Couples With Right Chemistry Have Love Down to a Science

For three decades, relationship research psychologists have been able to

pinpoint behaviors in couples that lead to successful, fulfilling and enduring

relationships and conversely, behaviors that are corrosive, insidious and deleterious

to the bonds of love.

Over the last dozen years, such relationship data have spurred an explosion of

therapeutic approaches, relationship education courses and 911-emergency-like

interventions for the divorce-bound. There is a kind of science to staying in love,

many psychologists and therapists agree, concrete ways to invigorate a couple’s

bond and to inoculate couples against the predictable lows and endemic conflicts

of long-term love.

But these efforts stand little chance if a couple doesn’t have chemistry,

psychologists Janice R. Levine and Howard J. Markman write in Why Do Fools

Fall in Love?, a collection of essays written by leading

relationship researchers and psychologists pondering the mysteries of love. LA Times