The origins of love

Is there any more talked about phenomenon in life than falling in love? Films, books, songs, and television shows are built around the phenomenon of two people meeting and finding themselves embroiled in a spiralling fountain of ecstasy and transcendence. The phrase itself, “falling” in love, suggests that there is an element of the experience that is out of the control of the participants, as if there is some “higher” power involved that is beyond the normal run of things. At the same time, falling in love has a disorienting impact, changing your perceptions of your world. This is why “eros”, passionate love, is often portrayed as arriving with a thud, sent by an arrow-wielding Goddess or God of love.

It is no surprise given its pervasiveness and life-altering quality that the phenomenon of falling in love has been the subject of extensive study for philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists. Out of this diversity of analysis has come some understanding of what happens when you fall in love and how you can make the most of it.

The biology of infatuation

Love is spoken of as a “matter of the heart”, but is it really? Love is in fact more of a matter of the brain. A new report titled “The Neuroimaging of Love” has been published late in 2010. As the name suggests, this report was no mushy piece looking at how to tell if he is really interested or what it is she really wants in bed. It is an overview analysis of many studies that have looked at what happens in the body when you fall in love and it brings together an overall picture of this complex state.

The first thing to note is that according to the research you can fall in love in one fifth of a second, or perhaps a more poetic interpretation may be “in the twinkling of an eye”. From that instant you are swept away in a brain-based biochemical torrent.

As you fall in love, 12 areas of the brain work together to release euphoria-inducing chemicals including dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, and aldosterone. In people who are “in love” there is also a spike in the release of the chemical nerve growth factor (NGF) which causes growth and maintenance of neurons. Levels of NGF drop off again after one year of being in love. The research also showed that falling in love activates similar areas of the brain to cocaine and elicits the same euphoric feelings.

It is no surprise then that being in love causes widespread changes in your body; it can for instance, reduce pain. To examine this researchers gathered people who professed to being passionately in love with someone. That is, they were identified as being in the early and most intense stages of romantic love. Previous research has shown that this knee-squeezingly intense phase of love lasts for around nine months.

They then had the subjects hold a thermal probe in the palm of their hand. This allowed the researchers to impart pain via heat. At the same time they took magnetic resonance images of the brains of the subjects. While they were experiencing heat-pain the subjects were on varying occasions; shown a picture of their loved one, shown a picture of an attractive acquaintance, or asked to complete a word-associated distraction task that is known to reduce pain.

The results showed that seeing pictures of their beloved significantly reduced pain and increased activity in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing. By contrast, merely seeing an attractive acquaintance made no difference to pain levels. The word distraction task did reduce pain but did not stimulate the reward centres in the brain, it was merely a distraction.

This all means that seeing your loved one definitely reduces the sensation of pain and it is not just because it provides a distraction. It is undoubtedly true that a complex interplay of hormones and psychology contributes to the anaesthetic powers of being in love.

All of this makes sense of the crushing feeling that occurs when love is not requited or when one partner ceases to feel it while the other is still immersed in the biochemical cascade. Being in love is a real and measurable phenomenon on the physical level. It is more than this, but we will come to that later. For now we also need to consider that as well as being biochemical, love has a significant genetic component.

Catching the eye

It might not be palatable but it is true that some of the things that motivate you have their seeds in your evolutionary history. As much as you might think that your choice of loved one is entirely your own the evidence of evolutionary biology reveals that certain things that determine attraction to another are hard-wired into you.

Our notions of beauty for example, have deep biological roots. Research has found that what we regard as beautiful in a face relates to the distances between eyes and mouth. Female Caucasian faces are judged as being beautiful when the vertical distance between the eyes and mouth is approximately 36 per cent of the face’s total length and the horizontal distance between their eyes is around 46 per cent of the face’s width. Interestingly, these proportions correspond with those of the average face.

It’s not really surprising that being beautiful physically is important to us. After all, attractive people have been shown to get better jobs, have higher salaries, and to have their pick of partners. Being physically beautiful is a powerful thing and therefore highly prized as we search for partners. It is not only the much criticised Western culture that values physical Beauty either.

Research published in the Journal of Global Business Advancement tested a physical vanity scale across China, India, and the USA. The results showed that while the different cultures have different ideas of what beauty is, the idea that physical beauty is important was consistent across the cultures. This is neither surprising nor particularly bad.

Beauty is said by some to be the unifying concept that we apply to certain signals processed instinctively by your unconscious brain; recognising beauty is hardwired into your DNA. To lend weight to this idea, many studies have shown that faces judged to be beautiful, regardless of culture, are highly symmetrical. This symmetry is thought to reflect favourable exposure to hormonal levels and a comfortable environment while we are in the womb.

In a sense then, detecting physical beauty is really detecting a healthy individual who would make a good mate. That’s why we have general agreement within cultures as to what is beautiful, and why physical good looks is important to all cultures. It’s a survival thing: neither good nor bad, it just is. It is also at least partly what motivates you when you feel an attraction to someone else.

The hand of fate

Humphrey Bogart famously spoke the lines in the classic film Casablanca “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine.” Bogie was referring to the fickle hand of fate throwing him back together with his old love. In fact fate does play a hand in the process of falling in love because where you live and where you meet someone impacts how you will evaluate them on an unconscious level.

As an example, the importance of physical attractiveness to you is determined by where you live. Research published in the journal Personal Relationships has revealed that attractiveness matters more in more socially mobile urban areas where individuals have a high degree of social choice. In rural areas relationships are less about choice and more about living in community. A flow on from this selection pressure in the cities is that city girls have their psychological wellbeing strongly linked to their appearance.

The context in which you meet people also has a big influence on how you will feel about them. This has been established in a recent study from the journal Psychological Science where researchers analysed data from 84 different speed dating events. People generally preferred people who were taller, younger and well-educated. Beyond that the attributes that people liked depended on how many people attended the event. At bigger events women and men decided based on quickly identifiable attributes like height and weight. At smaller events people made decisions based on qualities that take longer to identify like education and type of job. Our brains can only do so much and when faced with abundant choice it goes with what it can evaluate most quickly. It seems outrageous to suggest it but maybe a nightclub isn’t the best place to find a partner.

Unconscious attraction

As well as the social context in which you meet someone there are primal, subconscious senses that can draw you to another person.

Without necessarily realising they are doing it, women dress to impress when they are at their most fertile. In one study women came to a lab for a test and were given questionnaires about food. The women came back several times over the course of a month and were photographed. The researchers then asked men and women to assess these photographs by asking, “In what photo is the person trying to look more attractive?” The judges chose the photograph taken during the women’s fertile phases 60 per cent of the time, which is well beyond chance. This is not to say that the women totally changed their style when ovulating, but rather that they made the best of their personal style. They wore their best shirt, added some more flamboyant earrings or a little more make-up. Without even knowing it they were being driven by their biology to make themselves more attractive. There is another thing that women do though which takes no action at all.

Humans like to think themselves above the sniff and seek level when it comes to mate selection and sex drive. Alas, another illusion of grandeur has been dispelled. In one study researchers had women wear t-shirts for three nights during different phases of their menstrual cycle. T-shirts worn by no-one were also used. Men were then asked to smell the t-shirts with saliva samples being taken from the men before and after they smelled the shirts. Men who smelled t-shirts of ovulating women had higher testosterone levels and rated the t-shirts as the most pleasant smelling. This is the first study to show that testosterone levels respond directly to smells associated with ovulation. Men also put out their own olfactory signals.

Androstadienone is a male chemical signal found concentrated in men’s sweat. Researchers measured levels of the hormone cortisol in the saliva of females after they took twenty sniffs from a jar of androstadienone. Cortisol is secreted by the body to help maintain proper arousal and sense of well-being, respond to stress and other functions. Cortisol levels in the women who smelled androstadienone shot up within fifteen minutes and stayed elevated for up to an hour. The women also reported improved mood, higher sexual arousal, and had increased blood pressure, heart rate and breathing.

Without you even being aware of it then, subconscious biological messages may be being sent to draw you toward to a person. If it is all sounding a bit too primitive for you then take comfort in this study published in the British Journal of Psychology. Researchers asked women to read profiles with accompanying photographs of men. They were asked to say how willing they would be to have a short or long term relationship with the men and a group of men did the same for photos of women. Some of the profiles gave hints to indicate kind, altruistic qualities and the researchers then altered those profiles for the same photograph. Both men and women were more willing to have long term relationships with people with kind profiles than with neutral profiles. Women also showed an interest in the kinder people when choosing someone for just one date. Kindness is attractive in evolutionary terms as it suggests the person would make a good and generous partner and parent.

While there are undeniable evolutionary and biochemical elements to attracting you to someone in the first instance, falling in love is going a step further and that is where psychospiritual elements come into play.

Two as one

In the first year or so of a new relationship where love is in bloom there is a sense that the two people involved have melded into one. This is partly why it can hurt so profoundly when a relationship ends. Studies have shown that when a romantic relationship ends part of your self-concept is being torn apart. Over time romantic partners develop shared friends, shared activities and even overlapping self-concepts. Research has shown that individuals have reduced self-concept clarity after a break-up. Just as partners can come to complete each other’s sentences, they can come to complete each other’s selves. So when a relationship ends there is not only the pain of loss but the disorientation of changes in your self.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to be a close couple though. In fact couples who use the term “we” a lot may have the best relationships. Research published in the journal Psychology and Aging analysed conversations between middle-aged and older couples at times of conflict and found that those who use pronouns such as “we”, “our” and “us” behave more positively to each other and show less signs of psychological stress. Couples who emphasise their separateness by using pronouns such as “I”, “me” and “you” were found to be less satisfied in their marriages. “We” language grows out of a sense of partnership and being able to face problems together. The burning question though is what is really happening when you fall in love? Do you genuinely merge with another when you fall in love and do you really want to?

Love’s gift

Sigmund Freud in his final work Civilisation and Its Discontents wrote that humans are driven to obtain money, power, and sex. Freud believed that love came from the self and was driven by base instincts, a drive for sex. This bleak view may seem unduly harsh but at least Freud put love on the psychological couch for analysis. Over the years there has been much said and written about the apparent dissolution of the self and merging with another that characterises romantic love.

In his oft-reprinted and best-selling book The Road Less Travelled psychotherapist M. Scott Peck echoes Freud by saying that, “…the experience of falling in love is a sex-linked erotic experience.” Peck makes the point that we do not fall in love with friends or family and that the sexual element is essential to romantic love. He also discusses the sense of merging with another when we fall in love as a kind of psychological trick to get us to make commitments that would otherwise seem insane. Peck talks about the fact that as we grow we develop our ego, or sense of self, and that by the time we are adults we have well established ego boundaries. He makes the point though that it is lonely behind these ego walls and says, “The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual’s ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person.” For Peck the sudden release from your ego-prison is the source of the ecstasy of falling in love. In many ways this is a dark view. It sees falling in love as an act of psychological regression, taking us back to the childlike state of feeling at one with the mother. It also sees love as a doomed state once the reality of life intrudes.

There are however, more affirmative views of what is going on when the sense of “two becoming one” arises. In his book The Path to Love Deepak Chopra says, “Love’s gift is to strip away a lifetime of imprints in the psyche that condition us to believe in separateness, returning us to the reality that we were born in, which contains only love.”

Terry Robson is the editor of WellBeing magazine, a broadcaster, and an author. His latest book Failure IS an Option is published through ABC Books.