When you thought it couldn’t get this bad…
1. You Deserve to Be Happy
When people are in individual therapy, and they share their marital unhappiness, they are sometimes told:
“You deserve to be happy…”
No, you don’t.
Growth usually involves pain. Can you imagine a two-year-old falling down and deciding:
“That’s it. I’m not walking anymore. I deserve to live a pain-free existence.”
You don’t “deserve” to be happy, any more than you deserve to be rich, famous, or an expert cello player. All of these things take time and effort.
Happiness is also a transient state.
Your nervous system isn’t built for a state of perpetual happiness. It’s built for happiness in fits and starts. Something makes you happy, and then you fall back to baseline.
Ask opiate addicts. The thrill doesn’t last because it’s not designed to, biochemically.
Dispositionally, there are ‘cheerful’ people, but that’s not the same as constant happiness. If you want to be ‘happy’ in your marriage, you both have to work at it, and you can’t give up until you know how to love well.
2. If you were never ‘in love,’ then it was never ‘real love’ to begin with.
It’s marriage, not limerence, silly!
Limerence is an early stage of love which is similar in its effect to a drug intoxication. Oxytocin, dopamine, phenylethylamine (PEA), testosterone, estrogen, serotonin, and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) make a heady chemical soup which produces physical symptoms highly correlated to early romantic love.
It’s a fun, transient state to be in.
You hyper-focus on your Dreamboat and often have reduced appetite, have trouble sleeping, and find yourself in a perpetual state of romantic obsession.
And even though it is very cool to experience, it doesn’t happen in every sound relationship, and it doesn’t last all that long. And it can happen even with the WRONG PERSON, and we’re more familiar with that phenomenon:
Mr. or Ms. Wrong
You’re in the dating scene, or your marriage is in a difficult place, and you discover someone who seems perfect. Suddenly, all the switches in your brain light up. YOU HAVE TO HAVE THEM.
It’s a psychotic-like state, really.
Limerence lowers the fear response, making you reckless and bold. You feel young again. If sex and orgasm happen, oxytocin and vasopressin start to rise, blinding us to any negative information about our Dreamboat. Genital stimulation promotes dopamine activity that stimulates novelty and lifts depression.
Love is not blind, it just doesn’t care.
Most of us (even psychotherapists) believe that limerence is a prerequisite for lasting love. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to science.
“I love you, but I was never really in love with you…”
Wonderfully matched couples come to me in a panic because one of them suddenly makes the painful realization (maybe right before or a few years after the wedding) that:
“I love you, but I was never really in love with you…”
They were about to destroy a perfectly good marriage based upon this terrible marital advice.
The science is clear: Being in limerence does not guarantee long-term marital happiness, any more than its absence indicates a poor match. Not all marriages start in limerence, and not all of them have to.
The Brief Allure of Limerence
Limerence is a kind of biological reflex that lasts about 18–24 months. Just long enough to achieve that ‘caveman pregnancy,’ or at least this is the biological intent.
Biology is not concerned with your interpersonal happiness. And biology also doesn’t care about your thoughts, opinions, or better judgment.
After the thrill is gone, it’s souring and sobering to discover that some of your partner’s ‘cute and endearing traits’ become the source of frequent irritation and friction. If they’re a paramour, they start to hauntingly resemble your ex.
After the thrill is gone (and your marriage is in shambles,) you come to your senses. It’s one of the reasons that a relationship that starts as an extramarital affair seldom ends in a marriage, and the few that do have a 70% chance of divorce.
Some people get hooked on the high of limerence and look for a limerence cure to get over that person.
That’s a post you can read another day. Some people in affairs hate that they are so “in limerence” with someone other than their spouses.
3. Your marriage is dead because the romance is dead…
Romantic love is like a sleeping cat; it can be awakened at any time. — Dr. Helen Fisher, American anthropologist, and human behavior researcher.
Romantic Love is one of three fundamental brain systems that evolved to orchestrate our essential mate selection and reproductive strategy. While not as old as reptilian “horniness,” romantic love is a proven, successful survival strategy for the human race, at least in the short-term.
When the romance is dead, forget the lace and roses. Instead, up the frequency of your empathic conversations.
Having a solid felt sense of security lays the foundation for romance. It makes people more open to being influenced by their partner, less self-centered, and most importantly, increases their capacity for empathy.
Empathy encourages emotional bonding and, in part, determines whether or not a couple will describe their marriage as satisfying.
Attachment emerges slowly, and over time, unlike romantic love. Attachment is slower because it takes time to get to know whether someone is trustworthy and committed to you and to the relationship.
An entire model of couples therapy has been built upon the research on relationships that demonstrates that intensifying engagement by the distant partner and heightening empathy enhance love and bonding. Once that’s in place, romance can easily be awoken as couples become better able to say what they need to feel more loved and cared for in everyday life.
It’s good for you if you have rejected this sort of terrible marital advice and hung on when your marriage was in turmoil. Every day, we hear couples come to us believing this kind of crank advice. At Couples Therapy Inc., we’re working hard to dispel these hurtful myths with science-based advice. If you are wanting to jump-start your marriage with private intensive couples therapy in a retreat setting, contact us.
