KEEPING LOVE ALIVE | OUR SWEET PROBLEM - 2/9/08

[Smartmarriages]

- OUR SWEET PROBLEM: VALENTINE SEASON

As Valentine's Day and Marriage Week approach, there is an avalanche of
articles on love and marriage. HOWEVER, it's a sweet problem ­ so many of
the articles are INCREDIBLE. I'll try to prioritize, but there are a bunch
that fall in the "must read!" category, so get ready...more to come.

I'm also sure that many of you are being asked to do print, radio and TV
gigs for Love Week. Send me the info so we can alert the list, and/or send
urls so we can listen or view if your appearance is posted on a website.
  - diane   
 
   
- KEEPING LOVE ALIVE

This one is most remarkable and proves our point - that couples can stay in
love over the long haul.  These couples seemed to come by it naturally, but
in the Coalition we're convinced that we can TEACH LOVE....the skills and
knowledge that keep love alive to just about anyone.  I would bet the ranch
on the fact that couples that learn the three streams of information taught
in Marriage Education classes would light up the MRI brain scans - they
learn 1) the BENEFITS of marriage (thus WHY to hang in through the rough
patches) 2) what to EXPECT in marriage, and 3) the BEHAVIORS that destroy
love and the BEHAVIORS that support success - that help a couple stay
emotionally and sexually bonded, attached, and in love.  I'm convinced that
I've seen the brains and hearts of long-married, burned-out couples reignite
after taking a PAIRS or Relationship Enhancement class.....if you learn to
do a Daily Temperature Reading and the skills to share true Empathy, you
can't help connecting and lighting up. And, in love, as in anything else,
success breeds success.

The next step for these researchers has to be to measure the brains of
couples that have taken marriage education classes like Mastering the Magic
of Love, PAIRS, Keeping Love Alive, etc.  I'll contact them and invite them
to Smart Marriages - maybe they can do a keynote in 2009.  - diane
-------------------------
Keeping Love Alive
Neuroscientists are probing why some married couples can maintain the spark
for years.
By SAM SCHECHNER
February 8, 2008; Page W1

Ann Tucker is pushing a shopping cart through the produce section of a
supermarket in Plainview, N.Y., when she turns to kiss her husband. The
supermarket kiss is a regular ritual for the Tuckers. So are the restaurant
kiss and the traffic-light kiss. "I guess we do kiss a lot," says Mrs.
Tucker, a 39-year-old mathematician at a money-management firm.

Mrs. Tucker is living happily ever after, and scientists are curious why.
She belongs to a small class of men and women who say they live in the
thrall of early love despite years of marriage, busy jobs and other daily
demands that normally chip away at passion.

Most couples find that the dizzying, almost-narcotic feeling of early love
gives way to a calmer bond. Now, researchers are using laboratory science to
investigate Mrs. Tucker and others who live fairy-tale romances. The studies
could help reveal the workings of lifelong passion and perhaps one day lead
to a restorative.

Philosophers and writers have long examined passion and love. The 19th
century introduced psychologists and sociologists to the discussion. In
recent years, neuroscientists have joined in. While love is historically
tied to the heart, they are looking for answers in the brain, using magnetic
imaging and other modern tools to try to map love's pathways.
Sam Schechner reports on a study looking at the brains of people who claim
to have stayed madly in love for over a decade.

Psychologists studying relationships confirm the steady decline of romantic
love. Each year, according to surveys, the average couple loses a little
spark. One sociological study of marital satisfaction at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University kept track of more than 2,000
married people over 17 years. Average marital happiness fell sharply in the
first 10 years, then entered a slow decline.

About 15 years ago, Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook
University, became curious about couples outside the norm. His own work
turned up the usual pattern of declining passion. But he was drawn to what
statisticians call outliers, points way off the curve. These dots
represented people who claimed they'd been madly in love for years. "I
didn't know what to make of that," Dr. Aron says. "Was it random error? Were
they self-deceiving? Were they deceiving others? Because it's not supposed
to happen."

On a clear day in late August, Mrs. Tucker visited New York University's
Center for Brain Imaging. There, a four-ton device called a functional
magnetic-resonance imaging scanner would analyze her brain while she looked
at a photo of her husband. The machines record changes in oxygen levels of
blood feeding the brain. Because the brain is quick to supply fresh blood to
working areas, researchers use them to see where the brain is more active
during such mental tasks as recognizing words or feeling love.

Mrs. Tucker drove in with Bianca Acevedo, one of Dr. Aron's graduate
students. Ms. Acevedo's doctoral dissertation studies brain images to
compare new love with long-term love.

Only a handful of studies have used magnetic imaging to study love, in part
because scientists debate whether it is a good measure of hard-to-define
mental states. The first widely cited study, published in 2000, scanned men
and women who claimed to be madly in love. It found evidence that love could
be traced in the brain.

Over the next few years, Dr. Aron collaborated on a study that would push
further. Published in 2005, it helped establish the link between romantic
love and the so-called reward-seeking circuitry, which is thought to be
linked to such deep motivations as thirst or drug addiction. Dr. Aron joined
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and
Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in
New York's Bronx borough. They examined blood flow in the brains of 17
volunteers, mostly college students, who were scanned as they looked at
photos of their lovers.

They found robust activity in a brain region called the ventral tegmental
area, which is rich in dopamine, a brain chemical connected to feelings of
pleasure. Another of Dr. Aron's students repeated the results in China,
bolstering the case that romantic love is a biological drive not bound by
culture.

None of the published studies, however, focused on people in long-term
relationships. Ms. Acevedo's research plan -- hatched with Drs. Aron, Fisher
and Brown -- was to repeat the experiment with people who had been in love
for more than a decade to see how they compare. The first hurdle was finding
such couples.

Mrs. Tucker is a meticulous woman with black hair in a pixie cut who moved
to the U.S. from Korea when she was 5. She is shy and speaks carefully,
sometimes slipping into statistical jargon when talking with her husband.
When the two Ph.D.s plan a party they weigh a "Type I error" against a "Type
II error," too little food or too much.

Her husband, Alan, 64, is a lanky, applied-math professor at Stony Brook who
speaks with a youthful enthusiasm. They met sitting across a
horseshoe-shaped table at a math conference in the Adirondack Mountains. "I
knew immediately we'd get married," Mrs. Tucker says. They got their
marriage license less than a year later, on Valentine's Day.

They share a two-story home in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. One afternoon last
fall, their son Teddy, now 10, works his PlayStation, and their toddler
James plays with a toy train. Mr. Tucker recounts their courtship. "After
the second date, it would be three steps, stop and kiss," he says. After
nearly 11 years of marriage, they still see each other as romantic ideals.

Researchers also found Michelle Jordan, a 59-year-old communications
consultant, and her husband, Billy Owens. On a cross-country flight, she sat
next to Mr. Owens, a well-built man from Gadsden, Ala. "I had this immediate
reaction of, 'What a nice-looking guy,' " she says. They chatted throughout
the flight, her dry wit mixing with his easy charm.

Ms. Jordan and Mr. Owens lived in different cities so it took months of
long-distance dating before their first kiss. "You're always cautious about
setting yourself up for disappointment again," recalls Ms. Jordan, who was
42 at the time. They married three years later and now live in Newport
Beach, Calif. Even now, Ms. Jordan still seeks her husband's hand when
they're together. "It comes very naturally," she says.

Ms. Acevedo was confident that such long-term love was a real if somewhat
rare phenomenon. Brain activity in the ventral tegmental area would support
the idea. Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist on the project, was skeptical. Her
theory: Mrs. Tucker and Ms. Jordan weren't experiencing the same brain
impulses as new lovers, and brain scans would show that.

Mrs. Tucker recalls taking off a gold bracelet, a gift from her husband,
before sliding into the fMRI machine. Images of her husband are reflected on
a mirror above her. She recalls feeling "a warm contentment."

Until recently, most neuroscientists considered love an ill-defined topic
best avoided. But a growing body of work showed that our attachments have a
neurological underpinning. In 1996, a privately funded conference in
Stockholm took the title "Is there a neurobiology of love?" Among the
organizers was Sue Carter, an expert on the prairie-vole brain.

The prairie vole is a North American rodent that mostly mates for life,
making it a useful proxy for studying human attachment. Dr. Carter, a
neuroendocrinologist now at the University of Illinois at Chicago, helped
establish a link between vole monogamy and oxytocin -- the so-called love
hormone that helps bind mates, as well as mothers and their offspring.

Psychologists and social scientists worked on a different track, applying
their theories about love to social experiments and surveys. Their most
popular measure is the Passionate Love Scale. People are asked to score 15
statements about their lovers, such as, "For me, [blank] is the perfect
romantic partner."

The work of Dr. Aron and his colleagues reflects growing collaboration
between the social and neurosciences.

Days after Mrs. Tucker's brain scan, Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist, sat in
her book-lined office looking at the results. "Wow, just wow," she recalls
thinking. Mrs. Tucker's brain reacted to her husband's photo with a frenzy
of activity in the ventral tegmental area. "I was shocked," Dr. Brown says.

The brain scan confirmed what Mrs. Tucker said all along. But when she
learned the result, she too was a bit surprised. "It's not something I
expected after 11 years," she says. "But having it, it's like a gift."

The scan also showed a strong reaction in Mrs. Tucker's ventral pallidum, an
area suspected from vole studies to have links with long-term bonds. Mrs.
Tucker apparently enjoyed old love and new. In the months since, Dr. Brown
analyzed data from four more people, including Ms. Jordan, who also showed
brain activity associated with new love. The study is ongoing, and more
volunteers are being sought.

There is much work ahead before scientists can map the human-attachment
system and learn what factors affect it. A love drug is an even more distant
dream.

"People in the field, we've kidded about it, but nobody thinks it's, in the
short term, realistic," says Dr. Aron. "Of course, maybe we'll be contacted
by a pharmaceutical company, and they'll give us $10 zillion and we'll find
something."

{A brain scan (inset) reveals that Michelle Jordan (above, right) is still
passionately in love with her husband, Billy Owens (above).}

For the complete article with photos, charts and even video!:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120243044114252137.html

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