PASSION is admittedly an important component of love. This can be witnessed in any long-standing relationship where the passion has been trampled to death by habituation, indifference, and neglect as people repeatedly take each other for granted over time. Same old / same old will do that to you.
As one woman told me, “He used to juggle everything in his life so that he could make time to be with me. Now he juggles me so that I don’t interfere with the stuff in his life that he really cares about --- ESPN, golf, work.”
Passion is obviously important.
But contrary to common sentiment, passion alone does not love make.
In fact, those who are vulnerable to this common cultural faux pas --- mistaking passion for love --- frequently end up loving passion rather than loving a person. They may say, “I love you,” but what they really mean is, “I love the passion I experience with you.” Their experience of love is really more about them than it is about you.
When this is the type of love someone is after --- passion = love --- then do not expect them to make very stable long-term traveling companions along the road of life.
The trick (for those of us who want a dependable, enduring, long-term, life-giving relationship) is not to find yet another trigger for our experience of passion. There are plenty of new partners (or new pornographic images) that will fill the bill for that. The trick is to make it happen (over and over again) with the one we love.
When was the last time you saw a best-selling book titled “Sex With Someone New Does Not Have To Be Dull: 10 Tips On How To Keep Your Novel Experiences Exciting”?
As one author put it, “It is no great achievement to woo someone into a short-lived passionate experience. It takes a great deal more character and finesse to make a long-term marriage into a romantic, glowing love affair.”
Have you ever thought about what happens in the brains of couples who enjoy a novel date night together? I suspect not --- this is not the type of thing that most people spend their time sitting around thinking about.
But bio-chemically speaking, what happens is that when we engage in new experiences, the pleasure circuits in the brain are activated and large amounts of neurotransmitter chemicals --- for example, dopamine, norepinephrine, endorphins --- are released into the nervous system. [Please note the similarities between this bio-chemical concoction and that associated with an experience of passion --- see the Love Bytes blog post of 2 weeks ago: Is A Hook-Up Culture Going To Help Us Get There?]
And this is true not just of new couples who are experiencing a novel date night with each other for the first time. It is also true of old farts who have been married for years, but who have decided to go out and do something new and unique together. Their brains light up just like the newly-in-love-hot-and-bothered-young couples.
As was mentioned in the Love Bytes blog post of a few weeks ago [Love David Letterman Style], when married couples were asked how long it had been since their last date night, the average was over 3 months! And then they wonder what happened to the passion…….
As John Gottman (arguably the foremost love / marriage expert in the world) reported based upon years of research with married couples in his Seattle Love Lab: “The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70%, the quality of the couple’s friendship. For men, the determining factor in whether they feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70%, the quality of the couple’s friendship. So men and women come from the same planet after all.”
PASSION is necessary, but not sufficient, for love --- at least not for love that has any hope of surviving the tests of time.
Reference: Gottman, John M., & Silver, Nan. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. NY: three Rivers Press.
