Why Does Marriage Deepen Love? Ctd

In a review of Barbara Fredrickson’s Love 2.0 , Barry Schwartz latches on to another theory:

“Do you love your spouse?” becomes the wrong question; “Are you loving your spouse?” is the right one.

A critic might quarrel with Fredrickson for calling these moments of resonance “love” rather than something else. Why not keep “love” as we have always used it and coin a new term for the moments of positivity that Fredrickson is talking about? I don’t think this is a big deal, but, aside from helping to sell books, the virtue of redefining love in this way is that it encourages people to think hard about whether what they’ve been doing in the service of love is actually meeting its objective. And I can’t overemphasize how striking the evidence is that Fredrickson marshals in support of her position. Not just psychological evidence, which would be important enough. But also neural evidence, neurochemical evidence, cardiovascular evidence, and even evidence of effects on gene expression. This line of work may end up changing both what we mean by love and what we take as evidence for love and its effects.

via The Dish http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/30/why-does-marriage-deepen-love-ctd/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Dish%29