Are you the kind of person who ends healthy relationships because they're not "exciting" enough?

Or maybe you're not attracted to healthy relationships in the first place because you don't feel the "passion."

Well, the good news is, that happens to a lot of people.

Those of us who maybe didn't have healthy relationship models growing up or have lived lives that had a lot of chaos (aka "excitement") gravitate toward those things because they're familiar.

Even if we know cognitively that the chaos is bad, we're comfortable in it and healthy relationships can actually feel scarier to us.

Check out this video for a bit more about how people mistake the emotional activation of unhealthy relationships for passion and/or abandon healthy relationships because of these misconceptions.

VIDEO TRANSRIPT: Today’s video applies not just to singles but to couples too: I’m going to talk about love and how Hollywood and society has misled us with this myth of “passion.”

When you first meet someone you like, your brain fills up with feel good chemicals and we interpret these chemicals as in-love feelings. Some scientists call this phase “passionate love.” For some people these feel good chemicals are so strong early on that they think they have found “love at first sight.” And in fact, studies have shown that we think less clearly when our brains are flooded with these chemicals that we call being in love.

But that in-love feeling fades over time – though this is actually probably a good thing considering the cognitive impairment I just mentioned. For most people, it lasts 6-months to two years. Now, this is not specific to love, either – for example, studies have shown that lottery winners lose that winner’s high after a similar amount of time. This is a concept called hedonic adaptation and we’ll talk about that in more detail in my Break the Pattern Bootcamp.

So let’s move on to the word “passion.” I HATE this word in the context of romantic love because, really, what most people mistake for passion is an emotionally unhealthy rollercoaster. It’s an addiction to chaos – or, more gently put, an addiction to excitement.

Now, I’ll get into a lot of the nitty gritty of this in the Bootcamp but basically most of us didn’t get all of our emotional needs met as children because we live in a broken society. Even the best parents had obstacles that may have prevented them from meeting all of their children’s needs. But these unmet emotional needs and bad relationship models are now familiar to us. Comfortable. And so we naturally gravitate to them, even if we cognitively understand that it’s a bad thing. We gravitate toward what we know and, in fact, healthy relationships can feel a lot scarier to us and make us want to bail, especially after that in-love feeling wears off because we’re going to confuse the lack of intense feelings with boredom.

We’ve confused the system-activating excitement of an unhealthy relationship with passionate love and honestly neither the excitement nor the passionate love can sustain over time.

That’s why long-lasting relationships take work. After the passionate love fades, there is companionate love. Companionate love is about a deeper affection built on intimacy and trust. From an evolutionary perspective, the fading of passionate love gives your brain more bandwidth and allows couples to refocus on every day life and on building their life together. This love is an active thing that you must choose to keep alive every day, even – or maybe especially – when things are hard.

So, if you relate to any of this, the next time you feel yourself getting bored after you really liked someone for a while, or you feel that itch for romantic “passion,” take a step back and think about why that might be. And, of course, couples can get complacent and take each other for granted, so if you’re in a relationship and feel like that is what’s happening, think about what you can do to breathe some life back into the relationship. If it’s a healthy relationship, it’s worth the work. And consider joining our Break the Pattern Bootcamp where we’ll give you tips on how to avoid the passion trap and keep the love alive!

COVER PHOTO CREDIT: Rodrigo Souza