What brainscans reveal about marriage

Note: what brain scans DON’T tell us about marriage is the level of jing-polarity exhaustion, the main cause of divorce from my Taoist energetic view. But it seems some folks find spontaneous ways to renew it. Qigong & inner alchemy are excellent methods, imho. – Mihcael

WHAT BRAIN SCANS CAN TELL US ABOUT MARRIAGE
By Tara Parker-Pope
New York Times
June 4, 2010

The sudden breakup of Al and Tipper Gore’s seemingly idyllic marriage was
the latest and among the sharpest reminders that the only two people who
know what’s going on in a marriage are the two people who are in it.
Well

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.

“They were still very much in love and engaged in the relationship,” Dr.
Acevedo said. “That’s something that seems different from the Gores, who
said they had grown apart.”

Indeed, if there is a lesson from the Gore breakup, it’s that with marriage,
you’re never done working on it.

“It’s not that you have to be constantly scared about your relationship, but
you do have to renew it,” said Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian at
Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “I think the warning we should
take from this is not that marriages are doomed, but that you can’t skate
indefinitely and be doing different things and not really be paying
attention to the marriage itself.”

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.

And it’s worth noting that the Gores married in 1970s, the beginning of a
generation of couples that has consistently struggled with marriage more
than any other group. Dr. Stevenson calls them the “greatest divorcing
generation.”

Lost in the discussion about the Gore divorce is the inherent optimism that
the decision represents. Professor Coontz recalls living next door to a
couple in their 70s who disliked each other so much that during the summer,
they sat outside in lawn chairs on the opposite sides of the house. “I think
it’s good that people can go ahead and start over before they get to that
level of anger and hostility,” she said.

Dr. Stevenson called the Gore breakup a “glass-half-full story.”

“They had 40 years of marriage, and they had what, by many dimensions,
should be considered a successful marriage,” she said. “The fact that they
both can look forward and see a promising future by not being married —
it’s unfortunate that the answer is ‘yes,’ but it’s also somewhat a
celebration about how much optimism they have for the rest of their lives.”

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