Despite the Futility of Finding Enduring Love, We Keep Searching Anyway

Blame John Cusack

At the end of Say Anything, when John Cusack’s character Lloyd Dobler holds the boom box over his head and serenades would-be girlfriend Diana Court (Ione Skye) with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” the collective swooning of millions of young girls’ hearts set off seismographs and registered on Richter scales everywhere. In the years since, in one film after another, Cusack has essentially reprised his Dobler role. High Fidelity, Serendipity, even Hot Tub Time Machine — the theme is love. Unrequited love, lost love, meant-to-be love. Cusack didn’t start the fascination with together forever, of course. He’s simply perpetuating an ideal that began long before Humphrey Bogart uttered in Casablanca, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” That ideal is about “the one.” That one person who will set our heart ablaze. We’ll meet, fall madly and passionately in love, and then settle down to live happily ever after, like millions of happy couples in relationship bliss. Hand in hand, into the sunset. That’s how it’s supposed to work anyway, right?

The Inherent Weakness of Enduring Love

Statistically, enduring love doesn’t hold up very well. In the US, more than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. That’s just the ones that actually end. There aren’t statistics for how many couples have simply decided to settle for relationships that are just shy of domestic hell. From anecdotal evidence based on my own observations of family and friends, I would say it’s somewhere around “a lot.”

The Boredom Issue

According to a survey conducted by MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, most of that time was spent in front of the television. While we’re really good at getting ourselves into love, we’re not so great at staying there. According to a 2009 study published in Psychological Science, couples that told researchers they felt stuck in a rut at seven years into their relationships were less satisfied at year 16. That makes sense. boredom breeds ambivalence and leads partners to seek thrills elsewhere. The research on adultery, however, is notoriously skewed, as too, apparently, is the advice marriage therapists have for couples dealing with it. In dozens of studies done in the decades since Kinsey, between 20 and 70 percent of men and women report having had an affair. Somebody’s lying. Seventy percent seems low. All of that excitement-seeking may have been responsible for landing us in that boring relationship in the first place.

Blame Oxytocin

Love may be all in our head. The mysterious enabler that keeps us going back again and again despite past failures (and, of course, if we’ve learned anything from Hollywood, isn’t anything short of “together forever” a failure?) is the hormone oxytocin. When it comes to love, oxytocin is the benevolent dictator of our brains. Those who, for biological reasons, can’t secrete it become psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. For the rest of us, oxytocin, which plugs directly into our amygdala — that primitive fight or flight part of our brains — decreases fear, increases trust and makes us promise eternity to our betrothed. (Interestingly, men confess their love, on average, 42 days before women, according to one recent MIT study.) From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Meet, get excited, hook up, have babies, repeat. Oxytocin, along with its chemical compatriots, the neurotransmitters dopamine and phenylethylamine, isn’t forever, however. Its power to hold sway over us wanes at between 12 and 18 months. After that, in order to remain on the path to happily ever after, we must rely on something psychologists and advice columnists refer to as “hard work.”

The Power of Optimism

It’s not all dismal news for love though. There is hope for couples who decide to stick it out, says science. Love’s savior may be something known as “optimism bias.” A recent study in Scientific American Mind found that 80 percent of human beings have it. Those who don’t are predictably prone to depression and anxiety. People with the bias routinely overestimate their chances of success and downplay the odds of a misfortune, even after they are presented with the facts. Evolution, it seems, has given humanity the tools to find true love after all, even if it was never really there in the first place.