I found this article randomly while surfing the net and found that it is quite an interesting articles, especially the part about arranged marriages.  Some of the titles are a bit racy compare to all the other posts in my blog, but hey, it's really an interesting article.  Taken from www.elle.com

Learn to Love: How to Live Happily Ever After

New research refutes love at first sight in favor of slow-burn romance

By Carrie Sloan | March 26, 2010 10:00 a.m.

Photo: Getty Images

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Raise your hand if you believe in love at first sight. Now, quick—lower it before anyone sees you.

According to new research, that head-over-heels feeling we’ve all been swept up by at one time or another is likely to lead us seriously astray. Instead, say recent findings in the field of dating and mating, it’s the slow-burn attraction that builds over time—your growing crush on a slightly goofy coworker, not the instant lust you feel for that Johnny Depp look-alike across the room—that will lead you to true and lasting love. 

Even more surprisingly, says Robert Epstein, PhD, author of the new book Making Love: How People Learn to Love and How You Can Too, having the sort of bond you see (and envy) in couples married half a century can actually be learned, whether you fell head over stilettos at the start of the relationship or felt merely lukewarm. 

Befuddled? Who wouldn’t be? The idea that love can be learned, like, say, Excel or Italian, is anathema to most of us. Not to mention unromantic. Heroines in romantic comedies often collide—literally—with their soul mates, and we’ve come to expect similar destinies. Feeling the world melt away as we lock eyes with a sexy stranger makes us think they’re the One. 

But, say the experts, these chance meetings we equate with true love are more likely a case of sudden-onset lust, and much to our romantic detriment, few of us know the difference.

Lust at First Sight: Be Still Those Beating Butterfly Wings

We all know what lust feels like: The corps de butterflies doing jetés in your gut. Your heart beating out of your chest. The electric spark that passes between you and your heartthrob each time you touch.

I can recall a certain yoga teacher with spiritual leanings and rock-hard abs who had me seeing double every time he adjusted my hips in downward dog. This went on for weeks without our ever speaking. One day, while leaving class, we smacked into each other in the elevator and time seemed to stand still. 

Actually, the elevator had: We were struck so dumb, we’d both forgotten to push the button.

So rom-com cute! So fated! After that little incident, I devoted an unhealthy amount of work hours to daydreaming about raising our future kids on a kibbutz. (He was Israeli.) This, despite the fact that all I knew about the guy was his first name and the way his sweatpants clung to his yoga-fied behind. 

Says Epstein, the PhD behind the brave new theory about learning to love, I can hardly be blamed for objectifying Yoga Dude, the same way you should let yourself off the hook for whatever tall, dark, handsome stranger you last assumed was destined to be your husband. That’s because lust at first sight does serve a purpose: 

“Let’s give Mother Nature some credit here,” he says. “Lust is probably steering you right in some basic way, especially if it’s mutual. That probably means that the two of you are well-suited to create offspring.” 

In other words, Mother Nature—who may actually want grandchildren more than your mom does—is selecting a mate with whom you’re genetically in sync. 

But, cautions Epstein, if you let those feelings guide you, you’ll not only court heartbreak, you’ll be more likely to contribute to America’s sky-high divorce rate. 

“Lust is just not enough for what most people want, which is a long-term, stable, happy relationship,” he says. “It’s actually fairly dangerous to have those feelings. Not dangerous in the sense that the person is an ax murderer. Dangerous in that we have studies—well-done lab studies—showing that when people are feeling that way, they’re blind to important characteristics of that person. That blindness proves to be fatal, figuratively, for millions of us in America.” 

The Fractured Fairy Tale (Why Americans Fail at Marriage)

It turns out Americans may suffer more lust-versus-love dysphoria than the rest of the world. That’s because we’re dizzy with Disney-fed expectations. 

In fact, there are several common all-American love myths we buy into without even knowing it, says Epstein: “The notion that, you know, love is mysterious.” In other words, a fated force that acts on you, not one you have any sort of control over. And that ties in, he says, “with the myth that the One is out there for you, and you’ll just live happily ever after without any real effort.” 

There are literature specialists, he says, who have actually defined the plotlines of our favorite romantic comedies. “I can tell you for movies like Enchanted, what plot number it is,” says Epstein. “These plots have been very common in Western countries for the past 100 years. They seem like the truth to you. But in other countries, like Japan or India, those types of adult fairy tales don’t exist; you don’t necessarily live happily ever after in a Japanese movie.”

In other words, we, more than other women, are acculturated to believe that we’ll someday “meet cute”—say, doing sun salutations or dropping a glove walking down the street—and never look back. Let alone divorce.

After immersing himself in the subject for years, Epstein now believes the opposite to be true: “Real love, the kind I think most people really want, has to be based on psychological intimacy,” he says, “a deep knowledge of who your partner actually is, and if you are blinded by lust, it makes it harder for you to see that.”

Neurochemically speaking, even your brain is in on the act: “What’s going on is that lust triggers the neurotransmitter dopamine, which stimulates the release of testosterone, resulting in sexual desire,” says Yvonne K. Fulbright, PhD, author of The Better Sex Guide to Extraordinary Lovemaking. “When you’re in a lust state, you’re looking through rose-colored glasses. You’re drunk on this chemical high. Our chemical system is built not to find anything wrong with this person.” 

Certainly not the state in which you want to evaluate a potential long-term mate.

What Love Looks Like: How to Fall for All the Right Reasons

For Amy, 28, Mr. Right had been there all along—she was just busy looking the other way. The source of the confusion? He didn’t look at all like the Bradley Cooper doppelgänger she’d been waiting for.

“My current boyfriend, Steve, and I were friends before we ever started dating seriously,” she says. “He would ask me out on and off, and although I loved the fact that he was so kind and thoughtful, I never thought that he was the One.”

He wasn’t unattractive. He just wasn’t the type of guy she’d always expected would sweep her off her feet. So for three years, she kept searching, dating what she calls a string of Mr. Perfects: “They were intelligent, funny, and there was so much chemistry. When I saw them, I felt such a high,” she says, sighing. 

But time and again, the high wore off, and the relationship fizzled when she realized yet another Mr. Perfect was treating her less than right. 

Then one year her birthday rolled around, and Mr. No-Sizzle was the one who called to take her out for cocktails. 

“I’d had a horrible day,” she says, “and Steve cheered me up in five minutes. I decided to try dating him even though my gut had always told me no in the past. I realized I had never let him in because I thought it was so important to feel those fireworks—but fireworks don’t always happen overnight.”

Love, unlike lust, say the experts, builds gradually with a slow burn: As intimacy increases, so does your sense of certainty. Which is just what happened for Amy: “Now there is nothing I look forward to more than going home and seeing him,” she says. “We’re so in love.”

For Epstein, their story is a textbook case in the kind of fairy tale that endures. “You want to build the love over time,” he says. “It’s called an upward love trajectory. The downward one is the one we all experience, but the upward one is possible.”

Recently he’s been studying the effect in couples in arranged marriages—not that, he’s careful to point out, he’s suggesting we adopt the custom any time soon. 

One 1982 study comparing arranged and love marriages in India showed that, while the love matches were off the charts about each other to begin with, at the five-year mark, the arranged couples surpassed the love matches’ level of in-loveness. Ten years into the marriages, the arranged couples’ attachment to each other had doubled. 

Another study Epstein and Mansi Thakar, a student at the University of Southern California, presented at the National Council on Family Relations this past November showed just such an upward trend for another group of arranged couples: They were from nine countries, and their love had grown, they reported, from 3.9 to 8.5 on a 10-point scale, in marriages that lasted an average of 19.4 years.

But how to explain the staying power of twosomes who’d been little more than intimate strangers when they wed? 

Love Lessons: Learning to Lust After the One You’re With

To begin with, instead of hiding their flaws at the start of a relationship, the arranged couples were honest about who they were—and what they expected from a spouse.

“When people are trying to arrange a marriage, deal-breakers are on the table,” says Epstein, while Americans, in contrast, “hide their flaws through a crazy system of dating.”

The only way to build a love that lasts and grows, he says, is not by falling hard for a six-pack, but by starting out with someone with whom you’re compatible on the big issues.

Fulbright, too, suggests drawing up a “relationship contract”: “Ask yourself, what’s important to me, and then ask each other: ‘How many kids do we want to have? How do we pay the bills? Who would be the primary child caretaker? Do I keep my last name or take yours?’” she says. “All of those things that couples really don’t talk about unless they have premarital counseling.”

Sometimes, though, you need to make a contract with yourself first: “When it comes to guys I date for more than two seconds, they typically fall into the ‘challenge’ category—guys who are charming and physically attractive yet mysterious enough to keep me wanting more,” says Abby*, 29. “Though I hate to admit it, nice guys who have pursued me inevitably finished last. Until now.” 

Her New Year’s resolution was to change her dating patterns—and give a guy who didn’t keep her in hot pursuit a chance. “I’m currently dating someone new—it’s been over a month now—who treats me better than I’ve been treated in years,” she says. “I was attracted to him when I first met him, but it wasn’t a head-over-heels kind of lust. As I’ve gotten to know him better, though, I find myself becoming more attracted to him physically, too.”

And that’s just the selection process. Even if you’ve been with your One for years, Epstein believes he’s uncovered a way to start you on a late-breaking upward love trajectory built for two.

To understand that, you need look no further than a love seminar he recently taught at the University of California, San Diego (yes, a love seminar). 

One of the key lessons: an exercise called Soulgazing, in which random pairs of classmates were asked to stare into each other’s eyes for an extended period—then report what they felt.

What happened next elicited no less than cheers from the student audience: 45 percent of the volunteer couples experienced an increase in closeness; 89 percent in intimacy. 

Love at first sight? Not quite. These weren’t come-hither glances exchanged at the bar—the sort that say, “Let’s suck face later, shall we?” They were the type of prolonged stares, Epstein points out, humans try valiantly to avoid because they’re confrontational. By looking into each other’s eyes for an extended period of time, the students were letting themselves be vulnerable to each other.

Vulnerability, it turns out, is a word that comes up again and again in reports of successful long-term relationships. The arranged couples put it on their list of the top 10 reasons they still felt close to each other after a length of time that would find most Americans on their second or third marriage. Epstein believes letting someone see us with our guard down is one of the keys to falling—and staying—in love. 

Vulnerability can mean a lot of things: From trying something novel, like riding roller coasters or scuba diving together, to engaging in something as tender as caring for a mate who’s ill. Vulnerability is so bonding, it’s also believed to be the root cause of Stockholm syndrome and the reason so many A-listers fall for their leading men and ladies on set: Getting into character in front of each other requires all the same (emotional) nakedness as Soulgazing. 

Of course, recovering from heartbreak can lay your feelings bare, too. In fact, it was in the throes of a breakup that Karen, 29, met her Mr. Right, even if she didn’t know it yet.

“I met Ryan through a friend, and I liked talking to him, but I was concentrating on my broken relationship,” she admits. 

They jogged, they saw movies, he listened patiently to her long-winded monologues on what had gone wrong with the ex. 

Somewhere in the fog of the breakup, she started to notice that she really appreciated having him around and all the ways he was different from her exciting but self-centered former boyfriend. 

Then one night she finally kissed him. 

There were no bluebirds circling gaily around her head when she did so, but then again, most plotlines don’t have the prince sweep in while you’re still busy blubbering. 

Too bad: It’s the romantic leads in plotlines likes these who experts now know are likely to be happy long after they ride off into the sunset. Or as Karen puts it: “The rest is history. We are now happily married.” 

*Name has been changed to protect the innocent—and her dating habits.