It happened again. Last Thursday I was at a lunch with several colleagues, and the topic of love and relationships was discussed. “Gina! Tell them about the chemistry stuff,” my colleague Todd encouraged me, and off I went on my “love is drugs” speech. How I became a resident expert on such a topic goes back to the last time I was in love. The feeling was so overwhelming that I felt as if forces beyond my control were at work. I had a pressing sensation on my chest as if a 300 pound person was sitting on me. Goofy songs lyrics like “Could it be I’m falling in love?” ran through my head on a continual loop (much to my shock and embarrassment). I was happy, giddy, and didn’t require much sleep. Even my journal writing focused on love:
How curious that the mouth, although apparently designed to facilitate human consumption of a life supporting source such as food, is also an integral body part to one of the most beautiful gestures in life – the kiss. Could it possibly be that love is as important to human life as the food we eat and the air we breathe? …And isn’t love just an extremely pleasant combination of axons and dendrites furiously conspiring and causing the feeling that they do? Like déjà vu times a million and much longer lasting? Can all ethereal occurrences – all the things we have difficulty expressing in words other than the names we’ve given them – love, feelings – be explained by a chemical equation just as we can explain the digestion of food and inhalation of air?
As a person who is strongly ruled by her emotions, yet who also harbors a curious scientist within, I am always looking for explanations behind that which defines us as human. So with the help of a friend I started to research the topic, and found a vast amount of published information on the chemistry of love.
In the dozens of articles I read on the topic, Dr. Helen Fisher was quoted in nearly half. She’s a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, specializing in love. According to Dr. Fisher, there are three stages of love, all of which have been associated with the increase of specific chemicals in the brain. The stages are identified as lust, romantic love or infatuation, and long-term love or attachment. These stages are interrelated yet somewhat distinct, and people can attach different feelings to different people at the same time – meaning you can lust after the cutie at the office while you’re in a long-term relationship with your partner.
The lust one is pretty easy to understand. It is our most primal need for sex, fueled mainly by an increase in testosterone in the brain. I think of college boys when I think of this stage. It doesn’t really matter who they sleep with, the criteria is more or less anyone who will go home with them. It’s pretty easy to identify the areas of the body that are most affected during this stage – just think of the last time you had sex with a college boy.
But that doesn’t do much to explain that pounding in my chest, or better yet, one friend’s report that after she and her boyfriend broke up, the first night she spent alone without him she found herself shivering uncontrollably on her couch. “It was as if I was going through withdrawal,” she explained.
And she may have been. Her relationship fell somewhere in between the stages of lust and attachment - during those blissful 18 months to 4 years referred to by Dr. Fisher as the romantic love, or infatuation period. During this period the body increases production of PEA, phenylethylamine, a neurotransmitter which is always present in the brain. High incidences of PEA are not only found when someone is in love, but also during stressful events such as skydiving or bungee jumping. PEA stimulates the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter which is a “feel good” chemical similar to drugs like cocaine. Among its many uses, dopamine also plays a role in reinforcement, linking certain behaviors with positive results. “Needless to say, the brain’s dopaminergic and norepinephrinergic circuits predate the use of speed and cocaine and certainly did not evolve to give us an appreciation of psychoactive drugs,” Natalie Angier explains in Women, An Intimate Geography. “Instead, the circuits of pleasure arose to reinforce behaviors and activities of possible use to the individual. If we assume that we are attracted to a particular person for good reason -- that our instincts detect something worthwhile about the person, some reason to want to mate and spend time with the person -- then a neural system designed to amplify our intitial attraction, not to let us off the hook, might prove handy, for we are inclined toward laziness and sometimes need a kick in the pants."
But that's not all. During the infatuation phase not only do we produce more "feel good" neurotransmitters, but we also produce less seratonin, the result of which can be obsessive behavior. This could explain the dopey music that repeated in my head or the continual thoughts that people have about their sweethearts while in love. (It's currently being studied to help people who suffer from uncontrollable obsessions or stalking tendencies.)
Alas, as I mentioned before, bliss does not forever last. Scientists report that the typical 18 months to 4 years of this phase of love evolved in order to give a couple enough time to give birth to a child and raise it to toddlerhood. Humans have evolved as have other species (such as geese, dolphins, and some primates) to raising only one child at a time and investing a great deal of resources to that. This stage appears to be nature’s little way of keeping couples together long enough to advance the species.
Which brings us to the third group, and perhaps the most elusive of all, those capable of long-term love. With the help of endorphins, a group of chemicals also known to work as painkillers similar to morphine, those under the spell of long-term love (or attchment) are able to cohabitate with their partner with as little hostility as possible for the long haul. Although I’ve seen the wonderful affects of this phase- the long-standing marriage between my parents, for example –this is the phase that I refer to as nature tricking us into staying in monogamous relationships. I can’t help but think of the future peoples of A Brave New World, calmly taking their soma and going about their business. Although social, behavioral, and environmental factors play a heavy hand in the success of relationships that stand the test of time, I can't help but be intrigued by the fact that some people may never be able to commit to long term relationships simply because they don't carry a lot of endorphins around with them.
Don’t get me wrong. I like to let the scientist side of me take over because I tend to think logically, but if given the option of whether to understand how love works or actually be in love, I’ll take the experience of it over theory anytime. That chest-pressing can be scary but it also reminds me that I’m alive. Being in love is like being in on a big secret with one other person in the world. No scientist can ever explain - or take away- the beauty of that.
And this is the reality that poets live in. Even the scientists concede that the best experts on love are the poets. As Dr. Fisher explains, "I think the most powerful love poetry is written by people who are passionately in love at the time. That makes them manic, it makes them desperate... Emily Dickinson, I can feel her bleeding on the page. " Anybody who's ever been in love knows what she's talking about.
