love and the brain

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RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Everyone’s encountered those long-term married couples who claim to be just as much in love now as the day the first met. It turns out they could be telling the truth, according to research presented at a recent Society for Neuroscience conference. A team of researchers from Stony Brook University used brain scans to show that some couples still experience brain activity associated with the early stages of love, even though they’ve been together for 20 years or more.

THE DETAILS: Stony Brook University researchers used MRI scans to study the brain activity of 17 people who reported being intensely in love with a long-term (21 years, on average) spouse.

Brain activity was observed while the volunteers were shown pictures of their partners, family members, friends, and acquaintances. The scans showed that pictures of their spouses elicited activity in parts of the brain that, previous studies have shown, becomes active in early-stage romantic love. Activity was also seen in areas of the brain that seem to be involved in long-term pair bonding in other mammals—prairie voles, for example.

Researchers sometimes refer to couples in long-term romantic relationships as “swans,” after the birds that famously mate for life. Previous research suggests that about 1 in 10 couples seem to experience this kind of long-lasting romantic feeling. No ones knows for sure what makes some long-term couples have extremely loving relationships, but study coauthor Arthur Aron, PhD, social psychologist at Stony Brook University in New York, says the following make for better relationships, and a combination of all at high levels could account for intense love: