Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It’s all part of falling passionately in love — and scientists now say the feeling won’t last more than a year.
The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers.
The Italian scientists found far higher levels of NGF in the blood of 58 people who had recently fallen madly in love than in that of a group of singles and people in long-term relationships.
But after a year with the same lover, the quantity of the ‘love molecule’ in their blood had fallen to the same level as that of the other groups.
The Italian researchers, publishing their study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, said it was not clear how falling in love triggers higher levels of NGF, but the molecule clearly has an important role in the “social chemistry” between people at the start of a relationship.
I’m sure a lot of romantics out there will disagree, saying how their love will stand the test of time and last forever and ever, growing stronger and stronger…
I personally think this is both true and false at the same time. Love isn’t a constant unique definable thing, it changes, grows and morphs with time and has a different feeling and taste at every stage.
So it might be true that people don’t feel that same feeling they feel at the beginning of a relationship, but that’s only normal as they’re no longer at its beginning, they’re at a later stage and so they feel something quite different, which is equally beautiful.
Of course that is one nice possibility, the other is that they just wake up one day and stop loving each other 😛
[Source: Reuters]