Why Does the Feeling of Being in Love Fade?

At some point, you stop feeling that way.

Maybe it was gradual — the electricity just wasn’t there one day, and you noticed its absence before you noticed when it went. Maybe it was sudden, a moment of looking at someone and feeling something quieter than you used to. The intensity of early love — the fixation, the electricity, the way they occupied your entire attention — had become something else.

A lot of people interpret this as a signal. That they chose wrong. That something is broken. That they’ve fallen out of love.

The neuroscience suggests a more interesting story.

What New Love Is, Neurologically

In 2005, Helen Fisher and colleagues at Rutgers put newly-in-love people into an fMRI scanner and showed them photos of their partners. The results were striking: the brain’s reward system activated as intensely as it does in cocaine users shown drug paraphernalia.

Specifically: the ventral tegmental area (VTA) — a small cluster of dopamine-producing neurons deep in the brainstem — lit up. The VTA is the origin of the brain’s primary reward and motivation circuit. It drives the urgent seeking, the obsessive focus, the energy and sleeplessness and intrusive thinking of early love.

This is not metaphor. New love is pharmacologically similar to stimulant addiction. The same circuits, the same neurochemical profile, the same pattern of reward and craving. The VTA also fires for: cocaine, methamphetamine, and the anticipation of a large financial reward.

Norepinephrine explains the physical symptoms — the racing heart, the dry mouth, the inability to sleep. Serotonin levels drop — research by Donatella Marazziti in 1999 found that new lovers and OCD patients had similarly depressed serotonin, which may explain the obsessional quality of early love.

This is a state of genuine neurological arousal. It is not sustainable.

The Reward Prediction Error

In 1997, neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz published findings on how dopamine neurons actually work.

The intuitive assumption is that dopamine fires for pleasure — you get the reward, you feel good, dopamine releases. Schultz showed it’s more specific than that: dopamine neurons fire for unexpected rewards, not expected ones. They encode the gap between what was predicted and what happened.

Give a monkey an unexpected fruit treat: dopamine spikes. Do it repeatedly until the monkey expects it: the dopamine spike shifts to the cue that predicts the reward, not the reward itself. When the reward becomes fully predicted, the dopamine spike at delivery disappears entirely.

This is called reward prediction error. Dopamine is a learning signal, not a pleasure signal. It fires when the world is better than expected.

Early love is one continuous stream of unexpected rewards. Every text, every meeting, every glance — novel, unpredictable, charged. The dopamine system fires constantly because the person keeps delivering more than predicted.

As a relationship matures and becomes more predictable, the prediction error shrinks. The person delivers what you expect — which is wonderful, but doesn’t trigger the dopamine spike. The feeling of intensity fades not because the person became less, but because they became known.

This is not a failure of love. It’s a feature of how dopamine works. A brain in permanent early-love state would be incapable of anything else.

The Transition to a Different System

Fisher’s research also showed something else: long-term couples still show activation when viewing photos of their partners — but the pattern differs from new love.

In long-term relationships, the VTA activation persists for some (suggesting passionate love can continue), but it’s accompanied by stronger activation in the ventral pallidum and related regions associated with attachment, bonding, and companionate love. A different circuit, running on oxytocin and vasopressin rather than pure dopamine.

These systems are not weaker than the early-love dopamine state. They’re different. Where early love is characterized by craving and urgency, attachment is characterized by something harder to describe — a baseline presence, a comfort, a felt need for the person’s continued existence in your life that isn’t exciting in the way early love is exciting, but is arguably more structurally important.

Research by psychologist Arthur Aron has shown that couples who deliberately seek novelty together — trying new activities, visiting new places, learning new skills together — show higher relationship satisfaction and maintain more relationship-like brain activation in response to their partners. The reward prediction error can be partially regenerated by keeping the relationship genuinely novel.

This is why people in long-term relationships often describe feeling like they “fall in love again” after a trip, an adventure, a shared difficult experience. The novelty reactivated the prediction error system.

Stendhal’s Crystallization

In 1822, the French writer Stendhal described a psychological phenomenon he called crystallization — the process by which, early in love, everything about the beloved is perfect. Like a bare branch thrown into salt mines that emerges weeks later encrusted with glittering crystals, the beloved is seen through a lens that makes every quality luminous.

Stendhal was describing a real cognitive process: idealization. Early love suppresses the prefrontal cortex’s critical evaluation function. The parts of the brain that assess flaws, make comparisons, and apply social judgment are attenuated when viewing a new partner. You’re not just feeling more — you’re seeing differently.

As the relationship matures and the neurochemical state normalizes, the suppression lifts. The person becomes clearer. Their ordinary humanness — the habits, the flaws, the specific textures of who they are — becomes visible in ways it wasn’t before.

This is often experienced as falling out of love. Sometimes it is. More often, it’s the crystallization dissolving and the real person emerging underneath.

Whether you love the real person is a separate and more important question than whether you were in love with the crystallized image.

What the Fading Means

The fading of early-love intensity is almost universal. The average duration of passionate love in the research literature is somewhere between 12 and 30 months. It varies. It can be extended. But the neurochemical profile of new love is not designed to last indefinitely — it is designed to motivate pair formation, not to sustain it.

What sustains a relationship is not the early-love dopamine state. It’s something the dopamine state can make possible: time spent together, shared experience, attachment, the construction of a shared life. The attachment systems that replace early-love urgency are quieter but more durable.

The mistake is interpreting the transition as loss. “I don’t feel the way I used to feel” is true. What it means is that you’ve moved from the acute phase into something longer and lower and — potentially — deeper.

A lot of relationships end at this point because one or both people mistake the absence of intensity for the absence of love. Or they stay, but feel perpetually that something is missing, chasing a state that biology never intended to maintain.

The neuroscience doesn’t resolve whether you should stay or go. It just clarifies what you’re actually measuring when you feel the shift.

The feeling fades because it was always meant to.

What you do with what’s underneath it — that’s the part that’s actually about you.