What Goes On In a Marriage?

Recently The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle writ­ten by Tara Parker-Pope that makes many points that some may find sur­pris­ing about long-term mar­riages. Many of the key points of the arti­cle are quoted below.

We wanted to — we would have — if there was enough wind!

The truth is that most mar­riages, even our own, are some­thing of a mys­tery to outsiders.

Sev­eral years ago, a mar­riage researcher — Robert W. Lev­en­son, direc­tor of the psy­chophys­i­ol­ogy lab­o­ra­tory at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley — and his col­leagues pro­duced a video of 10 cou­ples talk­ing and bick­er­ing. Dr. Lev­en­son knew at the time that five of the cou­ples had been in trou­bled rela­tion­ships and even­tu­ally divorced. He showed the video to 200 peo­ple, includ­ing pas­tors, mar­riage ther­a­pists and rela­tion­ship sci­en­tists, ask­ing them to spot the doomed mar­riages. They guessed wrong half the time.

“Peo­ple on the out­side aren’t very good at telling how mar­riages are really work­ing,” he said.

Even so, aca­d­e­mic researchers have become increas­ingly fas­ci­nated with the inner work­ings of long-married cou­ples, sub­ject­ing them to a bat­tery of lab­o­ra­tory tests and even brain scans to unravel the mys­tery of last­ing love.

Bianca Acevedo, a post­doc­toral researcher at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Santa Bar­bara, stud­ies the neu­ro­science of rela­tion­ships and began a search for long-married cou­ples who were still madly in love. Through a phone sur­vey, she col­lected data on 274 men and women in com­mit­ted rela­tion­ships, and used rela­tion­ship scales to mea­sure mar­i­tal hap­pi­ness and pas­sion­ate love.

Dr. Acevedo expected to find only a small per­cent­age of long-married cou­ples still pas­sion­ately in love. To her sur­prise, about 40 per­cent of them con­tin­ued to reg­is­ter high on the romance scale. The remain­ing 60 per­cent weren’t nec­es­sar­ily unhappy. Many had high lev­els of rela­tion­ship sat­is­fac­tion and were still in love, just not so intensely.

In a sep­a­rate study, 17 men and women who were pas­sion­ately in love agreed to undergo scans to deter­mine what last­ing roman­tic love looks like in the brain. The sub­jects, who had been mar­ried an aver­age of about 21 years, viewed a pic­ture of their spouse. As a con­trol, they also viewed pho­tos of two friends.

Com­pared with the reac­tion when look­ing at oth­ers, see­ing the spouse acti­vated parts of the brain asso­ci­ated with roman­tic love, much as it did when cou­ples who had just fallen in love took the same test. But in the older cou­ples, researchers spot­ted some­thing extra: parts of the brain asso­ci­ated with deep attach­ment were also acti­vated, sug­gest­ing that con­tent­ment in mar­riage and pas­sion in mar­riage aren’t mutu­ally exclusive.

“They have the feel­ings of eupho­ria, but also the feel­ings of calm and secu­rity that we feel when we’re attached to some­body” Dr. Acevedo said. “I think it’s won­der­ful news.”

So how do these older cou­ples keep the fires burn­ing? Beyond the brain scans, it was clear that these cou­ples remained active in each other’s lives.

…

Research from Stony Brook Uni­ver­sity in New York sug­gests that cou­ples who reg­u­larly do new and dif­fer­ent things together are hap­pier than those who repeat the same old habits. The the­ory is that new expe­ri­ences acti­vate the dopamine sys­tem and mimic the brain chem­istry of early roman­tic love.

In a new study, the Stony Brook sci­en­tists will have cou­ples play­ing either a mun­dane or excit­ing video game together while their brains are being scanned.. The goal is to see how shar­ing a new and chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ence with a spouse changes the neural acti­va­tion of the brain.

But for those of us with­out a brain scan­ner, there are sim­ple ways to find out if your rela­tion­ship is grow­ing or vexed by bore­dom. Among the ques­tions to ask your­self: How much does your part­ner pro­vide a source of excit­ing expe­ri­ences? How much has know­ing your part­ner made you a bet­ter per­son? In the last month, how often did you feel that your mar­riage was in a rut?

If the answers aren’t exactly what you hoped for, take heart. From a sta­tis­ti­cal stand­point, your risk for divorce begins to fall once you’ve passed the 10-year mark. Accord­ing to Bet­sey Steven­son, an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­sity of Pennsylvania’s Whar­ton School, recent Cen­sus Bureau data show that only about 4 per­cent of recently ended mar­riages involved cou­ples mar­ried for 40 years or more.

…

For what it is worth, our per­sonal expe­ri­ence tells us that there must be a sig­nif­i­cant amount of truth to these find­ings. We have not had brain scans, at least for these rea­sons or under these con­di­tions, but we have been mar­ried for over thirty-seven years and both expe­ri­ence a fair degree of roman­tic love. And we do very many new and excit­ing things together. In fact, we have a long-standing habit of look­ing for new things to do together. This has been the habit of our life together. We each have our own per­sonal inter­est, but our pri­mary focus has always been find­ing new things to do together. Per­haps with­out actu­ally know­ing it, we found the secret to a long-term mar­riage. Then again maybe it was just love. Who knows? Who cares? We just desire the outcome.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too