Even though love is considered just an emotional reaction in our brains, it is very much influenced by neurological and physiological actions in our brains. It is, in turn, a major contributor to sustaining happy long-term relationships.
Sustaining loving relationships for a long period of time is really hard work. It will require perfect mental sync and harmony in order to make it last, all by ourselves. But thankfully for us, our brains do a lot of the work for us, so that we can focus on other things.
So how is it that your brain makes you stay happy and also in love? It simply omits out things which are otherwise unpleasant. Oh yes, the very last piece of the puzzle to having a strong and lasting relationship is played by your brain.
Helen Fisher, a renowned biological anthropologist and Lucy Brown, a renowned neuroscientist, have made claims that our brains create “positive explanations” in order to sustain and maintain our relationships as healthy ones.
In their research, Brown and Fisher have had hundreds of people get their brains scanned in their different states of commitment and love.
What this research concluded was that when two individuals are in a blissful relationship, three areas of the brain are active:
1. The area which is concerned with empathy.
2. The area which regulates emotions and stress.
3. The area which is concerned with positive artifices.
The region which is related to the creation of positive artifices is called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. It is this region that is responsible for our judgment. Whenever we are not sure about something, this region is where that thinking is processed. It is our critical thinking about someone that takes a backseat when we feel love for another person.
Hence, when two individuals are in love, the activity in this region of the brain is reduced.
The process of feeling negative judgment is thereby reduced when two individuals are in love and feel supported by each other.
Love lets us give our significant other the assistance of disbelief.
This is when a lot of toxic relationship habits might emanate if we do not see certain negative aspects of our partners and choose to address them. But this does hint at the fact that, even on a neurological basis, we are well aware of the fact that we need to overlook certain negatives to make a relationship work.
That happens to be the difficult part of being together, doesn’t it?
When two people spend a lot of time together and share the same living space, they get plenty of time to know each other as well as witness the worst qualities in each other. This is also where certain negative aspects of your partner might get magnified and seem more pressing than usual due to the fact that they are always with you. In addition to all that, is it also very difficult to stray from the temptation of saying “I did tell you so.”