How to be happy in love

No one is born to fall in love, there is no so-called to meet the age of love, love is an art, love is a compulsory course of life. Let's practice love with Teacher Yufeng.

Different expressions of love are actually determined by attachment style

The same is in love, different people will behave differently.

Some people show that love is a dispensable cloud, two people are good, a person is also good. And some people are so attached to their partner that the world would stop without them.

Why is that?

We need to start with a classic psychological experiment -- the "maternal deprivation" experiment. Harlow, an animal psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, used rhesus monkeys to do the experiment.

In the experiment, the researchers took newborn infant monkeys out of their mothers' care and put them in cages alone. There were two "fake mothers" in the cage. One was made of wire and carried a bottle. The other was made of flannelette and had no bottle on him.

The researchers found that when hungry, the young monkeys suckled from their wire mothers; When they want to rest or feel fear, the young monkeys will lie down on the mother flannelette. Thus, the young monkeys not only need food, but also have an innate need for close physical contact with their mothers. In other words, milk is not necessarily a mother, intimate contact is.

This experiment actually suggests that human babies also have an innate need for comfort. Whether this need can be well satisfied often directly determines the relationship pattern with others in adulthood.

Let's start with childhood. We often hear people say that some children are "easy to raise" and some are "difficult to raise". Why is that? According to psychology, this is caused by different attachment styles. About two-thirds of the children were "securely attached," or easy to raise; About a quarter of the children had "avoidant attachment" and about a tenth had "anxious attachment", which is the more "difficult" type.

How to understand this feeling?

Take the most common example. Every morning, I have to take my children to kindergarten. At first, the child did not want to go, kept crying, I also followed the tears. Over time, the situation gradually improved.

In general, children who are securely attached tend to say goodbye normally, have fun with their friends, and go home happy when their parents pick them up in the evening. Children with an anxious attachment will try to stop their parents from leaving by crying and screaming. The children of avoidant attachment do not want their parents to leave, but they do not have any performance on the surface. They just secretly hide away sad and do not play with their children.

Two securely attached people are most likely to form a long and stable relationship. Of course, this doesn't mean that people with other attachment styles are doomed to marriage and happiness.

In fact, every type of attachment has a chance to achieve a happy love, because love and marriage require two people to grow and mature together in the process of running in with each other.

Happiness is not born, need to run in and grow

So, how do we fit in and grow together? Harmony needs to be achieved on three levels: intimacy, passion and commitment. This is based on the triad theory of love proposed by Yale University psychologist David Sternberg in the last century, which is probably the most influential view of human love.

According to the triadic theory of love, although human love is complex and changeable, it has three basic components: intimacy, passion and commitment.

Intimacy is an emotional expression based on mutual trust, including warmth, understanding, communication, support and sharing.

Passion is necessarily accompanied by sexual attraction to each other and is characterized by physical arousal. Passion often takes the form of a desire for sex, and any strong emotion that is gratified by a partner falls into this category.

Commitment is a kind of responsibility and commitment that is internalized as an individual's spiritual needs. It includes the decision to commit oneself to a relationship and the effort to maintain it.

Commitment is primarily cognitive, intimacy is emotional, and passion is motivational. The degree of these three components will lead to different results of love.

Romantic love, also called passionate love, consists of intense sexual desire and infatuation and often dominates the early stages of a relationship. Romantic love is a complex mixture of emotions, such as fear, anger, sexual desire, joy, jealousy, etc. However, some emotions can also be a source of pain. Romantic partners are more likely to be the cause of depression than friends, research has found.

True love, also called companionate love, is the desire to be with another person and to feel a deep affection for that person. As love matures, passion tends to give way to emotion, sexual attraction wanes, novelty is replaced by familiarity, and both partners are in a caring, secure attachment relationship.

And finally, perfect love, which according to Sternberg is the strongest and most perfect kind of love. Perfect love, he suggests, consists in simultaneously sharing all three dimensions of love: passion, intimacy and commitment. If a couple fits all three of these descriptions, they experience perfect love.

Don't ignore the sexual motive

It is important to mention the sexual motivation, which is an important driver of the passionate component.

The sexual motive is as important to human survival and reproduction as the hunger motive, but we are ashamed to talk about it. The hypothalamus, which plays an important role in hunger motivation, also plays a role in sexual motivation.

The sexually motivated area of the brain is located in the central hypothalamus, which stimulates the pituitary gland to release hormone-stimulating hormones, thus causing the production of sex hormones.

Androgens and estrogens are the two most important hormones involved in sexual activity. Estrogen predominates in women and is mainly produced by the ovaries. Androgen is predominant in the male body and is mainly produced by the male adrenal gland and testicles. The secretion of sex hormones is regulated by feedback from the central nervous system, which keeps the hormones at the desired level.

Because of these common physiological mechanisms, sexual problems exist in every culture.

For example, in terms of sensory stimuli, women are more likely to be aroused by touch, while men are more likely to be aroused by visual factors.

Smell, for example, has also been linked to sexual interest between the sexes. Women may like the smell of their partner more, which leads to the line: "Miss his smile, miss his smell... Miss his white socks and fingers with the faint smell of tobacco ".

But experience tells us that biological factors are not enough to control human sexuality completely, and that cognitive and cultural factors also play a very important role.

Let's start with the cultural factors. A survey of U.S. girls in grades 6 through 8 found that Asian American girls said they should have their first sexual encounter before age 22, while African American girls said they should wait until at least age 19.

The study also found that the more girls felt they could succeed at school and work, the more likely they were to delay having sex for the first time.

Then there's cognition and experience. When faced with someone we are sexually attracted to, we often realize that we must suppress sexual urges before we can establish a good relationship with them. We also consider whether the other person is committed to me, what the future of the relationship will look like, and so on.

In short, with the excitement of brain activity and the release of hormones, we are more likely to perceive, control, and reason to make sexual activity more meaningful, thus achieving more happiness.

Finally, I would like to share the relationship between unrequited love, love and marriage. First of all, love must involve interaction and communication, so if it is only one person's unrequited love, it is not love, but obsession. Secondly, love needs to be maintained and cultivated. Marriage fixes some social rules such as responsibilities, affirms social norms, and also provides an environment for the maintenance of love.

Marriage is built on the basis of love, love is built on the basis of like. Of course, this is a general logical relationship, sometimes, they can also exist independently. I think you must have seen marriage without love, but also have seen love without the result of marriage. So, from this point of view, marriage is not the guarantee of love, and it is very difficult to guarantee, the relationship is. In other words, love, not marriage, is the source of happiness.