"How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" - Albert Einstein

[Image via this site.]

Or another question: forget first love (though it’s interesting… and we can explain a bit more these days in terms of hormones and pubertal development). But we are still far from explaining chemistry, how love/like/lust develop, how they fall apart, let alone how they dwindle slowly in sometimes heartwrenching ways…. or how, in long-term relationships, love and excitement sometimes come back in surprising ways, making you glad that you decided at some earlier point not to call it quits, but to give your life together a shot.

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"Speaking as a former teenage guy, the fact that you might someday get lucky was like the only thing getting you through those years… if you take that away I don’t know what’s left. It was the basic narrative of male adolescence." - Author Tom Perrotta as quoted in a thoughtful New York Times article written by Mokoto Rich about Perrotta’s novel The Abstinence Teacher Image via this site.

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"What we add here is that, ‘OK, being married is in general good, but be careful about the kind of person you have married.’ The quality of the relationship matters." - Roberto DeVogli, University College in London in an article found on CNN.com This quote comes in the context of a study I told you about recently that showed that married women -  more so than married men - may suffer heart problems and that this may be particularly true for women who stay quiet during arguments and who don’t voice their concerns with their partners. The above quote, however, is another oversimplification of what this all means. It does not mean that women (or men) are necessarily choosing the wrong partners - or that there are certain people who should not be married or in long term relationships. Instead, I’d encourage people to seek out relationship skills that help you to work with and live with and love the person you’ve chosen to be with. Pretty much any relationship or marriage book by Dr. John Gottman is a decent start as is couples counseling or sex therapy.

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