To understand the evolution of the feeling of love after several years together

This section follows the’article on how a man falls in love where I summarize Dawn Maslar’s research on the physiological mechanisms that occur when you fall in love and how these are different between a man and a woman.

In the same research Dawn Maslar finds that after falling in love, hormones roughly return to their original, pre-date levels and that couples who continue to stay together do so by conscious choice.

At this point in the relationship, it is no longer the reptilian brain that is the motor of the relationship, but the rational brain, more specifically the cortex, the same area of the brain that connects us to our values, to our desire to be the best version of ourselves by developing qualities such as compassion, unconditional love. This is typically the area of the brain that is activated when you are doing personal development.

In other words love begins with a feeling and ends up being a choice. 

It is therefore normal to see a change in the couple’s passion after several years together, because there is this return to normal hormones.

Dawn Maslar nevertheless describes two phenomena that occur in parallel with this brain change:

• The use of the prefrontal cortex will diminish our sense of attraction towards other people.
• Mirror neurons allow us to benefit even more quickly from our spouse’s experience, in the sense that we learn more quickly what he knows how to do, because he has already acquired this skill and we are often in contact with him. 

Be clear on the role of the couple

I hope that the description of the physiological evolution of the feeling of love will give you a more realistic expectation of the role of the couple in your life.

For me the couple remains and will remain only a part of your life, in the sense that the couple is for me two independent and fulfilled individuals in their respective lives, who decide to share the bonus of the couple, that is to say this icing on the cake (sharing your life with someone you love) and not the whole cake. 

And so this means two things: first of all, the first of your missions is to continue to develop yourself personally, independently of your life as a couple.

And that of two you can take advantage of this icing on the cake, which is the couple, for your own personal development.  

Once the couple is committed to the long-term, it becomes for me a tool for personal development in the sense that it is within the couple, in this zone of security and love, that the wounds of each partner’s past will resurface. The couple becomes the unique opportunity to settle what was not resolved in the first home where we experienced this security (or not), our parents.

Crises often occur when there is a change in the degree of dependence on the other partner at the structural level (e.g. with the arrival of children), at the financial level (e.g. when the spouse loses his or her job), at the emotional level (e.g. if one spouse loses a loved one), at the physical level (e.g. if one spouse becomes ill).

And so staying in a couple finally becomes a choice to go to the end of your personal development, because in the end changing partners will not necessarily help you to solve the problem, you will experience the same problem simply with another person.

Of course, up to a point. For some couples splitting up will be the best solution.

In my program Being happy as a couple I propose different tools for reflection in order to understand what lies behind a couple’s crisis, i.e. what are the wounds that emerge for each partner, what the couple can do to sift and manage the conflict, how each partner can help the other in this process and what questions need to be considered in order to decide whether it is worth continuing or not.