Why feelings cool over time and how to prolong love

Strong feelings are really fleeting, but neuroscience offers several ways to revive them.

Where do vivid feelings come from?

Dopamine plays the most important role in generating passion and intense romantic feelings. By acting on specific receptors in the brain, this neurotransmitter motivates us to fulfill our desires and achieve goals. Dopamine is associated with the joy of new experiences, travel, overcoming danger, the desire to grow in salary. Dopamine D2 receptors are responsible for our love impulses – they are backed up by D1, which block interest in other potential partners.

So, we abandon friends, lose productivity, we cannot tear ourselves away from each other, orgasms darken in our eyes. But this is temporary.

Why does the feelings cool over time

Over time, the feeling of novelty dulls. And also a familiar partner is always at hand – there is no longer a need for dopamine motivation to win it. This neurotransmitter, of course, continues to be released, but not in those quantities.

As a result, the passion fades a little, the feelings are no longer so burning, and someone may even be drawn to flirt with someone else.

Sex training presenters speculate on this topic, urging to pretend unavailability. There is a grain of truth in these words, except that in close relationships you usually do not bother and do not arrange an obstacle course on the way to the bedroom.

How to revive passion and strengthen feelings

So, here is a list of the main factors that influence the formation of dopamine cravings. Pay attention to how often these things happen in your life. If not, use the list as a guide to improving your relationship.

1. Create, develop and share experiences

In addition to friendship, the researchers note that personal growth plays a role in long-term happy relationships. This idea was even turned into a whole theory of self-expansion. According to it, if a partner contributes to a new experience, it strengthens love and passion. You can take the theory literally: a person expands your knowledge and skills, opens up new horizons for you, brings something new to life, supports your ideas and helps to realize them. Biologically, this raises your awareness of this world and how to make your life safer and more prosperous to a new level.

So travel (our evolutionary roots encourage the development of new territories), learn something together, helping each other (it is important that it is really interesting for both), do a common business, and so on.

2. Focus on novelty

Everything new is also surrounded by a dopamine flair – this is also a new experience for the brain, even if it does not develop you as effectively as a new book, launching a startup, or traveling abroad.

Give gifts, change your favorite places for walking with new locations. Dress-up RPGs also taste new, don’t they?

3. Indulge in extreme

In the movies, we often see a couple who survived a scrape together in a kiss. In a moment of danger, we have no time for romance, but when it recedes, dopamine takes over. It is needed in order to calm the feeling of fear when everything is over. If not for him, we would shake for hours after the harmless rustle that frightened us.

4. Solve common problems

This activates oxytocin and vasopressin, which enhance attachment. According to the theory of self-expansion, close people perceive the partner’s problems as their own, which means they are ready to participate in solving them.

Don’t blame your partner on your common troubles. Help him cope with difficulties and ask for help yourself.

5. Laugh

Many people tend to fall in love with those with a good sense of humor, and there is an explanation for this. Dopamine is associated with positive emotions that correlate with novelty, creativity, and humor. A joke is also a kind of simulated situation, in which there could be a banal way out, but you were offered an unusual solution, and you laugh. Thus, humor indirectly echoes the desire to learn about the world.

It is not even necessary to joke on your own – it is enough so that you can laugh at something together. Funny movies and videos from YouTube, funny games like “Twister” or “Imaginarium” will do.

Look for things that both of you like, bring you closer and excite. After all, science knows not everything about your love.