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By Audrey Davies '22
Romantic love is a powerful thing. Love is associated with many positive emotions and is found to increase our happiness and life satisfaction. On the other hand, love has the power to create negative effects on one’s mental and emotional health. Romantic breakups are shown to evoke feelings of shame, sadness, and a decrease in life satisfaction. Lust and jealousy can result from love, but so can kindness and thoughtfulness.
A common perception of love is that love is uncontrollable and that you can’t help who you love or how intensely you love. But, wouldn’t it be great if you could regulate your love for someone, dialing up your emotions when you are falling out of love with a partner or dialing down your feelings when you are falling for the wrong person? A study has shown that this may be the case. Psychology researchers from the University of Maryland and Erasmus University recorded the brain waves of participants as they looked at a picture of their ex or current partner and thought about the negative and positive aspects of that person. An important discovery was that if you ever find yourself attracted to the wrong person, you are capable of preventing yourself from falling in love with that person. The researchers found that reappraisal* was used to regulate love feelings, an effect useful for dealing with a hard breakup or stopping yourself from pursuing an unfit partner. Feelings of love were also able to be downplayed by imagining negative future scenarios with that person. Conversely, imagining positive future scenarios with someone were found to be able to up-regulate love emotions. In addition, it was observed that trying new activities with your partner helped prevent “falling out of love” in long term relationships.
This study was the first of its kind, and while it did provide insight into whether falling in love is a choice and if whether we can really regulate our love emotions, there are many more facets of love and attraction that should be researched and experimented with. I believe these results can help society learn more about one of our strongest and most intense human emotions, love.
*using cognitive processes to reinterpret the meaning of a situation in order to up-down regulate the emotions
Works cited:
Langeslag, Sandra J. E., van Strein, Jane W. “Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings:
Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility.” PubMed Central, 16 August 2016.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987042/
Salaky, Kristin. “Science says we may be able to control who we fall for after all.” Insider, 6
June 2017. https://www.insider.com/can-you-control-who-you-love-2017-6
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