Hi everyone and welcome back to the savvy psychologist. I'm your host Dr.

Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

For this week's episode, listener Claire from Los Angeles

writes that she and her partner have been together for two years but recently she's

begun to worry the spark is gone and she's interested in how love changes over time. Are you

supposed to feel like you've nested? Is that a good sign or a bad sign? So this

week we ask can love actually last or does love inevitably settle in

hang around in a stained t-shirt and get a little too comfortable.

So I sent out to write about the stages of a relationship, but after digging through the research,

I discovered that unlike grief, with its denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance model, there's really no go-to

stage theory for romantic love.

But what I did dig up was really interesting.

So let's look at the many permutations of love, including everlasting

love, which it turns out doesn't just happen in fairy tales. So here are three

schools of thought on the nature of romantic love.

School of Thought Number One, Passionate versus Companion at Love. Now you might also call this the old school model of

love. The theory has reached the holy grail of research in that it's become common

household knowledge. But is it true? Well, let's find out. In the 1960s, two pioneering

social psychologist, Drs Ellen Bursheid and Elaine Hatfield, started out in a field that was then thought of as an oxymoron,

relationship science.

But in 1969, they named the two stages of long-term love were all familiar with. The first

passionate love marks the beginning of a relationship. And in it you have strong

...