Can Passionate Love Survive the Test of Time?

It’s almost a given that passionate love will eventually dissipate and turn into a more sustainable emotion. You may have experienced this yourself as you and your partner enjoy more quiet moments with the passage of time. There were the lows, but then again, the highs more than outweighed them. What was once messy has now become neat.

Efforts to define love in psychological terms are, admittedly, risky. How can you turn this ineffable quality of feeling that you and your partner are destined for each other into a measurable entity? How well would that measure even capture the day-to-day variations you experience when the highs stay high or when the lows, sadly, erode your sense of commitment and happiness?

Capturing Passionate Love’s Variations

Taking on this seemingly impossible task, Carnegie Mellon’s Saurabh Bhargava (2024) muses that, despite its “presumed indispensability for relationships, physical and mental health, and even longevity," and despite the surfeit of theories, “empirical evidence on love is limited." Researchers may be afraid to tackle the complexities of measurement, and although questionnaire measures exist, these suffer from the problem of taking a single snapshot of a person’s feelings toward their closest romantic partner. Everyone knows that love may be constant, but its manifestation is anything but.

Consider what happens in a “messy” relationship. You might know a couple who seem to enjoy getting into what you might politely call a debate but which in reality is a vigorous back-and-forth of disagreeing observations. You’ve learned that these exchanges mean nothing compared to the clear demonstrations of affection, love, and support that the partners show each other, especially when one of them is having a bad day. They’ve been together for years and that is unlikely to change.

In a neater type of relationship, a couple may put on a unified front through all situations, and you can’t recall a time that they actually disagreed. As often as you’ve seen this couple, though, you also can’t recall a time when they hugged and kissed in front of you. They seem happy enough, but hardly passionate.

Testing Love’s Highs and Lows

Framing love as an emotion that can show these variations, Bhargava took an experiences sample method (ESM) approach to measuring love. Couples rated the extent to which they felt 15 specific emotions, including love, every 30 minutes over the course of a 10-day interval via mobile push notifications. They also reported who they were with (partner, children, family, friends) and whether the time with those people was exclusively spent with them alone.

The CMU researcher found that despite the somewhat heavy response burden involved in collecting these data, 97% of the sample provided data for the entire period of the study (they were paid from $100 to $150). The study was carried out over four waves from 2012 to 2013 on a total sample size of 3,867 married adults (heterosexual) ranging from 18 to 64 years old (average age 45 years).

To measure passionate love, Bhargava combined ratings of excitement and love, and distilled out ratings of these emotions during the day so that they reflected only time with partner, not anyone else.

Overall, participants reported love in 3.2% of all periods, making it the ninth-most-prevalent emotion. Men reported slightly fewer instances of love (1.3%) than women. However, men were more likely than women to rate the joint feelings of love and excitement when with their partners.

The big question about love’s ability to last over time became answered by the data from couples who varied in their duration of marriages. Across increasingly longer-married couples, there was a dip for both men and women in change in mood associated with exclusive partner time, although this was more pronounced for men. However, both men and women rated their love and excitement as higher when they felt they were in the presence of love from their partner.

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The decline in the love-plus-excitement data in older cohorts would suggest that the adage of love fading over time has merit. Furthermore, because those who were no longer married by definition were not in the sample, maybe the couples with the most passion also were the most likely to end their relationship. Maybe those neat couples are better off after all. However, passionate love did not fade completely over time.

As Bhargava concluded, “Notably, the most mature couples…reported (passionate) love with nontrivial frequency—rejecting assertions as to its complete atrophy." Add to this the finding that “partner love, when experienced, predicted a massive increase in mood.” Could this explain why your “messy” couple seems to be so happy? Their highs and lows might feed into a cycle in which both show that, despite slight differences of opinion, they really do love each other.

Turning to the gender difference, though, another possible explanation, other than that women get burned out more than men do, the time-use data suggests another conclusion. Recall that people were asked what they were doing when they rated their emotions. Women in the later cohorts seemed to be spending more time than men on chores; men, conversely, spent more time relaxing. This gender gap could reflect a continuation from earlier cohorts of enactments of more stereotypically masculine and feminine roles in the home. You can conclude what you like from this result.

The Value of Passionate Love

Overall, Bhargava concludes that her results on the experiences of love and well-being reinforce prior research showing the benefits of love for “self-esteem, health, and longevity." It’s worth it, in other words, to invest time in keeping love’s passion going. Even more to the point, the fact that both men and women showed huge well-being boosts when their partner expressed love suggests that being in a relationship in which you feel valued seems as important as feeling the emotion yourself.

You can ask yourself the same questions that the CMU researcher gave to her participants, and maybe ping your partner with the same questions. How much time do you spend together, and how much do you show affection toward each other? Because only one person in the couple was tested, there’s no way to estimate the joint effects of the expression of affection by partners toward each other, but that is a topic for another study.

To sum up, there’s no reason that passion has to die, nor is there reason to avoid it. Not only can feeling passion help infuse you with good feelings, but it can also infuse the fulfillment you and your partner find with each other.