Anybody been following the recent happenings swirling around David Letterman? Ah, the things done in the name of love.
Maybe there is no greater confusion surrounding our modern notions of love than those swirling around PASSION. In fact, for many of us, the two have become synonymous.
Without a doubt, most of us marry for love. But what this means may not be quite so obvious. College students were asked in 1983: “If you get married at some point in the future and the passion disappears from your marriage, would you divorce?” A little over half of the young men and women sampled stated that they would. A similar study completed in 1998 found that this number had gone up to almost 70%.
As pointed out in last week’s Love Bytes blog (“The Bullseye of Love”), PASSION is a crucial component of love – but passion alone does not love make.
One of the things that I have found “frightens” a number of young people whom I teach is the thought that passion can easily wane following that walk down the aisle. We have terms that we often use to describe this experience of petering passion. For example, habituation --- which is defined as a decrease in responsiveness when a person has repeated exposure to a stimulus. Or adaptation --- a change in the responsiveness of one’s senses to the quality of stimulation provided by a stimulus. In other words, we get used to the object of stimulation, whether that be a thing or a person.
Many years ago I had a unique dating experience that ended up having significant long-term consequences for my marriage. My wife (Kathy) and I were high school sweethearts and we ended up dating each other exclusively for several years. But midway through college, we realized that our relationship had gotten a little stale, and we agreed that it would be a good idea to “date around” a little bit before we made any sort of permanent decision to be with each other for life.
My wife dated a few different guys (only one of whom I trusted) where she was going to college. I, in turn, went out with a few different women (none of whom Kathy trusted – and probably with good reason) where I was attending college.
There was one particular woman that I ended up going out with several times, and one night as I was heading back to my place after an evening out, I found myself reflecting on the week leading up to that night. I realized that I had put quite a bit of effort into figuring out what we could do together that would be unique / different / interesting / out of the ordinary. [Please be aware that I was going to college in a relatively small town in Iowa and finding such a thing was no small challenge.]
In the wake of that evening, I began to suspect that my relationship with Kathy had not gotten stale because of habituation or becasue of adaptation, but rather, simply because we had slipped into same-old-same-old. We had started to simply do what we always did --- we went to the same movie theaters, we watched the same TV shows, we ate at the same restaurants, we ended up hanging out over and over again at the same places. Our relationship had begun to take on all the variety, uniqueness, and excitement of a bag of rice cake.
If married couples were asked how long it’s been since they went on their last date, what do you think they’d say? A recent random phone sample of nearly 1,000 men and women (who had been married between 11 and 19 years) revealed that the average was 13 weeks!
Is it any wonder that our passion for the one we have vowed to love for life begins to wane when it is over 3 months between dates?
As I learned years ago, if what you've got is a couch-potato relationship, then about all you can eventually expect to get is a few potatoes.
