The Chemistry of Love
Have you ever fallen in love with someone who you utterly find unlikeable?
Love is one of the most overwhelming and at the same time one of the most complex feelings that many people experience at some point in their lifetime. Trying to understand how feelings are formed and how they are affected by personal experiences has been a major goal of psychology. I will try to introduce you some of the current knowledge about how we fall in love and who we fall in love with.
What happens to us when we fall in love? Popular answers to this question are feeling euphoric, always desiring to be around the person we love, and almost becoming addicted to them. The truth is, love is an actual addiction. However, as opposed to what you might think, it is not an addiction to the person itself. It is an addiction to the chemicals that our bodies produce when we are around them.
One of the hormones we produce when we fall in love is dopamine. Dopamine is the reward hormone of the brain. It gives us feelings of well-being and thus we want to get more of what causes us to produce it. This is also the hormone related to drug addiction. Cigarettes and some drugs produce feelings of relaxation and well-being by prolonging or increasing the effect of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the hormone that causes what we call “liking”.
What we often confuse with love is lust. Lust is an important part of love, but is not all of it. Lust, in other words sex drive, is mediated by the hormone testosterone. Contrary to popular belief that testosterone is a “male hormone”, testosterone is present both in males and females, but in different amounts. It regulates how attracted we are to a person physically.
Another crucial hormone is oxytocin. Oxytocin is the hormone for long term bonding. It has a very important role in other types of bonding such as the bond between mother and child. Oxytocin may be produced in various ways. Physical contact is one of the ways it is produced. That is how hugging and holding hands strengthen our connection to our partner. Sex also promotes bonding through oxytocin.
According to the Triarchic Model of Love, love ideally involves all three of attraction, lust and long term bonding. This is not always the case, and the reason why some relationships end may be that some of the three is missing. These three hormones make us head over heels in love with someone, but the big question is how we choose the person we fall in love with. Why can’t we fall in love with just anyone?
The most widely accepted theory that tries to answer this question is that we take our parents as a model for our relationships. The parent of the same sex to which we are attracted plays an important role in our partner choices. Social learning determines many of our choices in life.
We are mostly attracted to people and situations that are familiar, but what if our parents were not as good a model for our future relationships as we would like? People who have negative early experiences such as abuse may unawarely choose partners that will provide those familiar experiences. This may cause them to get stuck in repetitive life patterns that have negative consequences.
Nevertheless, patterns may change with conscious effort. As long as we are aware of our choices and what triggers us to keep being attracted to a particular type of person, we can break a pattern that harms us. Therapy is one of the gateways to doing this as it helps to change certain behaviours and rebuild perspective towards various situations.
We still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding love, but hopefully now you understand just a tiny bit more of it!
By featured writer, Ilgin Cebioglu. See ‘Team’ for more information and contact details.