Family Law

Researchers Try to Understand Marriage and Divorce

By ckramer

The surprising divorce of power couple Al and Tipper Gore has reminded the American public about that simple truth: nobody knows what goes on in a marriage except the two people in it.

Few predicted that prominent divorce, and researchers have found that divorce on the whole is a difficult outcome to predict or to quantify.

One researcher, according to the New York Times, was Robert Levenson, the director of the psychophysiology lab at the University of California, Berkeley. In his search for answers about marriage, divorce and love, he videotaped ten couples as they talked and bickered. Then he showed those videos to 200 people who are traditionally understood to have some insight into human relationships, like pastors, relationship counselors, therapists and scientists. He asked these people to predict which marriages were doomed.

Levenson, of course, already knew which marriages had ended in divorce. And it turned out that the professionals could not predict which ones would. They got it wrong half the time, suggesting that it is extremely difficult for even the best of the best to determine, from the outside, the health of a marriage.

?People on the outside aren?t very good at telling how marriages are really working,? Levenson said of the research.

That hasn?t stopped academic researching from trying to answer these mysterious questions, and to attempt to get to the bottom of love and relationships.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Bianca Acevedo is studying the neuroscientific roots of relationships, and the endurance of passionate love. She searched out couples who had been married for a long time who still shared a passionate love for one another, who were still ?madly in love.? She spoke to 274 men and women, surveying them about their passion and their relationships and collecting data about how they went about the business of love.

What she found surprised her. Rather than finding the small portion of long-married couples still madly in love that she expected, she came to learn that around 40 percent of those couples got high marks for romance. Even among the remaining 60 percent, there were many people who were still in love and happy with their relationship, just not with the elevated intensity of the most zealous 40 percent.

In another study, 17 men and women who registered as passionately in love underwent brain scans, as researchers tried to determine what that might look like in the activity of the brain. Long-married couples looked at images of their spouse as they were being scanned, and their responses were measured.

What scientists read was that these couples had the same brain response to their spouses as people who were in the early stages of a romantic relationship. The romantic part of the brain, in other words, was as robust and excited about their long-married partners as new lovers were about each other.

These traits include euphoria as well as security and calmness. ?I think it?s wonderful news,? said Dr. Acevedo about the findings. One way to keep the fires of passion burning, according to Dr. Acevedo, was to stay active in each other?s lives.

She cited the Gores as a couple that had seemed to disengage from each other?s life. The Gores themselves admitted that they had grown apart and begun to lead separate lives.

Full post as published by The Divorce Blog on June 10, 2010 (boomark / email).