Your heart beats faster, he/she is all you can think about and you feel like your stomach has taken off on a crazy rollercoaster ride with a very unwilling you tagging along. While the experience of romantic love has inspired thousands of poems, novels, paintings, music, art and perhaps, even crime it isn’t some fathomless emotion that is at play here. In fact, there are a series of very well-documented reactions in your brain that trigger off all of those pleasant/unpleasant feelings that are associated with love: the obsession, the sleepless nights, the day dreaming, the risk-taking.
And no one is considered as much of an authority on what happens to our brains when we fall “madly in love” than the anthropologist Helen Fisher. In a series of well-documented studies (they have been the subject of two books and TED talks), Fisher observed the brain MRIs of subjects who reported having fallen in love, those who said they had just experienced a break-up and those who said they were still in love with their partner after 10-25 years of being together. She found that the “in love” brain has certain characteristics that last for a certain period of time, and that these characteristics might explain why we feel what we do when we find ourselves in love:
A chemical cocktail
The “in-love” brain has high levels of dopamine (which helps regulate the brain’s reward and pleasure centers, and also helps manage movement and emotional responses) and norepinephrine. However, it also has low levels of serotonin (which regulates sleep perhaps giving a scientific reason for why love can keep you up at night). Fisher also stated that the three “stages” of love — lust, attraction and attachment were driven by different hormones.
So for instance, lust (craving for sexual gratification) was driven by androgen and estrogen, but attraction had more to do with dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin (causing the extreme mood swings euphoria/depression, obsessive thinking and intense craving for the love object). Finally, attachment was driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin (which gives the feeling of peace and calm that is associated with a stable, long-term relationship).
It’s all in your head
The ventral tegmental area a tiny area near the base of the brain — is what becomes active when you fall in love. It is part of your brain’s reward system and is associated with wanting, motivating, focus and craving.
The center which calculates our gains and losses are also very active in the “in love” brain making it more likely that you’ll engage in greater risks to ensure that you get the “prize” you so want. A straightforward explanation indeed for why we feel the way we do, and why we do the things we do, when we fall in love!
why forgetting is so hard
You may have often given out well-meaning advice to a friend/relative suffering in the throes of an unreturned love to “move on”. But moving on is not as easy an alternative. Unfortunately, these same regions of the brain that are activated when you fall in love become even more active when you don’t get what you want the romantic partner of your choice.
This might explain why obsession after a rejection can spiral out of control (your brain is sending out signals that make you crave/want the love object even more, intensify your focus). In her studies, Fisher also found that the region of the brain that is stimulated for our forming deep attachments is also the one that is active when we experience a rejection a physical basis for the phrase about love and loss being two sides of the same coin.
The addiction is real
Research has established that falling in love activates the exact same centers in your brain as a cocaine high (the joke being that you can actually come down from a cocaine rush)! Fisher also pointed out that those, who had gone through a bad rejection or a failed relationship, went through many of the same stages as an addict first you developed tolerance (needing more and more of the love object just as you do a drug), then you experienced the withdrawal symptoms when your feelings weren’t reciprocated, and you even had relapses falling back into the addiction.
