No matter how much we have achieved in any area of our lives, true fulfillment can only be found in one thing: the emotional quality of our personal relationships.

Unfortunately, most of us have settled for something that falls below our standards and deepest desires. We all want love, passion, and intimacy yet most of us fill ourselves up with work, friends, sports, food, or causes outside the realm of passion, ecstasy, and intimate love.

The good news is that regardless of your past experience or current relationship, the promise of something deeper, richer and lasting is within your grasp.

For Christmas, I bought a dictionary and went through it, highlighting all the definitions that describe him or remind me of him.

“Every morning before I get up, he leaves two folded towels in the bathroom for me for when I take a shower — one big towel for my body and a smaller towel for my head.

Aron, who is a professor of psychology at State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook, has been researching the impact of love on the brain for three decades.

Several years ago he and longtime pain researcher Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, began talking at a neuroscience conference and conceived the idea for the study.

Mackey is chief of the division of pain management and an associate professor of anesthesia at Stanford University Medical Center in California.

“He was talking about the neural systems involved with love and I was talking about the neural systems involved with pain, and we realized there was a lot of overlap,” Mackey says.

They recruited couples in the first few months of romantic relationships for the study by posting notices around Stanford University. The researchers specifically focused on the euphoric, obsessive phase of early love rather than more mature romantic relationships.

“Our subjects fit into this category of recklessly, widely, passionately in love, and it was the easiest recruiting we ever did,” Mackey tells Rebuilding Relationships. “The fliers asked ‘Are you in love?’ and within hours we had a dozen couples beating on our doors.”

The hypothesis was that love affected the brain in the same way many addictive drugs do, by targeting the “feel good” chemical in the brain known as dopamine. This reward system has also been shown to be critical in pain management.