The Science of a Happy Marriage

Can a married couple be too close for theirown good? Can intimacy lead a couple to break up? New brain science shows ushat it can. If couples have not mastered the changing stages of marriage, breakup is possible, and often predictable because the human brain dictates aseries of natural responses during the life of a relationship. How we handle those stages can make or break a marriage. Understanding the behavioral differences involved can be the key to making love last a lifetime.

Stage 1 Romance

When two lovers come together, their brains begin to “fall in love”. High levels of oxytocin, a bonding hormone, may hide irritating behaviors from each other. But “lovers’ bliss” ultimately ends, and a new biological stage of the relationship begins.

Stage 2 Disillusionment

After a few months or even a year, our hormones and brain chemistry begin to change, and our “thinking” brain may notice that our partner is not perfect. We feel anger toward each other, evenfear at times. If we married our partner during Roman stage, we might, in Stage2, begin to have second thoughts.

The brain chemicals that took over during the early stages of romance have disappeared, as if a rug was pulled out from under love, how easy to say, “He/She is not the person I married.”

But this confusing place is a normal stage, a chemical letdown in both their brains. It is also a necessary next step in helping two very different brain systems come together for life.

Stage 3 Power Struggle

Disillusionment will usually start PowerStruggle. They will counter the invisible chemical letdown by trying to change each other back to who they were--- or thought they were---in the Romance stage.

One of the main reasons we pick at each other mercilessly during the Power Struggle stage is our differing attitudes toward marital independence. Not surprisingly, first marriages that end in divorce last an average of seven to eight years--- the very time we are trying to “change” the other person. Yet nature does not allow us to turn back the chemical and neural clock.

This is a painful time. But couples who are locked in Power Struggle do not realize their brain differences can actually be the key to long-term marriage. A new stage of marital love awaits when thecouple can finally discover each other, both as lovers and as men and women.

Stage 4 Awakening

In the first Stage, the man and woman become too close, erasing one another’s individuality. In Stage 4, the couple awaken to the realization that they have been too close to each other inunhealthy ways and must now psychologically separate. This separation does not mean divorce but means understanding.

Ultimately men realize that women areright: a relationship is most likely doomed if there is not enough togetherness. But men are right, too; it is most likely in serious trouble ifthere is not enough independence.

When we are too far away from each other, that amazing love we knew at the beginning will die. Yet when we are so close that one person will not allow the other to be himself or herself, the marriagecan not survive.

Stage 5 Long-term Marriage

The balance between the typical male and female ways of relating is a balanced state of love called Intimate Separateness. Strategies of mature love that nurture both intimacy and separateness take over. Couples live together, raise children, love and are loved, but not because the have become the same as each other---in fact, because they’ve learned to be happily different.