"Kendall, I love you. I love our three kids who aren't even born yet. And I love that we'll have a great life together. Please, please marry me."
– Speed Dating
Nancy Warren, a B.C. author of more than 30 sexy romance novels including Speed Dating, knows that love does settle down. Married for 22 years to a man she met when she was 19, Warren understands the way love changes with time; she describes her enduring love for her husband, Rick, as "the same as ever, only quieter."
For better or worse, the wild passion of early love is unsustainable – at least with the same person. Pfaus figures this is the lure of serial monogamy. "Some people get a rush out of the beginning and just keep trying to repeat it." For biological reasons that are not yet understood, emotional chaos eventually gives way to calm, and emotional security trumps sex.
This is what Fisher describes as the attachment stage of romance, when couples experience a "feeling of fusion with a long-term mate." Robert Sternberg, a psychologist from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., proposes in his triangular theory of love that intimacy, passion and commitment are the essential (but varying) ingredients of every type of love relationship, further refining the category. He describes this attachment stage of coupledom as companionate love (intimacy plus commitment) or consummate love (intimacy, commitment plus passion). He calls long-term love that is based only on commitment empty love.
Researchers point to prairie voles as evidence that the urge to bond with a partner is bred in bed and then in the brain. These mouselike rodents are one of only three per cent of mammal species (humans among them) that appear to form monogamous relationships. After an epic 48-hour mating ritual, some 90 per cent mate for life with a single partner. This behaviour is in marked contrast to their more promiscuous but genetically similar cousins, the montane voles, who mate and then move on.
Researchers have determined that prairie voles release two closely related "satisfaction" hormones, vasopressin and oxytocin, during copulation. But unlike the montane voles, prairie voles have more receptors for these hormones in particular centres of their brains, meaning that every time they couple they reinforce their attachment to their sex partner. Researchers such as Fisher and Pfaus believe these so-called cuddle chemicals, which are also released during human coupling, contribute to the delicious feeling of connectedness that follows loving sex.
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