and happiness, affecting our brains and bodies at the cellular level. “We were born to love,” empha-
sizes Fredrickson, who also serves as a psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The evidence comes from research that shows how our brain and nervous system are designed to enhance our chances of experiencing it.”
Happily Coupled
Creating Loving Relationships that Thrive by Judith Fertig
“To be fully seen by somebody… and be loved anyhow— this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
~ Elizabeth Gilbert A
t the conclusion of her best- selling memoir, Eat Pray Love, author Elizabeth Gilbert had
fallen in love with Jose Nunes (called Felipe in the book), a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The divorced Gilbert, reluctant to have her heart broken again, had vowed never to remarry… yet ultimately changed her mind when U.S. immigration law presented her with multiple choices: marry so they could live together in this country, stay single and live as ex-pat partners or say goodbye to Nunes. Gilbert chose a marital partnership that suits the shared life they want: hon- est and, after years of travel, settled in one place. She says, “For the first time in my life, living in a small town with a lovely husband in an old house with
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a big garden and several pets, I feel absolutely rooted in a way I have never experienced before and never would have imagined even desiring. But it is what we want—at least for now—and we’re relishing that stability.” Gilbert records the process of going from two global wanderers falling in love to a married couple sharing domestic chores in her follow-up memoir, Committed: A Love Story.
Love Science The spark that ignites such a partner- ship is love, which is “primarily about connection,” says Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D., a positivity expert and author of Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become. “It’s vital to our health
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When we share positive emotions with another person, experience a synchrony between their biochemistry and behaviors and ours, plus exhibit mutual care, love can bloom, whether we stay happily single or decide to pur- sue a committed relationship. She calls this triple-action sequence “positivity resonance”. Love, she observes, is less a smooth, solid path than momentary experiences of connection.
Making Love Last The more areas of connection we have with our partners, the more opportu- nities we have to positively resonate every day, adds Frederickson. Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., a psy-
chology professor at California’s Santa Clara University and adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavior- al sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, agrees. “Long-term relationships, like marriages, are part- nerships in living,” according to Plante. “The vast majority of the time couples are together they’re not having hot sex, but are sharing a practical day-to-day life together.” Shared activities aren’t always exciting or glamorous. Raising chil- dren, working, managing a home, cooking and cleaning, shopping, being with friends and family and the rest of regular daily living is where the rubber meets the road in relationship satisfac- tion, observes Plante. “If couples aren’t compatible in these areas, then the con- nection and attraction will inevitably atrophy, tensions emerge and too often, relationships fracture and fall apart.” Compatibility means different things to different people, and require- ments can change as individuals in a romantic partnership change over time. Compatibility also means agreement
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