At the beginning of every
relationship, when everything is still novel and we are immersed in the
chemical cocktails our brain is preparing for us, we never stop to wander if
the state of eternal bliss we find ourselves in is ever going to fade. Unfortunately
it does. This fading comes from a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation. The
term, which was coined by Brickman and Campbell in 1971, compares the pursuit
of happiness with a person on a treadmill, who needs to keep working to stay in
the same place.
It seems that marrying the
woman of our dreams and reaching the top of our profession, for example, is
only rewarding for some time. Our expectations, with time, change, multiply and
reach greater heights, and so we take the old improved circumstances we
currently find ourselves in and which took us a great deal to achieve, for
granted.
There are several reasons
underlying the evolutionary and psychological aspects to why it is contrary to
believe that passionate love will endlessly endure. If actually all our lives
obsessed over love, we would not be very productive human beings. We would not
pay attention to our offspring and we sure as well not be able to pay attention
to our health and lives in general. Quite right, it would not be a great
surprise if we´d compare the state of being in love with the state of being
addicted. Too much of anything is always bad.
Hence lies the reason why
couples when they reach the first or second year mark, they mistake the shift
from passionate love to companionate love for having incompatible differences.
The fact that someone else can provide the novelty and variety that is required
for someone to experience the surge in dopamine in the brain is quite possibly
something very difficult to resist. The best way to prevent this monotony in
long term relationships is to promote surprise and variety and to specifically
seek to let it thrive.
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Pictures via johnberd and oO-Rein-Oo.
