Love is not a magic but falling in love could be magical. Falling in love can make you feel like the happiest person in the world. For scientists, this sweet phenomenon poses interesting questions and conducted studies have shown love is a biological process involving more science than magic. Scientists peeking inside our brains and psyches have more clues than ever about the biology of love — why we’re attracted, why we fall so hard, and what makes us stay.
By
Louise Chang, MD; John Kim and Kathleen Doheny
Compiled by
D.A. Oluwole, PhD. MPoPAN
Emotions reveal themselves by showing various effects on steroid cycling for athletes our bodies. To illustrate, when you fall in love, you may feel butterflies in your stomach, your heart starts beating fast and you constantly feel excited for no reason.
Love shares a proven chemistry with hormones and this situation carries that feeling beyond being just an emotion. Numerous studies conducted on people in love points to the changes developing in dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline levels.
When you fall in love, you cannot think about someone else other than your loved one and you become so focused that you cannot even see that person’s mistakes, which is a result of low level of serotonin excreted in the body. A study conducted at the University Collage of London on patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) found that these people have low levels of serotonin just like those who are in love. The lower level of the serotonin hormone makes you become focused and you cannot stop thinking about the person you are infatuated with. So, is love some kind of disease?
When you fall in love, your excitement level escalates, you are head over heels and you feel very happy. Dopamine is the hormone responsible for all these. When you fall in love, excessive secretion of dopamine triggers noradrenaline. Conducting studies on love, anthropologist Helen Fisher of Rutgers University reported that the concurrent secretion of these hormones causes joy, intense energy, insomnia, deprivation, decrease in appetite and increase in concentration, and stressed that when a person is in love, the body starts releasing “the elixir of love,” which consists of these hormones. During a research in which they studied the chemistry of love, Fisher and her team scanned the brain functions of people in love. For this study, people were shown photos of their loved ones and their simultaneous brain functions were observed. According to documented results, increased blood levels have been detected in the brain regions that are rich in dopamine receptors.
It is a known fact that people’s dependency on their loved ones increases gradually. This situation is caused by the excessive secretion of two hormones known as oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is even released during the delivery of a baby. Playing an important role in the establishment of the relationship between mother and baby, these hormones help both the mother and baby to establish an emotional connection with one another.
Scientists, who are curious about the structure of love, which causes numerous changes in the human body, have also examined the concept of “attraction,” the first step toward love. How can an ordinary person differ from others? When and for whom is love, the emotion responsible for changing the body’s entire chemistry, activated? Why are some people found attractive while others do not seem appealing? We can reverse this question. Why do we find some qualities attractive and why are we not so interested in others?
Recent studies indicate that the oxidative stress, which causes the oxygen in our body to burn in the cellular level, is the main element related to attraction. A study conducted by psychologists on men who were found attractive by a majority of women proved that these men have the lowest levels of oxidative stress. Aside from oxidative stress, another factor that makes us look attractive is anti-oxidants.
Based on science, some qualities that give rise to attraction cannot be acquired later. However, weaknesses can develop in time, leading to an increase in that person’s level of attractiveness. One of the most important examples of this situation is the difference you see when looking at old photographs of the person you currently find attractive. This theory has been supported with many studies that cover the factors of attraction on the faces of new-born babies. These studies suggest that physical attraction is actually the biological signal for being healthy.
The extent of attractiveness is measured based on visual and emotional parameters including face shape, hair color, anatomical appearance and pheromone receptor, an excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Certain studies examining the subjects have found that fluctuating asymmetry is an important factor in attractiveness. In other words, people with symmetrical body features are found more attractive.
Love on the Brain
He’s analytical, driven, not very verbal, and not always compassionate.
She’s gregarious, intuitive, whimsical, warm, and compassionate.
Before you say “not a chance,” hear another view.
It’s probably a good match, says Helen Fisher, PhD, a cultural anthropologist from Rutgers University and a leading researcher on love, attraction, and romance. One of her findings: Biology matters, and these two people’s biology — their chemical “profiles” — may complement each other nicely.
“It’s all much less of a mystery than it was five years ago and certainly 30 years ago,” says Arthur Aron, PhD, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and another top researcher in the field. The science of the biology of love is relatively new. Research picked up steam in the 1980s, Aron says, and since then experts have made multiple discoveries. Here’s a sampling of their findings:
The Biology of Love: Biology Matters
When it comes to whom you are attracted to, “your biology plays a role,” says Fisher, who wrote Why We Love and several other books. It’s not only a similar socioeconomic status, level of education and family backgrounds that make people attractive to you, she says, but also hormones — ones that differ from your own.
We’re attracted, Fisher says, to those with a chemical “profile” for estrogen, testosterone, dopamine, and serotonin that’s different from our own, yet complements it. For instance, she says, “If you tend to be high estrogen, you will gravitate to the high testosterone type.”
That explains why Mr. Analytical and Driven and Ms. Gregarious and Warm are a match. He’s probably a ”high testosterone” type, Fisher says, and she is probably a “high estrogen” type. “For good Darwinian reasons, they are very complementary,” says Fisher. She can likely see many ways of doing things and become indecisive. To the rescue, the analytical man. Likewise, she might inspire more compassion in him. Fisher is working with chemistry.com, an offshoot of match.com, to develop this chemical profile match strategy.
The Biology of Love: Your Brain in Love
Love involves three basic brain circuits, according to Fisher. There’s the sex drive, which motivates us to seek out partners; romantic love, the in-the-clouds feeling when you first fall in love; and the attachment phase, the comfortable-but-fewer-fireworks stage.
“The sex drive is a very simple drive,” Fisher says. “It’s simply the craving for sexual gratification, driven largely by testosterone in both men and women.”
The three brain systems, however, don’t always come into play in any kind of order. They can kick in separately of be intertwined. Or they can trigger each other. For instance: you can have sex with someone but not fall in love, of course; you can be in love with someone with whom you’ve never had sex.
“Of these three systems, in many respects I think the most powerful one is intense romantic love,” Fisher says. With Aron and others, Fisher has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs) to examine the brains of people in love and get clues about romantic love.
In one study, 17 people who were newly in love and asked to look at a photo of their beloved showed intense activity in two brain regions associated with reward and motivation — called the ventral tegmental area and the right caudate nucleus. The findings led Fisher’s team to suggest that the crazy-in-love feeling is more a motivation system than an emotion. The report was published in 2005 in The Journal of Comparative Neurology.
The Biology of Love: Smell Counts
Aside from biology and brain activity, body odor is important and help may dictate who we are attracted to and our romantic behavior. “It may be one of the first things that inspires us to say yes or no,” says Charles Wysocki, PhD, a researcher at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.
Preference for human body odors is influenced by both gender and sexual orientation, Wysocki and his colleagues found in their research, published in 2005 in Psychological Science. When his study participants of different orientations and genders were asked to choose between distinct odors — straight men, gay men, straight women, lesbian women — each picked the odor of a partner of the preferred gender and orientation.
”A person’s body odor is determined by a number of factors,” Wysocki says,” and among them is a set of genes that regulate the immune system.” This cluster of genes is called the major histocompatibility complex or MHC. “This MHC confers on an individual an odor print,” says Wysocki, citing others’ research. And experts have found that a person will seek out a partner with an MHC different than his or her own. “MHC is so variable, no two are alike,” Wysocki says.
The Biology of Love: The Script Counts
Once you’re initially attracted to someone — helped along by hormones, odor, or other unconscious factors — what the other person does or doesn’t do counts, too. “You become more attracted to people who are attracted to you,” Fisher says.
For instance, one research participant told Aron: “I sort of liked this woman and she came over and sat by me.” Things developed.
A woman told Aron she was talking to a friend about her piano instructor and the friend said, “You know he likes you.” At that moment, the woman told Aron, she realized she had feelings for him, too.
“When people fall in love, that is the most common scenario,” Aron says. “We are looking for the opportunity to love and be loved back.”
The Biology of Love: From Butterflies to Comfortable
After people have been in love a while, the activity in the brain reward areas wanes, Fisher has found in further research. “As the relationship matures, it links in new brain areas associated with emotion,” she says. “We aren’t exactly sure what is going on, but everyone knows romantic love changes over time.”
Still, she says, “chemistry” can persist. “We have started a new study, of those in long-term marriages,” she says. Only five people have undergone the fMRI imaging so far, she tells WebMD, but it looks promising for those who yearn for long-term chemistry. “They still show activity in some brain regions associated with romantic love and also with some associated with attachment,” Fisher says.
Two other hormones — oxytocin and vasopressin — may come into play once you are settling into a more comfortable relationship. At least it’s true in small rodents called prairie voles, according to Sue Carter, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied the monogamous animals for decades. Both hormones seem important in the animals’ attachments to one other vole, she says.
Oxytocin, sometimes called the hormone of love, is plentiful in women in labor and in lactating women and is released by men and women during orgasm. Some human studies have suggested it plays a role in maintaining interpersonal relationships. Vasopressin is released by the pituitary gland.
In voles, at least, Carter says, the hormones seem to play a role in social bonding, and perhaps in reducing fear, making them feel less anxious. So that may play a role in the voles’ decision to mate with just one other vole.
The Biology of Love: Making it Last
Avoiding boredom is crucial for the health of a relationship. In a study, he randomly assigned couples to participate in activities both considered highly exciting but moderately pleasant or highly pleasant but moderately exciting.
“The group who did highly exciting but only moderately pleasant activities had a much bigger increase in marital satisfaction,” he says. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Meanwhile, another expert is tracking the long-term effect of picking a partner with a different major histocompatibility complex. Martie Haselton, PhD, a psychologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, is working with the web site eharmony.com to track newlyweds, noting the effect of different MHC patterns between partners.
“There is some evidence that fertility is higher in those with dissimilar MHC genes,” says Haselton. And children who inherit different MHC genes from each parent are thought to have broader immunity, she says. She also wants to determine if picking someone with different MHC genes than your own bodes well for the relationship long term.
Women in a relationship with a man with very different MHC genes are more sexually responsive to that partner and less likely to be attracted to other men than are women who pair up with a guy with not-so-different MHC genes, says Haselton, citing a study by other researchers published in 2006 in Psychological Science. How that plays out long term will be Haselton’s focus as she follows couples for five years or so.
The Biology of Love: What Part Chemistry?
So how much of a role does all this chemistry going on in our brains play in all this? “Chemistry isn’t quantifiable,” Fisher says. In the making of a relationship, she says, several variables come into play — such as personality, which includes your character and your temperament. “Your character is formed by everything you grew up with,” she says. “And your temperament is built by your biology. Together they create who you are.”
So it’s difficult to put a percent or a number on the role of chemistry in a relationship. And like some of us, it can be fickle. “One moment chemistry rules and the next moment your upbringing will rule,” Fisher says. As in: “I’m madly in love with this guy.” to “What I am thinking? He’s a different religion.”
One thing’s for sure. There’s much more to discover about the biology of love, guaranteeing that relationship scientists will have jobs for years to come.
Love is Magical But Not magic
Love is not destiny. Love is not magic but is surely magical. And yes, you can make someone fall in love with you.
Yes, you can meet someone and have that lightning in a bottle feeling (note: That chemistry doesn’t always come from a healthy place). You can be swept away, by someone’s mind, body, passion for life, knowledge, wisdom, humor, and the way they make you feel. You can see someone walk though a door and lose your words. But love is not about losing your words or being swept away. That’s connection, chemistry, the strong glue that’s produced by two attracted beings. And that collision gives you the feeling of falling. It’s magical. You got dopamine pumping, tingles in your body, can’t stop thinking about the person, and you feel like you’re falling backwards with your eyes closed and smile you haven’t felt in a long time. But that is not love.
I’m sorry.
Because you don’t fall in love. You fall in lust. You fall in infatuation. You fall in amazing chemistry and connection. You fall in hot sex. But you don’t fall in love.
Love is discovered.
There are many many parts to us. We are complicated beings. We don’t always make sense. We have feelings. Thoughts. Phases. We are confusing. Unpredictable. And of course, we hide. Becasue we are afraid. It’s impossible to really know someone in a week or over a weekend. This is why you can’t fall in love with someone on a reality show. Love is discovered and that shit takes time. There are layers to be peeled. And trust must be formed for someone to truly show themselves and we can all agree that trust is earned and takes time, correct?
Love is discovered as you get to know all the different parts of someone. The good, the bad, the ugly, the real. This is why long distance relationships that are open ended rarely work. It’s just a long honeymoon. You don’t get to peel layers because everyone’s on their best behavior when they see each other.
Love is about the day to day, not the magical weekend. That’s the highlight reel, the movie trailer, the commercial you are mistaking for falling in love.
And I’m writing this article because people think when that fantasy feeling fades, they are no longer in love. The truth is when the fantasy feeling fades, that’s just the beginning. That’s when you start to see other sides to them and the relationship. But it doesn’t mean it’s not magically anymore. Magic comes in different forms. You start to discover other things about that person. Some you love. And maybe some things that challenge you. But it’s all part of the discoverying parts process. As you peel layers and see more and more sides of someone, and these sides appear as you experience the person in different situations, settings, and spaces, in all different moods, around different people, going through different challenges, etc., you get to really know them. You see the whole instead of the movie poster.
Now, discovery is on going. It never stops. Because people are always changing and growing and evolving. But once you’ve discovered enough to make a decision to love someone,
Then Love is built
And you build love by making a daily choice.
Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
There is you.
There is him/her.
And there is what you guys are building together (the relationship).
I always encourage my clients to see that love — what is being built is its own living breathing separate piece.
It allows people to not always make it about them. Now there’s something greater. Something outside of self. And that’s how you make love sustainable and lasting. Two people building something greater than them. Then love goes from a to-me mindset to a through-me mindset and a through-me mindset is always the highest, most powerfilled state.
What’s my point?
Stop looking at love as something you fall in. As romantic as that sounds, it also sounds like a trap. And it also feels time sensitive, like you need to make some big life changing decisions quick because you have “fallen”.
Instead, see love as a discovery process. You are exploring, not only another person but yourself. Notice how you feel around someone, especially how you feel about yourself. Notice the differences. The similarities. Notice everything. And discover. Discover. Discover. That way there will be no surprises. Which is why you’re afraid. You had way too many surprises last time. It doesn’t mean you won’t get hurt.
Possible hurt is always the buy in to discovering love.
There’s no way around that.
Like anything meaningful, careers, companies, bodies, love is built. And that’s great news because we’re not just crossing fingers anymore. We’re actually doing work, work we believe will make us happy and fulfilled. And I’ll be honest, some people have tools to build something with legs and some people do not. And that’s why love is not about falling. Because you can “fall in love” without someone but they made not have tools to build anything so love is short lived.
We support you to come back to love, trust and freedom and to bring the magic back into your life! Our vision is to co-create a world of freedom, peace and love by transforming ourselves.
At Positive Psychology and Educational Consult, we are ready to help you to navigate your life. Contact us today. We are available online 24/7. Phone: +2348034105253. Email: positivepsychologyorgng@gmail.com twitter: @positiv92592869. facebook: positive.psych.12