The age-old wisdom is that the first addictive shot of romantic love doesn’t linger over the long term. For awhile, we’ve all been resigned to losing that intense, twitterpated feeling and settling into a love more calm and comfy—but scientist have something different in mind. Two PhDs in the psychology dept. at Stony Brook University have research results indicating that our love may be able to last one, two, or twenty years.

Back to the brain scans again to prove what’s going on in our heads; the researchers took ten women and seven men who claimed to be very in love with their spouses even after 21 years of straight marriage and measured their brain activity while they looked at pictures of their sweethearts. The researchers did the same for ten women and seven men who had just fallen in love that year—and whaddya know, their brain activities registered as pretty much the same.

“We found many very clear similarities between those who were in love long-term and those who had just fallen madly in love,” said one of the lead researchers, Dr. Arthur Aron. And some of those dopamine-rich pleasure and reward brain centers were actually more active for those in love for a long time. Aw. MRIs are so romantic!