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The World Today - Monday, July 26, 1999 12:27
COMPERE: Romantics amongst us will not be amused at the latest research on the nature of love. A study at Cornell University in New York State in the United States suggests that, for most men and women, love lasts no more than 30 months. After that, according to the study, love becomes a habit with little chance of the so-called love chemicals returning the relationship. Denise Knight reports.
DENISE KNIGHT: Professor Roger Short from the University of Melbourne is an evolutionary biologist and the co-author of the book Ever Since Adam and Eve. He says love does have a chemical basis in the brain.
PROF. ROGER SHORT: As to how long love lasts depends on what you mean by love, and I'd go back to the ancient Greeks who summed it beautifully. They said there are two sorts of love. There's eros, which is the erotic intercourse-related love and there's agape which is the sort of more bonding tender form of love. And I think what happens when people fall in love, is that you fall in love because of eros and gradually it gives way to a lasting bonding love which is that of agape.
DENISE KNIGHT: Professor Short says research clearly shows that lust doesn't last very long.
PROF. SHORT: The intense physical desire to be in contact physically with the other person and to have intercourse with them, that has a relatively short life as overruling overriding emotion.
DENISE KNIGHT: Are you saying then that the lust, that intense sexual attraction, happens for a particular reason which is reproduction?
PROF. SHORT: That's obviously the reason it starts, is to bring a male and a female who otherwise would live very different lives with very different aspirations and expectations, to bring them together with one common desire; and it's a wonderful thing and, without it, the human species wouldn't exist. But, it has a rather sort of transitory nature, that intense physical attraction, and it gives way to this far more important lasting bonding relationship which is very necessary, particularly in humans, for the rearing of the offspring. And, as we know, rearing your children takes forever.
DENISE KNIGHT: Roger Short says it's not just sexual love that has a chemical basis.
PROF. SHORT: If we look at another sort of love - the love of a mother for her baby - we're pretty sure now, in animals, that that is very definitely chemical and we know which hormone is responsible. It's the hormone oxytocin and this is produced in the base of the brain - in the pituary gland - and is very essential for the ability of the mother to mother her newborn young.
DENISE KNIGHT: Dr Gil Anaf is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist in Adelaide. He says couples who have been together for years would be surprised at the findings, that men and women are biologically predisposed to be in love for no more than 30 months.
DR GIL ANAF: It tends to reinforce the current culture of reducing everything to a biochemical problem almost, and making something that is a meaningful part of relationships almost sound like sickness.
DENISE KNIGHT: Dr Anaf believes there is such a thing as true love which can last a long time.
DR ANAF: Well, I think it's like a therapeutic or analytic view of romance might be that people fall in love with illusions about the other person, which are created in a mutual kind of novel and intoxicating atmosphere, which is all very pleasant and nice while it lasts; but, then when these illusions gradually subside, one is faced with the real person behind that and one would say that's when true love starts, because you start relating to the real person rather than the illusion.
COMPERE: Psychoanalyst, Dr Gil Anaf, with Denise Knight.
© 1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation