Love and pair-bonding

Zephir855

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Apr 29, 2021
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Hello Peatists,

I think many would agree that life-long monogamy is an unnatural state and something necessitated by the "civilised" social structure that developed with agriculture, yet many still try to make monogamy work and some seem to actually succeed at it.

What do you think are the factors that enable a happy monogamous relationship, how is sustainable love between two people actually generated?

1) Is it strongly dependent on initial chemistry and having exquisitely matched personalities?

2) Or, is it less dependent on personality traits and more directly generated by deliberate loving action and loving intent towards your partner (ie choosing to love, the grass is greener where you water it)?

3) Or, is the ease with which you can generate loving feelings directly dependent on your general state of health, ie the key to staying in love is to stay healthy?

I'm leaning towards #3 being the most important, being bio-energetically healthy increases your baseline level of positive affect, making you more loving in general towards the world, including your partner, making you both more motivated to make him/her happy, and more energetically capable to perform loving acts per #2.

Is letting your health slide after you get into a committed relationship the main reason why many relationships deteriorate over time? The low-stress hypo-energetic state leads to a stable but unfulfilling monogamous relationship, whereas people dominated by the stress metabolism seem prone to serial monogamy. In contrast I've noticed that people with a truly strong metabolism are quite able to keep a fulfilling and love-filled monogamous relationship going for life (public figure examples: Christopher Lee, Stanley Kubrick, Sean Connery), but I might be cherry-picking here.

I'm thinking that #1 is the least important, since almost everyone first gets together with a person based on at least some kind of mutual attraction and would not remain together long if they were completely incompatible, but a great many couples break up despite strong initial attraction and shared personality traits.
 

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