Is Love Best When It's Fresh?

The taste and nutritional value of romantic love.

KEY POINTS

• Focusing only on the freshness of love can prevent people from developing long-lasting, profound love.
• Profound romantic relationships can preserve the "nutritional value" of love as well as some of its exciting taste and freshness.
• Neither change nor familiarity alone produce spikes of romantic intensity—it is a change happening within a familiar framework that does so.

“Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.” —Russian proverb

“There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?” —Tom Robbins

The connection between love and time has always fascinated lovers, who ask themselves if their love will endure, always and forever. And if it does, will it be the same as it is now? Will there still be traces of the initial infatuation after a few years have passed? Will the wonderful feeling of not noticing how time passes be replaced by boredom and the sense that time hardly moves?

The problem: Will you love me tomorrow?

“Tonight you’re mine, completely ... but will you love me tomorrow?” —Carole King

”Marble breaks and iron bends, but our love will never end.” —Drafi Deutscher

Carole King asks a burning question of the romantic lover: Will you love me tomorrow? In other words, will the feeling that I am your beloved last only until the sun rises, or will it last for many years? Can brief romantic affairs be fully satisfied?

There are confusing findings in this regard.

A large body of research indicates that sexual desire decreases dramatically over time within relationships. Thus, the frequency of sexual activity with one’s partner tends to decline steadily as the relationship lengthens. After one year of marriage, couples tend to be half as sexually active together as they were during their first month of marriage, with sex declining more gradually thereafter. A similar pattern of decline has been found among cohabiting heterosexual couples and among gay and lesbian couples. Hence, enduring romantic love seems to be uncommon, often evolving into companionate love in which sexual desire grows weaker as time passes (e.g., Baumeister & Bratslavsky 1999; Brewis & Meyer 2005; Call et al., 1995).

Yet research also suggests that many long-term couples remain deeply in love. Daniel O’Leary and colleagues (2012) asked 274 married individuals: “How in love are you with your partner?” Forty percent of those married for more than a decade reported being “very intensely in love.” Even more dramatically, among those in marriages of thirty years or more, 40 percent of wives and 35 percent of husbands reported very intense love for their partner. Moreover, Bianca Acevedo and colleagues (2012) showed 10 women and seven men who had been married for an average of 21 years and reported being intensely in love with their spouses the facial images of their partners while scanning their brains with fMRI. The scans revealed a significant activation in key reward centers of the brain—much like the pattern found in people experiencing fresh love, but vastly different from those in companionate relationships.

Change and familiarity

“The more I see you, the more I want you. Somehow this feeling just grows and grows. With every sigh, I become more mad about you.” —Chris Montez

“Weirdly, I want the unpleasant situation between me and my husband to change. But then again, I would not have an excuse for a hot lover. Just being honest...” —A married woman

People typically experience emotions when they perceive positive or negative significant changes in their personal situation—or in that of those related to them (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000). This seems to work against the possibility of enduring romantic love. From an evolutionary point of view, it is advantageous to focus our attention on change rather than on static stimuli. Change indicates that our situation is unstable, and awareness of this may mean the difference between life and death. A change cannot persist for an extended period; after a while, we consider the change as normal, and it no longer stimulates us.

In addition to the crucial role of change in producing emotions, similarity and familiarity have been found to be prompts for emotion. Thus, romantic partners show strong similarity in age and in political and religious attitudes; moderate similarity in education, general intelligence, and values; and little or no similarity in personality characteristics. Only in short-term relationships, where commitment is low, do people prefer dissimilar partners. In long-term relationships, which are characterized by high commitment and joint activities, greater similarity predicts romantic liking (Finkel et al., 2015).

Neither change nor familiarity alone, however, has been found to produce romantic intensity spikes. It is a particular change—one that happens to a familiar, stable framework—which tends to incite such an intensity increase. While change tends to generate intense, short-term emotion, familiarity tends to produce a more moderate attitude, which can be long-lasting indeed.

Romantic intensity and profundity

“We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.” —Thomas Merton

Romantic profundity goes beyond mere romantic intensity and refers to the lover’s broader and more enduring attitude. External change is highly significant in generating romantic intensity; in romantic depth, familiarity, stability, and development are tremendously important. While romantic novelty is useful in preventing boredom, romantic familiarity is valuable in promoting flourishing (Ben-Ze’ev, 2019).

Likewise, we can differentiate between fleeting pleasure and lasting satisfaction. Superficial pleasure is an immediately rewarding, relatively short-lived experience requiring few complex human capacities. Superficial experiences affect only the surface and are limited in their scope and impact—although their impact can become rather negative if we engage in them excessively. Profound satisfaction involves optimal functioning, using and developing one’s main capacities and attitudes. Gorging ourselves on consumer goods can give us short-term pleasure, but it is unlikely to make us substantially happier people.

Eggs and aging wine

“Love and eggs taste best when they are fresh.” —Russian proverb (revised)

When it comes to eggs, we look for two things—taste and nutritional value. And it is when eggs are fresh that they are at their peak. Life gets more complicated when love is at stake. The intensity of excitement (the “taste”) is strongest when love is fresh, but the profundity of the connection (the “nutritional value”) is often best when love is mature. While the old saying has it that “revenge is a dish best served cold,” I believe that romantic love should never be cold. It does not need to be served at the boiling point, however; warm is very good as well.

In my book, The Arc of Love, I cast doubt on the popular attempts to make love as fresh as it was at its very beginning. When freshness is foremost, we are setting ourselves up to lose the battle for long-lasting profound love before the war has begun, as there will always be fresher and tastier occasional romantic affairs than the present one.

I am not the kind of romantic nutritionist who advises giving up enjoyable but non-nutritious food while promising that, ultimately, we will feel better without it. I do not recommend giving up intense, wild love—on the contrary, in my view, we are witnessing a renaissance of romantic intensity and excitement, and this is a positive development. However, these new circumstances have disturbed the balance between intensity and profundity to the extent that romantic profundity is becoming harder and harder to achieve.

When the bond between partners is nourishing, and lovers bring out the best in each other, they become calmer, happier, and healthier. In this way, they discover new tastes in their ongoing romantic relationships. People who live in a romantic environment that helps them flourish continue to surprise themselves and their partners, making each other the sunshine of their life.

Unlike most other consumable goods, wine has the potential to improve in quality over time. So do romantic relationships. In both cases, this is a complex achievement depending on various internal and external factors.

To paraphrase Napoleon Bonaparte, who said that “nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin,” we can say that nothing makes the future look so rosy as to contemplate it through profound love.