Is Love Real Or A Delusion? Love Test

America has the highest divorce rates in the world. Over half of first marriages end in divorce, with even higher divorce rates for second through forth marriages. Clearly, the love that draws couples together in marriage can’t keep half of married couples together through challenging times.

How do couples beat the odds and bulletproof a marriage? Understand the true answer to this love test: Is love real or a delusion?

Get the answer from me and two other top experts in highlights of my radio conversation for A Lasting Love with neurosurgeon, Dr. Charles E. Rawling who wrote It Really Is That Complicated and R. Milton Quibner, author of the sexual satire, How High Should I Jump?

Hadley: Earlier we talked about reasons why it’s difficult to find love with a good partner and sustain love in a marriage. Don’t we need something to hold onto, some hope, something believe in, like love? I imagine you each will have opposing answers to this question: Is love real or a delusion?

Charles: For most part, love is a delusion. It’s scientifically shown that feelings of love are driven by hormones and seratonin in the brain.

It’s been shown that most males have to be engaged in a relationship with a woman within 18 months of meeting her, or their seratonin will disappear and they’ll go looking for something else.

So love is an an emotion. It’s chemically driven in a male’s brain. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and you can’t play off it. Once it goes away, you have a real need for working at the relationship.

Hadley: I agree. I call it “Cupid’s Cocktails” that draw you together and bond you at the start of a relationship. So that love might be perceived as a feeling. But true love is a verb. It’s all the actions that you do to be loving. It’s great chemistry, communication, kindness.

Milt: Let me jump on that, because that’s the thing we must understand. We need to move from believing in things, in objects like love or depression. They are not things that come into us. No they are activities we share.

We learn love. We learn to become loving. It is not a state that comes in and completes us. No. It doesn’t work that way.

There’s so much romantic crap out there. When I fall in love I will be completed. No it doesn’t work that way. As Charles said, the idea of love can be reduced to a scientific level of hormones.

So what it is this thing that draws us together and leads us to stay together through arduous experiences? It is the verb of love. It’s the loving we are doing. It is learning about each other and ourselves during the process. It is processional. Love is not a thing.

Hadley: It’s not just an emotion that may draw you into it. Love’s an action word. That’s why I call it a love toolkit. You can learn to use these love tools, because a lot of use didn’t grow up to see our parents’ marriage that was blissful. But you can use love tools to create an enchanting relationship. You can and should learn to use these love tools from the start of a relationship.

Do you each have a tip for newlyweds who want to start off on the right foot to create an enchanting relationship with love that lasts?

Get the love toolkit that builds a dream relationship in the next highlights of our conversation for A Lasting Love.

Get all the happy, sexy love you desire,

Hadley Finch