Connecting With Brain Regions That Encourage Romantic Love Is a Secret to Successful Marriages

Love is an overpowering force in our lives – but how does it affect us? We often ask ourselves what love is – but rarely do we take a moment to reflect upon what it’s about. Love encompasses a whole range of positive and negative emotional states, from the strongest personal trait or greatest personal pleasure, to the most sublime religious faith. But it also involves a sense of obligation to others and a willingness to see their needs and wants to fulfil.

The most common description of love is “a deep and abiding friendship”. Friendship is a long-term relationship involving two people who have deep feelings for one another. It is not lust; although it can be passionate love, romance, or even sexual attraction. A close friend will listen to and support you through difficult times, will offer moral guidance, and will be there with you if you need a shoulder to cry on.

Friendship is a natural and healthy response to meeting new people and forming new relationships. And it can be healthy and constructive when love is an element of those relationships. But love can turn into unhealthy forms of affection if it is not well-managed. Unhealthy love is passion without responsibility, a short-term physical attraction that usually leads nowhere. Unhealthy love can damage a relationship and can ruin the life of the person involved. And it usually goes hand-in-hand with harmful and destructive behaviours, such as infidelity, dishonesty, rage, addiction, and jealousy.

But love isn’t always about sex. In fact, many people in long-term romantic relationships experience no sexual attraction at all. They maintain strong loving connections because they have deep emotional connections. When you feel passionate feelings for a partner, that’s an instinctive part of your brain signalling that you should go for it – and chances are, your partner would do the same. The difference is that you need to have a mechanism in place to ensure that your feelings of excitement translate into something more than just an urge to mate.

What happens when you have the passion for one another but not the intimacy that could make a long-term relationship work? Sometimes people fall into a rut of predictable affection that doesn’t develop into anything meaningful. A person in a rut is not looking for intimacy and sexual attraction. They’re looking for affection from another person that fulfils some need that just can’t be met in the context of a healthy relationship.

Deep feelings for another person can be a great way to boost one another’s sense of self-worth, create intimacy, and help you grow as a person. When you connect with your brain regions that encourage romantic love, you open up the pathway to connecting with multiple partners as well as friends. That’s because your brain has a natural tendency to use one area of the brain when it’s working with one another to support our basic needs.