Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love?

Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love?



Have you ever been obsessed with, wild for, smitten by, hot
for, or crazy about someone? What about a
crush or an infatuation? Do you recall how you were unable
to think of anything but that other person? How ’bout the mood swings
from euphoria to despair? Do you recall feeling addicted or the way
separation only amplified the longing? Do you recall the depression,
frustration, and embarassment associated with an unreciprocated crush?
What about the craving for union and the possessiveness?
If so, then you know first-hand something about this crazy
little thing called “love.” It is sweet and bitter both – a
craving we won’t let go of and that won’t release us even if we want it
to. That intense romantic focus provides a sense of complete and
permanent devotion (which turns out to be inaccurate in fact) – even as
it generates immense pain when it is unrequited or otherwise impossible.
What creates this wonderful source of pain, this ache of passion
– Cupid’s hurts-so-good arrow piercing the heart?
Earlier this year, the Washington Post’s Neely
Tucker attempted to shed some light on those questions in an article titled “An Affair Of the Head: They Say
Love Is All About Brain Chemistry.” We have excerpted portions of the
article below.

* * *
It’s all about dopamine, baby, this One Great True Love, this
passionate thing we’d burn down the house and blow up the car and drive
from Houston to Orlando just to taste on the tip of the tongue.
You crave it because your brain tells you to. . . .
Dopamine.

God’s little neurotransmitter. Better known by its
street name, romantic love.
Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation.
These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing
amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start
pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic
system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the
desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a
stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on.
“Love is a drug,” says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist
at Rutgers University and author of “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.”
“The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a
natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions” when one is
in love. “It’s the same region affected when you feel the rush of
cocaine.”
Passion! Sex! Narcotics!
Why do we suspect this isn’t going to end well?
Because these things are hard-wired not to last, all of them. Short
shelf lives. The passion you fulfill is the passion you kill. The most
wonderful, soaring feeling known to all mankind . . . amounts to no more
than a narcotic high, a temporal state of mania.
“Being in love, having a crush on someone is wonderful . . . but our
bodies can’t be in that state all the time,” says Pamela C. Regan, a professor of psychology at
California State University, Los Angeles, and author of “The Mating Game: A Primer on Love, Sex and Marriage.”
“Your body would fizzle out. As a species, we’d die.”
Some of these love chemicals in the brain, scientists measure by the
picogram, which is a trillionth of a gram.
How fragile, this [crazy little] thing called love.

* * *
In her most recent research, Fisher and colleagues gave 32
love-struck subjects an MRI scan while they viewed a picture of their
beloved.
Boy, did their brains light up!
There are two shrimp-size things on either side of your brain called
the caudate nuclei. This is the gear that operates bodily movements and
the body’s reward system: “the mind’s network for general arousal,
sensations of pleasure, and the motivation to acquire rewards,” Fisher
writes. And when the test subjects looked at their sweeties, these
things started singing “Loosen Up My Buttons” with the Pussycat Dolls!
This, then, kicked the party over to the tiny ventral tegmental area,
a little peapod-size thingy that sends dopamine bopping around your head.
This is what scientists call lots of fun.
A separate study by Italian researchers several years ago showed
something else.
Serotonin, another neurotransmitter in the brain associated with
obsession, depression and racing thoughts, was greatly affected — right
down to the molecular level — by romance and surging dopamine. People
newly in love and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder showed the
same lowered levels of the “platelet 5-HT transporter.” In other words,
dopamine appears to suppress serotonin, which in turn triggers
obsessive-compulsive thought patterns.
You can’t stop thinking about Dave. No wonder! Dave’s hiding under a
wet flap of cortex!
Your brain is officially in love, and it officially is driving you
crazy.

* * *
Cupid can’t last, you know.
Oxytocin and other chemicals kick in, running around your brain to
make you bond with your lover, producing a mellower, more sustainable
relationship.

* * *
Dopamine leaves the scene of the affair, now running off into the
nucleus accumbens, the insular cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex,
research by Fisher and others shows. Jilted lovers’ brains now light up
in these areas when they look at pictures of their former flames — this
brain matter is associated with taking big risks, addiction, physical
pain and obsessive-compulsive disorders. This is why, researchers
theorize, people become obsessed with lost love, and are driven, in
extreme cases, to stalking, suicide, homicide, rubber tubing.
Regan, the California researcher, notes that such cases are rare, and
may have more to do with existing mental issues than simple unrequited
love. Still, she says, passion is destined to end . . . . Given this,
she wonders if “we do our self a disservice by glorifying passionate
love so much.”
“The search for eternal passion is very misguided,” she says. “It’s
the search for the perfect high that keeps people discarding
relationships right and left . You don’t feel the same way you did;
people want to break up, instead of seeing it as normal.”
And so, alas. Even neurologists, to go with Shakespeare’s priest, now
tell us passion is true love’s fool’s gold, a flamboyant dead end on
the evolutionary chain of primate happiness.
The only problem with this insight is that no one pays it any mind.
Doomed passion may not make us right, and it may not even make us very
happy.
It only makes us human. It only makes us who we are.

* * *
Understanding something about what leads to our romantic
love, unfortunately, does little to protect us from Cupid’s overwhelming
power. Good luck lovers. Remember, you “gotta be cool . . . relax.”
For the complete article, click here. To watch a lengthy but fascinating lecture
by Professor Fisher on the “Drive to Love,” click here. A shorter talk by Professor Fisher, providing
an overview of her research on romantic love can be viewed in the video
below: