so strong that the relationship breaks up. But that’s okay. A breakup can be part of your happily ever after. What? Did I say that right? Happily ever after the breakup? How can it be happily ever after if you broke up? Because love is still a process, one of personal growth. It’s a process of breaking down your natural defenses to become vulnerable to another person. It’s a process of becoming better than you were and developing your higher self. It’s a process of learning to love.
Since love is about personal growth, sometimes you need to break out of the relationship you’re in, in order to grow further, often in another. Remember Nikki, who complained about her husband until the marriage collapsed? Sometimes we need to lose a relationship so we can grow. Eventually Nikki will get to the point where she stops looking at and blaming Dick. When that time comes, she’ll have to take a close look at herself. She’ll have to do some self-reflection. She’ll need to own up that at the time she married her husband, she was in love with him, but over time she felt that she had made a bad partner choice. She’ll see that she didn’t respect him, and this came out in little barbs and insults. Eventually, her contempt pushed him away.
This concept is something that famed researcher Dr. John Gottman of the Gottman Institute calls “the Four Horsemen” (as in the four horsemen of the apocalypse). When these show up, Gottman predicts that a couple is heading for divorce. The Four Horseman are criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. Stonewalling is when the listener withdraws from interacting.230
Once a relationship erodes to this level, it’s not healthy for anyone. Some couples can work on the relationship to enhance communication and bring them close again. But for some, like Nikki, the best course of action is to split and reevaluate.
Nikki believed the issue was all Dick’s problem. But the truth is, it could’ve been any Tom, Dick, or Harry. The real issue is Nikki’s. For a brief moment, when she and Dick fell in love, she became vulnerable and loving. However, when love became real, her defenses and fear returned.
Nikki’s problem wasn’t Dick but her own past. Nikki’s mother died when she was seven years old. This was an extremely painful time in her life, but she never really got a chance to grieve because Nikki’s father remarried quickly and expected her to act like everything was fine. Unfortunately, underneath it all, Nikki still had a lot of hurt and fear. Earlier I noted that part of your temporal lobe, the area that’s known to house negative memories, goes dim when you fall in love. Once you get past the initial, crazy stage of love and are in a healthy relationship, this part fires up again and memories return. Ideally, now that you’re with a partner, you can process these painful memories and heal. However, for some people, like Nikki, the pain is unfortunately turned toward the partner.
Nikki’s divorce was one end of the spectrum. At the other end was Kelly. Kelly and John were married for six years. They had two beautiful children, a great house, and jobs they both liked. However, by the end of the fifth year of marriage, they just felt like they had grown apart. There was no stress or disagreements. They had grown as people, but felt they couldn’t grow any further in the relationship.
In a joint study with universities in New York and China, researchers looked at couples as they progressed in their relationship. They studied couples who had fallen in love, then followed up with them eighteen months later. The couples at follow-up who reported higher relationship happiness had activity in their superior frontal gyrus.231 The superior frontal gyrus is the part of the brain that’s involved in self-awareness and introspection.232 It helps you figure out how you feel about things. Now you’re more self-aware, more conscious, and more introspective. You’re no longer on autopilot and are making decisions with clarity. The people who moved out of the subconscious autopilot of love and actually took a deeper look at themselves were the happiest.
Kelly and John’s divorce was amicable. A few years later they both remarried other people. When they looked back, they felt they had tried to live a life they were supposed to, not what they wanted to. When they broke apart, they figured out what they really wanted and what was important. Their next relationships were very different from the first.
Both of these divorce scenarios, Kelly and John and Nikki and Dick, are still part of the theory that love and relationships are about growing as an individual. In an ideal world, each person would grow in the relationship. Unfortunately, for some people to grow, they may need to break away to be able to take a look at themselves. Some need to deal with their past and heal, others need emotional development, and a few just need to figure out what they really want from life. The beauty is that when the relationship ends, they are now free to start the process again. Some are lucky enough to gain a perspective and start over with the same person, while others need to fall in love with someone else. If a current relationship is stagnant or not aiding one’s growth, breaking away and falling in love again with a new person can enhance neuroplasticity, improve self-esteem, and promote greater empathy.
Sometimes you must break apart for your own growth.
I mention breakups because I want you to know that no relationship fails. Some end, but they don’t fail. The only failure when it comes to love is not trying. When you get so scared of getting hurt that you protect yourself from being vulnerable, that’s when you fail. But if you’re willing to love, you never fail.
The willingness to be vulnerable and loving is quite rare. So rare, that if you master it, you will never be alone. You will have a line of people at your door looking for what you have to offer.
In this chapter, I explained what happens to you once love gets real. I mentioned the part about breakups, because unfortunately, some couples do break up. But the good news is that you don’t have to. I told you in the beginning of the book that you now hold the keys to a happy relationship. In Chapter 9, I’ll explain how you can master the secrets of happily ever after.