PASSIONATE LOVE AND COMPANIONATE LOVE
Common wisdom says that in every relationship there are two phases. There’s the beginning, where you fall in love and everything is new and magical. Then, after a certain point, maybe a few years, things get less exciting and more routine. There’s still love, but it’s just not like the magic you had in the beginning. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, “Love fades.”
“Not in my relationship! Everything is great. We peaked and then that peak turned into a plateau and now we’ve been peaking ever since!”
Okay, why are you even reading this book about relationships? So you can see what mistakes sad, lonely people are making to cause them to have so much shittier lives than you? You know, why don’t you just put this book down and go have sex with your partner you’re so into, you asshole?
But wait, hold on a second—science says you are possibly lying. Yeah, I’m talking brain scans and shit. BRAIN SCANS.
Researchers have actually identified two distinct kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love.
In the first stage of a relationship you have passionate love. This is where you and your partner are just going ape shit for each other. Every smile makes your heart flutter. Every night is more magical than the last.
During this phase your brain gets especially active and starts releasing all kinds of pleasurable, stimulating neurotransmitters. Your brain floods your neural synapses with dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that gets released when you do cocaine.
“Carol, I can’t describe how you make me feel. Wait, no, I can—you make my mind release pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters and you’ve flooded my mind with dopamine. If the experience of snorting cocaine and getting so high out of my mind that I want to climb a telephone pole with my bare hands just to see if I can do it were a person, it would be you.”
Like all drugs, though, this high wears off. Scientists estimate that this phase usually lasts about twelve to eighteen months. At a certain point the brain rebalances itself. It stops pumping out adrenaline and dopamine and you start feeling like you did before you fell in love. The passion you first felt starts to fade. Your brain is like, ALL RIGHT!! We get it, we get it. She’s great, blah, blah, blah.
What happens then? Well, in good relationships, as passionate love fades, a second kind of love arises to take its place: companionate love.
Companionate love is neurologically different from passionate love. Passionate love always spikes early, then fades away, while companionate love is less intense but grows over time. And, whereas passionate love lights up the brain’s pleasure centers, companionate love is associated with the regions having to do with long-term bonding and relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, the author of Anatomy of Love and one of the most cited scholars in the study of sex and attraction, was part of a research team that gathered and took brain scans of then-middle-aged people who’d been married an average of twenty-one years while they looked at a photograph of their spouse, and compared them with brain scans of younger people looking at their new partners. What they discovered, she writes, is that: “Among the older lovers, brain regions associated with anxiety were no longer active; instead, there was activity in the areas associated with calmness.”1 Neurologically it’s similar to the kind of love you feel for an old friend or a family member.
So love goes from feeling like I’m doing cocaine to feeling how I feel about my uncle? I don’t want to make companionate love sound like a bummer. It is love, just less intense and more stable. There is still passion, but it’s balanced with trust, stability, and an understanding of each other’s flaws. If passionate love is the coke of love, companionate love is like having a glass of wine or smoking a few hits of some mild weed. That makes it sound a little better than the uncle thing, right? We all like booze and weed more than we like our relatives, right? Great.
It also makes sense that passionate love shouldn’t last. If we could all have lifelong passionate love, the world would collapse. We’d stay in our apartments lovingly staring at our partners while the streets filled with large animals and homeless children eating out of the garbage.
This transition from passionate love to companionate love can be tricky. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies two danger points in every romantic relationship.
One is at the apex of the passionate love phase. We’ve all seen this in action. People get all excited and dive in headfirst. A new couple, weeks or months into a relationship, high off passionate love, go bonkers and move in and get married way too quickly.