The Science of Attraction
Think of the last time you ran into someone you find attractive. You may have stammered, your palms may have sweated; you may have said something incredibly asinine and tripped spectacularly while trying to saunter away (or is that just me?). And chances are, your heart was thudding in your chest. It’s no surprise that, for centuries, people thought love (and most other emotions, for that matter) arose from the heart. As it turns out, love is all about the brain — which, in turn, makes the rest of your body go haywire.
According to science, the process of getting into romantic love can be divided into three stages.
Stage 1. Lust.
When you are in this stage, you feel physically attracted and drawn to the object of your affection. Most of the time you are driven by the need for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from the need to reproduce. Most of the times, people who openly show these feelings are victimized as “sexual predators” but in real sense, they are just an indicator or a signal of a “potential” stage 2 between the bearers. Activity during this period is driven by estrogen in females and testosterone in males. There may be an element of misery or an intensity that makes things exciting. While these chemicals are often stereotyped as being “male” or “female”, both play a role in both men and women. Testosterone increases libido in just about everyone. These effects are less pronounced with estrogen but most women report being more sexually motivated around the time they ovulate when estrogen levels are highest.
Stage 2. Attraction
In the second stage you begin to obsess about your lover and crave his presence. Your heart races and you don’t feel like sleeping or at times even eating. You may even get sweaty palms. There is an extra surge of energy when you fantasize about the things you would do together. These feelings are created by three chemicals; norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin.
Dopamine at increased levels is associated with motivation, reward and goal directed behavior. It’s released when we do things that feel good to us. Large quantities of dopamine and a related hormone called norepinephrine are released during attraction. These hormones make us giddy, energetic and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia(I know what you may be thinking, and yes it is true. The expressions, “I love you so much I can’t sleep” or “I love you so much, I can’t eat” are scientifically true). Brain scans of people in love have actually shown that the primary reward centers of the brain including the caudate nucleus fire like crazy when they are shown a picture of someone they are intensely attracted to, compared to when they are shown a picture of someone they feel neutral towards.
Attraction also leads to a reduction in the hormone serotonin that’s known to be involved in appetite and mood.
Stage 3. Attachment
This is the predominant factor in long term relationships. It involves wanting to make more lasting commitment to your loved one. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well.
After about 2 to 4 years in a relationship, dopamine decreases and physical attraction goes down. If things are going well, it gets replaced by oxytocin and vasopressin, which create the desire to bond, affiliate with and nurture your partner. You want to be close and share deepest(or darkest) secrets with him or her. You plan and dream together. This is at the point which you may move in together, get married, and/or have children.
Oxytocin is often nicknamed “cuddle hormone” for this reason. Oxytocin is released in large quantities by the hypothalamus during sex and exponentially increases during orgasm. It is released in lower quantities during childbirth and breastfeeding. This may seem like a very strange assortment of activities — not all of which are necessarily enjoyable — but the common factor here is that all of these events are precursors to bonding. There is a dark side to oxytocin as well. It plays a role in needy, clingy behaviors and jealousy.
Well understanding this may help you build long lasting relationships with your partner, just keep the oxytocin and dopamine flowing.
Love hurts
This all paints quite the rosy picture of love: hormones are released, making us feel good, rewarded, and close to our romantic partners. But that can’t be the whole story: love is often accompanied by jealousy, erratic behavior, and irrationality, along with a host of other less-than-positive emotions and moods. It seems that our friendly cohort of hormones is also responsible for the downsides of love.
Sexual arousal (but not necessarily attachment) appears to turn off regions in our brain that regulate critical thinking, self-awareness, and rational behavior, including parts of the prefrontal cortex. In short, love makes us dumb. Have you ever done something when you were in love that you later regretted?
Dopamine, for instance, is the hormone responsible for the vast majority of the brain’s reward pathway — and that means controlling both the good and the bad. We experience surges of dopamine for our virtues and our vices. In fact, the dopamine pathway is particularly well studied when it comes to addiction. The same regions that light up when we’re feeling attraction light up when drug addicts take cocaine and when we binge eat sweets. For example, cocaine maintains dopamine signaling for much longer than usual, leading to a temporary “high.”
In a way, attraction is much like an addiction to another human being. Similarly, the same brain regions light up when we become addicted to material goods as when we become emotionally dependent on our partners.
Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brain, is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships. However, we can push the dopamine pathway too far when we become addicted to food or drugs. Similarly, too much dopamine in a relationship can underlie unhealthy emotional dependence on our partners. And while healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice.
The same way a person craving for a drug will go through withdrawal effects, is the same way a person after a breakup will go through withdrawal effects. Once the brain is used to a certain level of dopamine and Oxytocin stimulation, failing to get that stimulation has great effects on your health and well being.
This is the reason why most of the time after a breakup a person my get addicted to alcohol or other drugs. This is just a reaction of your brain, trying to make you raise the dopamine stimulation to the level that your partner used to raise it to. That is the reason after separation from your partner you may experience moments of emotional breakdown, headaches, dizziness. Sometimes it goes as far as nausea, vomiting and hospitable sicknesses. The hypothalamus is overworked while it struggles to produce as much Oxytocin and dopamine as it was used to — but this time without stimulation — leading to a feeling of exhaustion, laziness and tiredness even as soon as you have just woken up in the morning.
This sequence of activities cause the victim to dissociate from his or her environment and act wildly and recklessly.
So, in short, there is sort of a “formula” for love. However, it’s a work in progress, and there are many questions left unanswered. And, as we’ve realized by now, it’s not just the hormone side of the equation that’s complicated. Love can be both the best and worst thing for you — it can be the thing that gets us up in the morning, or what makes us never want to wake up again. I’m not sure I could define “love” for you if I kept you here for another hundred thousand pages.
In the end, everyone is capable of defining love for themselves. And, for better or for worse, if it’s all hormones, maybe each of us can have “chemistry” with just about anyone. But whether or not it goes further is still up to the rest of you.
