This article examines the possibility that romantic love (with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest) can exist in long-term relationships. A review of taxonomies, theory, and research suggests that romantic love, without the obsession component typical of early stage romantic love, can and does exist in long-term marriages, and is associated with marital satisfaction, well-being, and high...

ABS1RACT In this study, individual differences in internal-external control were expected to relate to several aspects of ronantic, hetrosexual love. For example, it was hypothesized that proportionally fewer internals experience romantic attachments. Moreover, among persons having been in love, internals were expected to have fewer romantic experiences and to experience romantic attraction as ...

Drug addiction is a complex neurological dysfunction induced by recurring drug intoxication. Strategies to prevent and treat drug addiction constitute a topic of research interest. Early-stage romantic love is characterized by some characteristics of addiction, which gradually disappear as the love relationship progresses. Therefore, comparison of the concordance and discordance between romanti...

Drawing on recent claims in the study of relationships, attachment, and emotion, the authors hypothesized that romantic love serves a commitment-related function and sexual desire a reproduction-related function. Consistent with these claims, in Study 1, brief experiences of romantic love and sexual desire observed in a 3-min interaction between romantic partners were related to distinct feelin...

Scientists have described myriad traits in mammalian and avian species that evolved to attract mates. But the brain mechanisms by which conspecifics become attracted to these traits is largely unknown. Yet mammals and birds express mate preferences and make mate choices, and data suggest that this "attraction system" is associated with the dopaminergic reward system. It has been proposed that i...

Recently a compassionate love scale was developed to assess compassionate love or altruistic love for different targets (e.g., romantic partner, close others and all the humanity; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005). This study was conducted to examine the psychometric properties of the Compassionate Love Scale in the Portuguese context. In addition, it has been examined how compassionate love for a romanti...

OBJECTIVE Experiencing romantic love is an important part of individual development. Here, we investigated stability and change in romantic love and psychological correlates, including mood states, anxiety, and sleep, among Iranian adolescents over a period of 8 months. METHOD Two hundred and one adolescents who had taken part in a previous study were contacted; 157 responded. Participants co...

This paper discusses ideal romantic love as it appears in Western literature and how women are portrayed in works containing idealistic romantic plots. It also explores how Canadian author Margaret Atwood rejects the traditional love plot in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as in her book of poetry Power Politics and the poem “A Woman’s Issue.” The first section of this paper gives a bri...

Although sexual desire and romantic love are often experienced in concert, they are fundamentally distinct sub jective experiences with distinct neurobiological substrates. The basis for these distinctions is the evolutionary origin of each type of experience. The processes underlying sexual desire evolved in the context of sexual mating, whereas the processes underlying romantic love?or pair b...

Romantic love is the catalyst behind the spread of the human life. The neurobiology of love embraces the hypothesis that what we call "romantic attachment" or "romantic love" may be at least in part the expression of biological factors. A corollary of this hypothesis states that it is possible to learn much about the nature of human love by studying the molecules involved in the expression of s...