Astral Codex Ten

companionate love

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companionate love

Article

companionate love is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between September 13, 2022 and September 30, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The typical retort is that they are doing something called “companionate love” which is totally different”; “the ‘companionate love’ phase of a relationship”. It most often appears alongside Andres, dopamine, nucleus accumbens.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: September 13, 2022
  • Last seen: September 30, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness
September 13, 2022 · Original source
…I know many people who have been married for decades and still have great relationships. The typical retort is that they are doing something called “companionate love” which is totally different. But I know some people who have been married for decades and still have great sex (sometimes even with each other!)
Suppose you reached the point where it sounded exactly like background noise. Your spouse could give you a dozen red roses and a sonnet about your many excellent qualities every day, and it wouldn’t update you at all. At that point, you either need to have the mysterious “companionate love” thing in place - something that isn’t based on reward prediction error - or you are doomed to never feel another positive emotion from your relationship at all.
What if for some reason you can’t do companionate love? I wonder if you would end up like my patient - addicted to someone who had a 50-50 chance of being adoring or terrible at any given time, just because half the time you get positive prediction error out of it, and you’re able to feel anything at all. Of course, half the time you get negative prediction error. But as gambling addictions show, the positive and negative errors don’t necessarily have to add up above 0 in order for something to be compelling. Everyone has some weird function that doesn’t correspond to normal addition, and maybe for some people dating a person who gives good vs. bad signals exactly 50% of the time is the only way to get that function in the black.
Highlights From The Comments On Unpredictable Reward
September 30, 2022 · Original source
That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them. I don't think dopamine so much contributes a unique kind of happiness as it makes our happiness attention-grabbing, memorable, instructive, and motivating. *That* is what we lose when passionate love turns into companionate love.
The flipside of this is that we become very sensitive to unexpected *omissions* of reward. We take expected pleasures for granted as long as they keep coming, but woe betide anyone who suddenly threatens to take them away. This may add a certain kind of fragility to reliably pleasant relationships in the companionate love stage.
I think this explanation differs from the one you offered because rather than seek some other neuromodulator to account for the "companionate love” phase of a relationship, you can just consider that phase to be the psychological correlate of the brain's internal value estimate as it is instantiated in this cortical/striatal circuitry. Though I certainly wouldn't rule out other options, especially intracellular mechanisms in these areas, because neural firing on these very long timescales is dubious.