Love cures neurosis

Love is many things; a quick scan of pop lyrics tells you that it is all at once “higher than a mountain”, “an open door”, “in the air”, “a battlefield”, and “the drug”. Whatever it is, this news column has more than once pondered the power of love to transform otherwise mentally sound individuals into tepid puddles of inanity. That of course, is an external perspective, if you are the one swimming in that puddle, it is an endless ecstatic sea. Now to add a further positive quality to the table, it seems that being “in love” will make you less neurotic.

Neurosis is an unstable aspect of personality. It features anxiety, insecurity, and easy annoyance. Neurotic people tend towards depression, to have low self-esteem, and to have low levels of satisfaction with life. As bleak as it sounds neuroticism is said to be one of the five basic human personality traits present in us all to some degree (the others are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness), which is why researchers wanted to see how it is impacted by being “in love”.

To study this the researchers followed 245 couples aged between 18 and 30 years over nine months. The subjects were interviewed as individuals at three monthly intervals. The interviews were aimed at measuring relationship satisfaction and neuroticism. The individuals were also asked to evaluate how fictitious every day events may influence their relationship. The reason for this latter part of the study was that neurotic people are known to react to outside stimuli differently as they are more likely to react to negative stimuli and to interpret ambiguous events as negative.

The researchers found that the longer a person was in a loving relationship the less neurotic they were.

This is probably because the partners support each other but also because the positive experiences of being in a relationship changes the inner world of a person for the better. Love seems to help people feel better about life in general, focus less on the negative, and see things in a more positive light.

In the big picture it shows that neurosis and other negative ways of being can be unlearned and you don’t need expensive courses or therapists to do it; love is the answer.