60% of breakups happen at the 18 month mark

60% of breakups happen at the 18 month mark. Why is that? In the 18 month mark, the chemicals change in your brain. So there's really two stages of love, neurochemically speaking. The first stage is like that passionate romantic stage. It's very dopamine driven. So dopamine motivates you to get more. That's why someone who can be highly avoidant, the first two months are hopped up on dopamine. They will, you know, make plans, initiate, text you all the time, and then when they're kind of like got like flooded with their dopamine, they're like, they go back to their baseline behavior. So people need to understand that there's a natural transition in the 12 to 18 month mark where we move into the companionate stage of love. And these chemicals, they're called the here and now chemicals. More oxytocin, for example, which suppress dopamine. This mellows you out, makes you calm. It's very stable. You're not wondering like, oh, do they like me? Am I going to see them this weekend? There's kind of a routine now. The mistake people make is they think that, oh my gosh, something is wrong. I don't feel butterflies. I love you, but I'm not in love with you. And they break up with their partner. When this is just the evolution of relationships, and it's just that Mother Nature isn't going to do the work for you anymore, and you need skills. And so what do some of those skills look like for maintaining that? How do you create dopamine? Novelty. So couples, it's really great if you like learn something new. You take dancing, you travel somewhere brand new together, constantly being curious about your partner. This is relationship hygiene. It doesn't happen automatically. So if you don't intentionally do it and proactively nurture that flame, it will eventually get to this place where like, feels like a roommate.