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Alan and Lynn went through the same thing twenty-five years ago. They stayed together. But Millie and Sid show that love doesn't have to go wrong. Young people today seem to me to be looking for utter perfection. Where is there perfection? Maybe in heaven. I know it sounds daft but everybody's got the possibility of creating their own heaven on this little bit of earth, if you want to. So in the presence of god and before this congregation I proclaim that they are husband and wife. Love, in the early days it always seems so easy. Alan is manager of a large golf and leisure complex. He's been married to Lynne for thirty-two years. Up to that point I thought we had the perfect marriage and I was very proud of him. I love her with all my heart. And more. Love her back. I hope he'll be able to talk to me. Millie and Sid seem just as in love as the day they married. Dr. Angela Rowe is an experimental psychologist and an expert in the science of love and she suspects that the answer might lie in how our feelings literally alter the way we see our partners. To find out if she was right she took photographs of twenty volunteers. She then altered them into three progressively better looking images and three progressively worse looking images. But when it came to a test who would choose which version of their partner? Your task is to select the best representation of your partner. As the women settled in to look at the photographs each had to work out how her partner really looked to her. The tests went really well. Our hypotheses seem to have been supported. And that's to say that the couples who are very happy and showed this idealisation of each other tended to choose partners from among the array of photos that were slightly more attractive than their actual partner. Steve chose exactly as predicted. Picking not the real image of Donna but the most ideal. More surprisingly Donna did pick the correct image of Steve. Despite Alan's choice the experiment had finally proved that the more in love you are the more you will idealise your partner. Oh don't really have a care in the world actually. It's like we're on this big cloud. Just Steve and I - we're on this love cloud and it's brilliant. But just what was producing Steve and Donna's incredible feeling of perfect union? We sent Steve to the Institute of Psychiatry to find out. As Steve lay down in the brain scanner an image of Donna was projected onto a screen. But what was happening in his brain? Neuro-scientist, Andreas Bartells, has done this test on scores of in-love men and women and consistently found the same result. Firstly we found some activation in parts of their reward system which explains why love makes you so happy and exhilarated and motivated to be with your partner and spend as much time as you can with your partner. I love you, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And at the same time we found some regions that were suppressing the activity. And as it turns out these are exactly those regions that are activated whenever you're asked to make judgements of trustworthiness and so on about another person. Nothing else cares. These regions are all suppressed in the state of love and that may explain why people say love makes people blind. So every time Steve looks at Donna two things happen. His reward system floods with feel good chemicals. Making him see Donna as the world's most perfect woman. According to Bartells there are very powerful evolutionary reasons why love affects us this way. What people don't realise maybe is that love is a mechanism that's been built in, into our brains so that we stay together with a particular person or in the case of mothers and, and father they stay with their child and help raising it. At Berkeley University one professor thinks he can do just that. And all he needs is a photograph of a person smiling. It's a rather preposterous claim from one perspective that a photo can tell us what life is like. Keltner was particularly interested in the intensity of the women's smiles. But just what impact had their smiles had on the rest of their lives. When these women returned to the laboratory thirty years later at about age fifty-two what we found is that women who had uh a stronger, warmer, more enthusiastic smile. And perhaps most astonishing was that they were actually more content and satisfied with their marriage and experienced greater well-being in general. But just what is it about a smile that gives Keltner his clues? One of the really interesting things about facial expressions is that they tend to involve certain muscle actions that we can't fake. So here is what we call a pleasurable smile. And it involves this Zygomatic major muscle that just pulls the lip corners up. But then it involves the contraction of the orbicularis oculi which raises this part of the cheek up. Keltner believes the reason some people produce fake smiles and other people real one is all down to how much stress you experience in early childhood. So to test Keltner's theory we gave him photographs of Lynne, Alan, Hayley and Jay to analyse. At the same time back in the UK clinical psychologist Frank Tallis had agreed to hear from the couples themselves. Our couples will have to pitch for a new job and perform a mental arithmetic task in front of three cameras and a panel of stony faced scientists. To begin each participant sat quietly for half an hour while their normal level of the stress hormone cortisol was measured. Then with that recorded the test began. The next day Angela and Frank were briefed on the results. On average men respond far more strongly to stress than women. Your cortisol response was very low. Women do show an elevation in cortisol levels as a response to stress. But it's very elevated compared to most female responses. Both couples have taken another step in understanding how they really feel. A really important thing that I think development psychologists have learned is that you can start off life with one family context and temperament. You've got to show your wife that you care and, and you do your best for her. And she has to do the same for you. Go on. And as time goes on you are becoming more and more secure in your love and in your marriage and then it gets better still. Millie and Sid show that to succeed a marriage takes work. No it's alright. But for couples already at the point of divorce it's almost impossible to know where to begin. Howard Markman is one of the world's foremost relationship experts. He's worked with thousands of couples and studied what makes love thrive and what makes it fail. We're looking for the four research based danger signs. Based on twenty-five years of research, we used to take twenty-four hours to code one hour of video tape, micro-analytically. Men often do what we call the appeal to god. Women pursue in the face of withdrawal. When you're attacking the other person verbally, sometimes physically and when that happens the relationship is often headed for divorce. Fortunately none of our couples showed signs of invalidation. Conflicts are inevitable, we need to talk about them but we need to do this and this is the whole key - safely. One of the best things that uh a couple who's feeling distant can do is to reach and just hold your partner's hand. For some couples cutting out the rows comes naturally. For others it takes work. That's when love comes in. And if you're sensible that is where you begin to create what should be a good marriage.
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