Who Said You Can’t Live ‘Happily Ever After?!’

Disney didn’t get it wrong. You can live “happily ever after!” True love does exist! Or does it?!

Researchers using brain scans at Stony Brook University learned that older couples who have been together for more than 20 years can still be just as much in love as people in the first throes of passion.

The older couples have the same sort of reaction in their dopamine reward circuits as young lovers, according to the study, published the online journal “Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience.”

“Lifelong love is possible,” said researcher Dr. Bianca Acevedo.

Acevedo and Dr. Arthur Aron, of SUNY Stony Brook’s Long Island campus, recruited a group of people who had been married for an average of 21 years and who said that they were still “very, intensely, crazily, seriously in love,” Aron said.

“We brought them to the scanner, and while they were in the scanner, they looked at several kinds of pictures,” he said. “They looked at photos of their partners and several control photos and we looked to see what areas of their brains showed what activity.”

When the researchers compared the scans to earlier tests of young couples, they found that the older folks’ brains had become just as excited.

So basically, the old get down and dirty… in love, just as if they were half their age! The mental picture kind of makes us throw up a little bit in our mouth!

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