The Honeymoon Phase of Love: with Justine Bates-Krakoff, MS

The honeymoon phase of love is one of the greatest human experiences. Learn from this episode: What is the honeymoon phase? What is happening in our brains? How long does the honeymoon phase last? How can learning about the honeymoon phase apply to smart dating? How can knowledge about the honeymoon phase inform us about marital affairs? How can the above inform us about long distance relationships? Can long term relationships keep the honeymoon phase going and how? (The answer is: yes they can!) My guest for this episode is Justine Bates-Krakoff, MS, an expert on brain-behavior relationships, including work in: a longitudinal study examining genetic, cognitive, and interpersonal vulnerability to depression, a group intervention based on The Penn Resiliency Program (PRP), an investigation on PTSD and resilience trajectories in at-risk populations following traumatic events, and internship at New York Presbyterian Hospital on an affective disorders acute inpatient unit serving adults with primary diagnoses of major depressive, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. Justine Bates-Krakoff is currently attending Fairleigh Dickinson University, working toward a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Robert McGrath, in his positive psychology laboratory. If you haven’t had a chance please consider purchasing my new book entitled "There’s Always Hope:  A Story About Overcoming,” which can be found via an Amazon Link on PsychologyAmerica.com. I wrote it with love for children nine and under. The beautiful illustrations were done by Briana Giasullo, my stepsister! PsychologyAmerica.com also has links to Amazon for other books I recommend! 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:04

To love learning. To laugh.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

To love.

SPEAKER_02 0:08

To be loved. To see beauty. To understand.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

To bring grace to the things that matter most.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

This is Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra. Welcome to my show. For every life stage, we have questions. Let's enhance our lives together as we explore the things that matter most. So, this is one of the greatest human experiences that we are going to talk about today. And it's an experience where you can't stop thinking about your beloved. You have incredible energy. You have a feeling of elation. You're willing to realign all your priorities for your beloved. You only can think about the positive things about this other person. If you have the smallest setback, you feel despair. And studies have found you'll spend more than 85% of your waking hours thinking about this person. Justine, what's happening here?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

So you're talking about the honeymoon phase. We all know it. We've all been in it. And researchers have actually run some studies to show that there are brain changes when you are in this phase of passionate love. So through functional MRI, researchers have identified two brain areas that are uh very much associated with the feeling of passionate love. The first is the caudate nucleus, which is very important in learning and memory. And next is the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, which is central to emotional processing. Both of these areas are very high in a neurotransmitter called dopamine that's associated with reward and pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Yes. Dopamine, we've talked about dopamine in a previous podcast about music and um all about how it does give us pleasure and that feeling of reinforcement and reward. Dopamine makes us feel good. We like dopamine. We like dopamine. And we have lots of it in the honeymoon phase.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

We do. It's it's when we have our most dopamine associated with our idealized lover. And they are idealized in this phase. Yes, we tend not to see the bad and only have blinders to see the good.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Love is blind during this phase. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

And I read that during the honeymoon phase of love, we have very low serotonin. So for our listeners who aren't familiar, serotonin is what certain psychotropic medications want us to access more of, like in Prozac, to make us feel good. Well, guess what? You have low serotonin, so low that it's very similar to the brain of OCD patients, meaning those with obsessive-compulsive disorder. And what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Having very low serotonin means that you're really relying on that dopamine to make you feel good.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

And in addition, you're obsessive about your lover.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Very. Yes. All you see. All you see is them. Um, another study revealed that recent lovebirds have higher levels of nerve growth factor, um, which is another hormone associated with neurons, and it w is really much more prolific in the brains of those in new relationships. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Um, and what else have you found about the brain and the honeymoon phase?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Uh another really important thing that is very stress-buffering during the time of the honeymoon phase is that you're releasing a lot of cortisol. And this cortisol is very different than that that's even found in close friendships. So it's something about this romantic relationship during the honeymoon phase that's very stress-buffering, which is allowing you to just feel those positive and good feelings.

SPEAKER_02 4:32

And, you know, I have to tell you that I usually associate cortisol with the negative stress reaction.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Mm-hmm. And too much cortisol for too long definitely will lead to those deficits in induced stress, which potentially is why this is a fleeting period.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

Because we would feel like we would die if we had to have it for too long. Right. Yeah, because cortisol will do that. Yes. Yeah. Yep. Um, so this is a good time to play a clip that I heard this morning on my commute by Janet Jackson. She's fabulous. Yes. And uh this clip just cracked me up as I was thinking about this podcast and the honeymoon phase. This is what I heard.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

What's up, girl? He stood me up again. Again. Well, what's up with this guy? Do you really like him that much? Yes, honey, I love him. He is fine. He does a lot of nice things for me. I know he used to do nice stuff for you, but what has he done for you lately?

SPEAKER_02 5:43

So this clip was apropos to two cases that I wanted to talk about. Um, it's actually two young women that I've seen in my practice very recently, and it was very similar situations. In both cases, they were pining over these men who weren't treating them well for quite a while. And in both cases, I asked them to really think about what it is that they loved about them or that they wanted or that they saw in these men. And as it turned out, in both cases, it was only in the first six months of the relationship that they experienced this wonderful person that they missed, but then poof, it was gone. What happens here?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

So findings suggest that romantic love is arousing, but it can also become stressful when you stop experiencing those, experiencing those heightened levels of dopamine. And what's happening physiologically is that your body is literally adapting to your beloved. So all the things that were very new and exciting and emotionally stimulating are becoming a little bit dull. That's funny. It's just not as exciting as it used to be. Your bot you've adapted. You've adapted to this person. To the newness.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

And um studies have found that when they when they check the brains 12 months later, all of those elevated hormones, including the dopamine, they're gone. They're normal. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

You're just like everyone else. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

Which is sad too. I mean, it is a wonderful feeling. The honeymoon phase is incredible.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yes. But after about a year, you know, your brain is just gonna acclimate and become normal again.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Um so there is a couple I'm thinking of that I worked with, and they came in for couples therapy, and he had had an affair. Now it was out in the open about the affair, and he was clearly in the honeymoon phase uh with the woman he was having an affair with. And he would say things to me like, Well, I love my wife, but I am in love with this other woman. Now, this man, um, in spite of the tremendous feeling of the honeymoon, he could also clearly see that he wanted to stay with his wife. Why would breaking up during the honeymoon phase feel unlike unbearable anguish to this man?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

So back to to dopamine that we were talking about earlier, it's associated with reward in a similar way, actually, that drugs like cocaine are associated with reward. And so there are times where people actually get addicted to the feeling that the honeymoon phase brings, and breaking that relationship or leaving that person would feel like withdrawing from a drug that gives a lot of pleasure. So it's the same reward system in our brain.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

And the same feeling of withdrawing from an addictive drug, the same pain and anguish.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Absolutely. And you know, leaving the euphoric feelings associated with the honeymoon partner.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Yeah, not easy. No. Um, it reminds me of a video, actually, a show I recently saw about George Michael the singer, and he was describing the intensity of the feelings that he experienced with his first love, um, and how devastating it was to lose his first love, who was a Brazilian that he met in Rio de Janeiro, and um who died of AIDS, and as it turned out, the lover died six months later into the relationship. So not only were the feelings made stronger by being long distance, but they but the relationship ended with death during the honeymoon phase.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Devastating. Devastating.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

Yes, devastating. And I think that George Michael, who's no longer with us, I think he never got over it. But it also inspired him to have beautiful music.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yeah, the a lot of creativity comes out of you know the worst expressions of pain.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

So yes. So when I uh after my doctoral program, I did two extra years in marriage and family therapy under the guidance of Charlene Alderfer. And I remember learning something from her in one of my classes. And she said, for those people that are dating, everything is there at the beginning. And what she meant by that is to really pay attention to your gut, to your intuition when there are things in the beginning of a relationship when you're dating that make you uncomfortable. She called those the red flags. So it could be like the way someone speaks to a waiter or waitress made you uncomfortable, or the way they talk about their sister or something like that. Um I'd like to add to that, yeah. And it would be I think people that are dating should pay attention early before the honeymoon phase hits. Because once that honeymoon phase hits your brain, as you said, we are blind for six to twelve months.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

We are blind and we idealize the other person, which makes it so difficult to see those flaws. Yes. So I think that's great advice to look for them before that phase starts when you can be more objective.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

Yes, because you lose objectivity. Yes, yeah. Yeah. So I do try to tell that to my patients, and um, there is a business saying hire them slowly, fire them fast, right? Yes. So I think that that's a good thing to think about with dating. Definitely. Too. Um, so in my preparation for this, I read, and I I loved reading this, that in some long-term marriages, they can still maintain that feeling, that wonderful romantic honeymoon feeling.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

There are things that people can do to elongate the honeymoon phase, to stretch it out a bit longer.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Um, so my background and my research is in the area of positive psychology. And the main premise behind positive psychology is to really work on enhancing the good rather than focusing on the bad. Yes, I love that. Yeah, about f positive psychology. Yes, it's it's the answer to the deficit model that most of psychology centers around. And specifically in relationships, that would mean rather than fixing problems, you're focusing on enhancing the good things in the relationship, the positive feelings, the positive experiences. And this is one way to elongate the honeymoon phase and the feelings of euphoria, and actually to work on the brain transmitters as well.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

And how does this apply to long-term love?

SPEAKER_01 13:47

So long-term loves is something that hits home for me. Um, early in my current relationship, which is about it's a little over ten years at this point. Um, but after yeah, after knowing my beloved for only a few months, found out that he would be deployed overseas in the military. Um and it seemed at the time like something that was gonna be really devastating to the relationship, but I think it did actually extend our honeymoon phase quite long. Um, because uh it everything was novel. We had to come up with novel ways to communicate. It wasn't always phone, sometimes it was email, sometimes it was love letters. Um, we didn't always see each other, so when we did, we made more meaning out of it. Um and things like having gratitude and appreciation and meaning making are things that positive psychology has shown really do enhance these positive feelings and these positive experiences.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

So for one, you and your beloved didn't get to see each other that often. We didn't. When you did, you had new experiences. The newness of seeing each other, first of all, after long spans without each other, yes. Right. And I'm sure that you also tried to make the best of it to have like good activities and absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

And you can do those new and exciting activities, even if you're not in a long distance relationship, just by doing something that you don't often do together, like rock climbing or bike riding. It can be something as simple as that, but creating a new experience together can add to that novelty and slow down that adaptation.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

I like that you keep using the word adaptation. It I I think it's hilarious actually to just think of it in terms of adaptation. Yeah. But um the new experiences bring out dopamine in our brain. Yes. So we are bringing on the reward system with our beloved, and then we associate that with our beloved, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

And that caudate nucleus that's associated with learning and memory becomes very activated, and again, it's associated with these brain changes that tell us that we're happy and we're enjoying the person we're with, and this is a really good positive experience we're having together.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

Yes, I have learned that sports can really do that, sharing a sport together. Um, certainly my experience with tennis and running and ping pong with my beloved um have definitely led to bonding and live music can bring on some of these the same type of brain activity that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Absolutely. Music is very associated with memory um areas in the brain, and creating memories with the person we love while listening to the music can just be the perfect combination.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

Well, Justine, thank you for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Thank you so much for having me, Alexandra. It was a pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 17:05

It was a pleasure for me too. Do you want to teach your child about how to make the best of it even when they're disappointed? Consider purchasing my recently published book entitled There's Always Hope: a story about overcoming. It can be found on Amazon.com or for locals at SpartaBooks. I wrote it with love for children 9 and under, or to serve as a symbolic gift for an adult in your life who's in need of hope. Lastly, if you've enjoyed Psychology America with Dr. Alexandra, support us at no cost by leaving us a rating on iTunes, sharing it with a friend, and pressing subscribe.