This article is part of Tools of the Trade, a weekly series in which a variety of experts share actionable tips for achieving fast and effective results on everything from forming good habits to raising money.
This week Sandra J.E. Langeslag, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who specializes in the neurocognition of romantic love, offers a look at whether feelings of love can be regulated.
There may be a lot of things you can't control about love, but when it comes to the intensity with which you feel it, there's some amount of fine-tuning that can be done.
At times, you may be more in love than you want to be. Maybe you're in love with someone who doesn't love you back or who has broken up with you. Maybe you're in love with the wrong person, such as your boss or someone who doesn't treat you well. Maybe you're happily married but have a crush on someone else. In instances like these, you may want to decrease your love feelings. That might reduce heartbreak, prevent you from pursuing someone when you shouldn't, or help you end an unhappy relationship.
At other times, you may be less in love than you want to be. Maybe you're in a long-term relationship and the passion has died. This is actually pretty common, and falling out of love is one of the primary reasons for divorce. If you're in a happy relationship and the only problem is that your love feelings are declining, you may want to increase your love feelings. This could reduce the chance of a break-up or divorce due to dwindling passion.
That is where love regulation, or the use of behavioral and cognitive strategies to change the intensity of your current feelings of romantic love, comes in. Some people argue that love is a natural process that should not be changed. But emotions (such as fear, anger, joy, etc.) are natural processes too, and there is much research that shows that emotion regulation can be very beneficial. So even though love is a natural process, love regulation may be helpful as well. In addition, my own research has revealed that people often believe that it's difficult or even impossible to control love feelings . However, my research has also shown that you can actually change how in love you are by thinking certain things.
Related: These 3 Food Myths Could Be Hurting Your Health, According to a Stanford Nutrition Professor
How to decrease your love feelings
If you want to decrease your feelings of love for someone, think about that person's negative qualities (he's lazy, she's always late) and the negative qualities of your relationship (we fight a lot). You could also imagine negative future scenarios (he'll cheat on me). Negative thoughts like these will decrease infatuation (i.e., passionate love) and attachment (i.e., companionate love). Clearly, this isn't the most fun exercise - in the short term it may make you feel bad. But previous research has shown that thinking negatively of an ex and the ex-relationship helps people get over a break-up, so it will likely make you feel better in the long run.