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Ann Tucker is pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket in Plainview, N.Y., when she turns to kiss her husband. The supermarket kiss is a regular ritual for the Tuckers. So are the restaurant kiss and the traffic-light kiss. "I guess we do kiss a lot," said Tucker, a 39-year-old mathematician at a money-management firm.

Tucker is living happily ever after, and scientists are curious about why. She belongs to a small class of people who say they live in the thrall of early love despite years of marriage, busy jobs and other daily demands that normally chip away at passion.

Most couples find that the dizzying, almost-narcotic feeling of early love gives way to a calmer bond. Now, researchers are using laboratory science to investigate Tucker and others who live fairy-tale romances. The studies could help reveal the workings of lifelong passion and perhaps one day lead to a restorative.

While love is historically tied to the heart, neuro- scientists are looking for answers in the brain.

Psychologists studying relationships confirm the steady decline of romantic love. Each year, according to surveys, the average couple loses a little spark. One sociological study of marital satisfaction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Penn State University kept track of more than 2,000 married people over 17 years. Average marital happiness fell sharply in the first 10 years, then entered a slow decline.

About 15 years ago, Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University, became curious about couples outside the norm. He was drawn to what statisticians call "outliers," points way off the curve. These dots represented people who said they'd been madly in love for years.

"I didn't know what to make of that," Aron said. "Was it random error? Were they self-deceiving? Were they deceiving others? Because it's not supposed to happen."

On a clear day in late August, Tucker visited New York University's Center for Brain Imaging. There, a functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner would analyze her brain while she looked at a photo of her husband. The machines record changes in oxygen levels of blood feeding the brain. Because the brain is quick to supply fresh blood to working areas, researchers use them to see where the brain is more active during such mental tasks as recognizing words or feeling love.

Tucker drove in with Bianca Acevedo, one of Aron's graduate students. Acevedo's doctoral dissertation studies brain images to compare new love with long-term love.

Only a handful of studies have used magnetic imaging to study love, in part because scientists debate whether it is a good measure of hard-to-define mental states. The first widely cited study, published in 2000, scanned men and women who said they were madly in love. It found evidence that love could be traced in the brain.

Over the next few years, Aron collaborated on a study that would push further. Published in 2005, it helped establish the link between romantic love and the so-called reward-seeking circuitry, which is thought to be linked to such deep motivations as thirst or drug addiction. Aron joined Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at Einstein College of Medicine in New York's Bronx borough. They examined blood flow in the brains of 17 volunteers, mostly college students, who were scanned as they looked at photos of their lovers.

They found robust activity in a brain region called the ventral tegmental area, which is rich in dopamine, a brain chemical connected to feelings of pleasure. Another of Aron's students repeated the results in China, bolstering the case that romantic love is a biological drive not bound by culture.

None of the published studies, however, focused on people in long-term relationships. Acevedo's research plan — hatched with Aron, Fisher and Brown — was to repeat the experiment with people who had been in love for more than a decade. The first hurdle was finding such couples.

Tucker moved to the United States from Korea when she was 5. She is shy and speaks carefully, sometimes slipping into statistical jargon when talking with her husband. When the two Ph.D.s plan a party, they weigh a "Type I error" against a "Type II error," too little food or too much.

Tucker's husband, Alan, 64, is an applied-math professor at Stony Brook who speaks with youthful enthusiasm. They met at a math conference in the Adirondack Mountains.

"I knew immediately we'd get married," Ann Tucker said. They got their marriage license less than a year later, on Valentine's Day.

They share a home in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. One afternoon last fall, their son Teddy, now 10, worked his PlayStation, and their toddler, James, played with a toy train. Alan Tucker recounted their courtship:

"After the second date, it would be three steps, stop and kiss," he said. After nearly 11 years of marriage, they still see each other as romantic ideals.

Researchers also found Michelle Jordan, a 59-year-old communications consultant, and her husband, Billy Owens. They met on a cross-country flight.

Jordan and Owens lived in different cities, so it took months of long-distance dating before their first kiss.

"You're always cautious about setting yourself up for disappointment again," recalled Jordan, who was 42 at the time. They married three years later and now live in Newport Beach, Calif. Even now, Jordan still seeks her husband's hand when they're together. "It comes very naturally," she said.

Acevedo was confident that such long-term love was a real if somewhat rare phenomenon. Brain activity in the ventral tegmental area would support the idea. Brown, the neuroscientist on the project, was skeptical. Her theory: Ann Tucker and Jordan weren't experiencing the same brain impulses as new lovers, and brain scans would show that.

Ann Tucker recalled taking off a gold bracelet, a gift from her husband, before sliding into the imaging machine. Images of her husband were reflected on a mirror above her. She recalled feeling "a warm contentment."

Days after Ann Tucker's brain scan, Brown looked at the results. "Wow, just wow," she recalled thinking. Tucker's brain reacted to her husband's photo with a frenzy of activity in the ventral tegmental area. "I was shocked," Brown said.

The brain scan confirmed what Ann Tucker said all along. But when she learned the result, she too was a bit surprised.

"It's not something I expected after 11 years," she said. "But having it, it's like a gift."

The scan also showed a strong reaction in Ann Tucker's ventral pallidum, an area suspected to have links with long-term bonds. Tucker apparently enjoyed old love and new. In the months since, Brown analyzed data from four more people, including Jordan, who also showed brain activity associated with new love. The study is ongoing, and more volunteers are being sought.

There is much work ahead before scientists can map the human-attachment system and learn what factors affect it. A love drug is an even more distant dream.

"People in the field, we've kidded about it, but nobody thinks it's, in the short term, realistic," Aron said.