Taking a page out of the Bee Gees‘s playbook, researchers asked scores of married Americans one simple question: How deep is your love?
In spite of the 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, the answer was encouraging to anyone who believes in everlasting love.
Of the 274 married Americans randomly surveyed by a team at Stony Brook University in New York, 74 percent of couples married 10 years or more consider themselves “very in love,” “intensely in love” or “very intensely in love.”
On an individual level, the numbers varied slightly according to gender. While 49 percent of men said they were “very intensely in love,” 46.3 percent of women reported the same.
Indeed, married love seems to grow stronger with age. While individuals in their second decade of marriage didn’t gush over their spouse quite as much as those married 10 years or less, “for those married over 30 years, 40 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported being ‘very intensely in love,’” Jacobs notes.
Psychologist K. Daniel O’Leary writes in the study that they were surprised by these results, however. Earlier this year, a group of fellow Stony Brook professors discovered, through MRI scans, that honeymooners and couples married more than 10 years had similar brain activity when looking at pictures of their spouses.
So how do you know if you’re really in love?
In the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, Leary and his crew list several factors that correlate positively with intense love reported by the study’s participants.
“Thinking about the partner in positive ways and how often they thought about the partner when not together were two of the strongest predictors of intense love,” they write.
Individuals who considered themselves in love also noted that they frequently kiss, hug and have sex with their spouse, and often do “novel things” together.
In spite of the 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, the answer was encouraging to anyone who believes in everlasting love.
Of the 274 married Americans randomly surveyed by a team at Stony Brook University in New York, 74 percent of couples married 10 years or more consider themselves “very in love,” “intensely in love” or “very intensely in love.”
On an individual level, the numbers varied slightly according to gender. While 49 percent of men said they were “very intensely in love,” 46.3 percent of women reported the same.
Indeed, married love seems to grow stronger with age. While individuals in their second decade of marriage didn’t gush over their spouse quite as much as those married 10 years or less, “for those married over 30 years, 40 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported being ‘very intensely in love,’” Jacobs notes.
Psychologist K. Daniel O’Leary writes in the study that they were surprised by these results, however. Earlier this year, a group of fellow Stony Brook professors discovered, through MRI scans, that honeymooners and couples married more than 10 years had similar brain activity when looking at pictures of their spouses.
So how do you know if you’re really in love?
In the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, Leary and his crew list several factors that correlate positively with intense love reported by the study’s participants.
“Thinking about the partner in positive ways and how often they thought about the partner when not together were two of the strongest predictors of intense love,” they write.
Individuals who considered themselves in love also noted that they frequently kiss, hug and have sex with their spouse, and often do “novel things” together.
