Social psychologists today would have you think that they’ve placed love in the lab and analyzed it. They’ll say that they’ve discover that it exists in almost eerie accordance folk notions of it. But is this true?
Psychological models of love usually divide it into passionate love and companiate love. Passionate love is rich with dopamine injections. It starts off heated and lusty but quickly quiets down after about six months. This is when most people wake up one morning, look over at their lover, and can’t quite help but find a bunch of faults with them that they didn’t notice before.
Companiate love is something that grows over time – a long time too. It has little to do with dopamine and more to do with security. One doesn’t get a rush of good feelings when they think about their house or job (sometimes it is the exact opposite) but to take those things away from them would be devastating. Those things are securities – lasting bases from which activities that do create dopamine flares can originate. So instead of a lover becoming an activity, they become a part of your life.
In countries where arranged marriages are the norm, divorces are relatively low. These young people aren’t fed myths about passionate love that lasts forever. Their cultures stress the importance of monogamy for rearing families and living generally happy lives. A newly-wed couple simply grow to love one another. They must change themselves to do this.
Our culture doesn’t like the idea of changing or compromising our inner constitutions for somebody else (and, perhaps, rightfully so). So we’ve stigmatized the idea of everlasting passionate love. Name one love story in a movie or book that introduces a couple long after they’ve already fallen in love. The exceptional stories that do probably tell a tale of how a couple fall back in love again and “reignite their passions” for one another. (They also probably star Meryl Streep.) But is this real? It’s always assumed that live happily ever after – that companiate love will begin to commence and that we won’t have to worry about them getting a divorce. But chances are they will.
Psychologists seem very apologetic with their concept of companiate love. To me, that just sounds like friends with (exclusive) benefits. This doesn’t fit with our popular myth of true love. No one in our culture thinks that this is the ideal relationship.
So I ask, who’s at fault here: psychologists who gerrymander a scientific theory of true love, a culture that feeds us unhealthy definitions of true love, or are such institutions just obsolete now that we live off of the savanna and on the grid?