To all of you sensitive souls out there who have fallen in love and spent many sleepless nights wondering why the object of your desire refuses to reciprocate and wishing there was something you could do to take away the pain, there is good news. Psychologists have now come to the conclusion that we can actually take control over our love life.

Could Regulating Your Love Life Spell The End Of Heartache?

According to research carried out by Sandra Langeslag from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Jan van Strien from Erasmus University Rotterdam, it is possible to convince ourselves to focus on the positive traits of our partners or their negative ones, and thus increase or decrease our attraction to and positive feelings for them accordingly.

The Experiment

The findings were drawn from an experiment (the first of its kind) conducted on 20 people who were in a relationship and an equal number of others who had recently experienced a break-up. They were asked to bring 30 photographs of their current or ex-partner. The experiment subjects were simply asked to focus their attention on a positive characteristic of their partner or ex-partner when they looked at his or her photographs, and then on a negative characteristic when they were shown the photographs again.

The Surprise Findings

Interestingly enough, it was found that every time they concentrated on the positive traits, they simply loved their partner more, and every time the opposite happened, they loved them less. According to Langeslag, it was all scientifically proven thanks to the Late Positive Potential brainwave, which shows how emotionally affected we are by a stimulus. The LPP brainwave figures were boosted in the former and reduced in the latter cases in the experiment.

A Long Time Coming

It seems that an experiment like this had been a long time coming since the scientists expressing their agreement with its findings are too many to neglect. Their premise is that since we can control other emotions, such as stress and anger, it is only logical that we can do the same with love, thus improving our love life significantly.

So, it turns out that maybe 16th-century playwright William Shakespeare knew it all along when he wrote in The Tempest: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

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