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Apparently, love - like depression - is a chemical imbalance. That's my take on this interview, anyway. Below are a few amusing and/or disturbing excerpts from salon's talk with the author of "Why We Love - The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love."
For me, the most revealing part of the interview is this one, from a section where the author talked about certain antidepressants interfering with the ability to fall in love:
"...seminal fluid has dopamine and norepinephrine in it, as well as serotonin and testosterone and estrogen -- all kinds of things they've now shown have an antidepressant effect. When a man doesn't deposit them in the vaginal canal, [he's not able to influence a woman's mood positively, and therefore not able to] trick a woman chemically into liking him.
In other words, Lit pornsters, semen is like roofies - the date-rape drug. We only love you because you inject us with antidepressants. Is that fair? Certainly not. So cut it out. Or do it often enough that we don't have time to feel manipulated, okay?
Bits from the interview:
---------------------
This is your brain in love
In a fascinating new book, evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher examines the chemistry responsible for the giddiness, fixations and overarching lunacy associated with romantic love.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Carlene Bauer
According to Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, the bliss we feel when we fall in love is the result of elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, which can result in sleeplessness, exhilaration and single-mindedness, among other things, and low levels of serotonin, which can set the mind racing toward obsession. What we're feeling in those early throes of passion is an addiction, she says.
Some may think this sounds like a just-so story with footnotes, but there's something comforting in the notion that maybe it's the dopamine talking when it's 2 in the morning and you've been Googling your office crush for the past seven hours.
Among her tips?
Don't think you can fornicate frequently and indiscriminately without, à la "A Midsummer Night's Dream," one day waking up to find you've fallen in love with an ass.
And maybe lay off the Prozac.
salon: The big news in this book is an experiment in which you scanned the brains of people in love. And you found differences between men and women.
{excerpt} I'm interested in why we're all alike. What we discovered is that the parts of the brain that lit up and became active when someone falls in love are part of the reward system in the brain. And one of them is the ventral tegmental area, a tiny part in the midbrain, quite far down, that makes dopamine and sprinkles it around the brain. When the prefrontal cortex -- the part behind your forehead, the thinking part -- realizes that you are not getting your reward, those dopamine cells work harder and pump out more dopamine and you feel more motivation, more ecstasy, and that's why -- think of Romeo and Juliet -- when there are barriers to the relationship, you try harder and you love harder.
On average, men tended to show more activity in {the region of the brain associated with} the integration of visual stimuli. This really shouldn't come as a surprise. Everybody knows that men are highly visual -- men spend their lives commenting on women, looking at porn, and the like. I believe these visual networks evolved 1 or 2 million years ago because men needed to look at a woman and size up her ability to give him healthy babies...Men definitely fall in love faster than women -- there's good psychological data on that. And I think that's because they are more visual.
salon: And women?
Several regions associated with memory recall became active. And I couldn't figure out why at first, and then I thought to myself, my goodness -- for millions of years women have been looking for someone to help them raise their babies, and in order to do that you really can't look at someone and know whether they're honest or trustworthy or whether they can hit the buffalo in the head and share the meat with you. You've got to remember what they said yesterday, what they said three weeks ago, what they gave your mother two months ago at the midwinter festival...There's no other animal on earth for whom motherhood is so complex.
salon: So you're saying this would explain why, a copious amount of undergraduate women's studies notwithstanding, I feel myself turning into Alice Kramden when, during arguments with my boyfriend, I dredge up things he wishes I'd forget?
Women remember. It drives both sexes crazy. If women could forget a few things, it might be better for them. Men complain about their marriages much less than women do; they remarry faster than women do. Throughout their lives women have many more complaints during the marriage. But if men could remember a few things, it would probably be better for them too!
salon: Falling in love seems too unpredictable and individual a process to qualify objectively. How was it possible for you to decide whether someone was sufficiently far gone to use them as a subject?
I established about 20 primary characteristics of romantic love, and I did it several ways. First I went through the last 25 years of psychological literature, looking for the things that come up over and over again. And I looked at poetry from around the world -- from ancient Sumer, China and India [for similarities in the expression of love across time and history]...
Then I created a questionnaire, which I gave to 430 Americans and 420 Japanese of all ages. And those candidates who said they were in love responded to the characteristics outlined in the questionnaire in positive ways.
So here are the basic characteristics {of love}: You lose a sense of self, your edges become porous -- this person almost invades, but it's a very pleasant invasion. Then there are mood swings -- real giddiness and ecstasy when things are going well, but if you don't hear from him via e-mail or phone, there's despair.
But the main characteristic for me is obsessively thinking about the person.
salon: You say romance is brief because nature only wanted us absolutely nuts until we managed to conceive. After we have children, attachment, a different chemical reaction that results in feelings of stability, kicks in to bind a couple together to raise those kids. What would you say to those who find the prospect of attachment too monotonous to contemplate? And is the idea of "till death do us part" wishful thinking?
Americans come out of a farming tradition, as all Westerners do. The whole concept of "till death do us part," that is our idea, because we have so much property. But we are probably built to be restless in long relationships. And now, when we break up -- well, it's not like the grasslands of Africa where you pick up your spear and walk off. You've got cars and houses and college educations to pay for.
But for most of human evolution there was a lot of serial pair-bonding. You would form a pair bond for a while, have a child, break up, fall in love again, have another marriage, another child, break up again, and then somewhere in middle age probably form another long-term relationship -- and maybe were adulterous on the side. From a Darwinian perspective, this makes sense. It enables you to raise babies in a stable partnership while you go out and collect more resources for the babies you have with an affair, or to have more babies if you're a man.
We live a long time, and we're nicely wired to fall in love several times in our lives. So this trend we have now of a long period of extended practice [with having different partners] before beginning a long attachment is a good one.
...we weren't built to be happy; we were built to reproduce. {my bold highlight - sr
}
Lust, romantic love, attachment, these three different systems, we all have them to various degrees, and some people find it easier to form a long-term attachment than other people do. And I do think that there's a chemical basis to that. Divorce does run in families. Some people need thrills all the time -- and if they do have a marriage they're almost always adulterous within a couple years of that marriage.
I think everyone of us lies in bed in night and tries to decide how we're going to [find and keep love]. I mean, that's the problem. We have a brain that can simultaneously feel deep attachment to one person while we feel mad romantic attraction to someone else.
salon: It seems that in your book you caution against casual sex. Did I read you right?
...I do think knowing what we know about how these brain systems are connected, it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on whom you copulate with. Because casual sex might not be so casual. Most liberated contemporary adults have copulated with someone they will never love. And women are just as able to copulate without love as men...But neither women or men are too good at love 'em and leave 'em. You can be the other woman -- for a while. But at some point some of that brain circuitry kicks in and you fall in love.
These three brain systems -- the sex drive, romantic love and attachment -- are connected, particularly the romantic love and sex drive. When you fall in love you want to start hopping in bed with the person, in part because the elevated levels of dopamine associated with romantic love can trigger testosterone, the hormone of desire, of sex craving. But the reverse can happen -- testosterone can elevate the activity of dopamine and you can fall madly in love with someone that you hadn't intended to.
salon: So the idea that one could always keep having sexual adventures without real emotional consequences, that's a fairy tale we've been telling ourselves?
It's not gonna happen. With orgasm, levels of oxytocin go up in women and vasopressin in men -- they call these the satisfaction hormones because they do give a sense of calm and peace and security and often a cosmic sense of union. If you have enough of them with somebody you're going to feel attached to them.
salon: How can we control love?
The only one way I really know of to kick in that dopamine system and to help spark love, particularly in a long-term relationship, is to do novel things together. Novelty is associated with elevated activity of dopamine and norepinephrine -- those are the same stimulants associated with cocaine and amphetamines. Novelty can step up that system. Some people can just go to a different restaurant. You don't have to go skydiving. Other people, maybe they should.
-----------------------------
"Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love"
By Helen Fisher
Henry Holt & Company
320 pages
Nonfiction
---------------------------
For me, the most revealing part of the interview is this one, from a section where the author talked about certain antidepressants interfering with the ability to fall in love:
"...seminal fluid has dopamine and norepinephrine in it, as well as serotonin and testosterone and estrogen -- all kinds of things they've now shown have an antidepressant effect. When a man doesn't deposit them in the vaginal canal, [he's not able to influence a woman's mood positively, and therefore not able to] trick a woman chemically into liking him.
In other words, Lit pornsters, semen is like roofies - the date-rape drug. We only love you because you inject us with antidepressants. Is that fair? Certainly not. So cut it out. Or do it often enough that we don't have time to feel manipulated, okay?
Bits from the interview:
---------------------
This is your brain in love
In a fascinating new book, evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher examines the chemistry responsible for the giddiness, fixations and overarching lunacy associated with romantic love.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Carlene Bauer
According to Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, the bliss we feel when we fall in love is the result of elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, which can result in sleeplessness, exhilaration and single-mindedness, among other things, and low levels of serotonin, which can set the mind racing toward obsession. What we're feeling in those early throes of passion is an addiction, she says.
Some may think this sounds like a just-so story with footnotes, but there's something comforting in the notion that maybe it's the dopamine talking when it's 2 in the morning and you've been Googling your office crush for the past seven hours.
Among her tips?
Don't think you can fornicate frequently and indiscriminately without, à la "A Midsummer Night's Dream," one day waking up to find you've fallen in love with an ass.
And maybe lay off the Prozac.
salon: The big news in this book is an experiment in which you scanned the brains of people in love. And you found differences between men and women.
{excerpt} I'm interested in why we're all alike. What we discovered is that the parts of the brain that lit up and became active when someone falls in love are part of the reward system in the brain. And one of them is the ventral tegmental area, a tiny part in the midbrain, quite far down, that makes dopamine and sprinkles it around the brain. When the prefrontal cortex -- the part behind your forehead, the thinking part -- realizes that you are not getting your reward, those dopamine cells work harder and pump out more dopamine and you feel more motivation, more ecstasy, and that's why -- think of Romeo and Juliet -- when there are barriers to the relationship, you try harder and you love harder.
On average, men tended to show more activity in {the region of the brain associated with} the integration of visual stimuli. This really shouldn't come as a surprise. Everybody knows that men are highly visual -- men spend their lives commenting on women, looking at porn, and the like. I believe these visual networks evolved 1 or 2 million years ago because men needed to look at a woman and size up her ability to give him healthy babies...Men definitely fall in love faster than women -- there's good psychological data on that. And I think that's because they are more visual.
salon: And women?
Several regions associated with memory recall became active. And I couldn't figure out why at first, and then I thought to myself, my goodness -- for millions of years women have been looking for someone to help them raise their babies, and in order to do that you really can't look at someone and know whether they're honest or trustworthy or whether they can hit the buffalo in the head and share the meat with you. You've got to remember what they said yesterday, what they said three weeks ago, what they gave your mother two months ago at the midwinter festival...There's no other animal on earth for whom motherhood is so complex.
salon: So you're saying this would explain why, a copious amount of undergraduate women's studies notwithstanding, I feel myself turning into Alice Kramden when, during arguments with my boyfriend, I dredge up things he wishes I'd forget?
Women remember. It drives both sexes crazy. If women could forget a few things, it might be better for them. Men complain about their marriages much less than women do; they remarry faster than women do. Throughout their lives women have many more complaints during the marriage. But if men could remember a few things, it would probably be better for them too!
salon: Falling in love seems too unpredictable and individual a process to qualify objectively. How was it possible for you to decide whether someone was sufficiently far gone to use them as a subject?
I established about 20 primary characteristics of romantic love, and I did it several ways. First I went through the last 25 years of psychological literature, looking for the things that come up over and over again. And I looked at poetry from around the world -- from ancient Sumer, China and India [for similarities in the expression of love across time and history]...
Then I created a questionnaire, which I gave to 430 Americans and 420 Japanese of all ages. And those candidates who said they were in love responded to the characteristics outlined in the questionnaire in positive ways.
So here are the basic characteristics {of love}: You lose a sense of self, your edges become porous -- this person almost invades, but it's a very pleasant invasion. Then there are mood swings -- real giddiness and ecstasy when things are going well, but if you don't hear from him via e-mail or phone, there's despair.
But the main characteristic for me is obsessively thinking about the person.
salon: You say romance is brief because nature only wanted us absolutely nuts until we managed to conceive. After we have children, attachment, a different chemical reaction that results in feelings of stability, kicks in to bind a couple together to raise those kids. What would you say to those who find the prospect of attachment too monotonous to contemplate? And is the idea of "till death do us part" wishful thinking?
Americans come out of a farming tradition, as all Westerners do. The whole concept of "till death do us part," that is our idea, because we have so much property. But we are probably built to be restless in long relationships. And now, when we break up -- well, it's not like the grasslands of Africa where you pick up your spear and walk off. You've got cars and houses and college educations to pay for.
But for most of human evolution there was a lot of serial pair-bonding. You would form a pair bond for a while, have a child, break up, fall in love again, have another marriage, another child, break up again, and then somewhere in middle age probably form another long-term relationship -- and maybe were adulterous on the side. From a Darwinian perspective, this makes sense. It enables you to raise babies in a stable partnership while you go out and collect more resources for the babies you have with an affair, or to have more babies if you're a man.
We live a long time, and we're nicely wired to fall in love several times in our lives. So this trend we have now of a long period of extended practice [with having different partners] before beginning a long attachment is a good one.
...we weren't built to be happy; we were built to reproduce. {my bold highlight - sr
}Lust, romantic love, attachment, these three different systems, we all have them to various degrees, and some people find it easier to form a long-term attachment than other people do. And I do think that there's a chemical basis to that. Divorce does run in families. Some people need thrills all the time -- and if they do have a marriage they're almost always adulterous within a couple years of that marriage.
I think everyone of us lies in bed in night and tries to decide how we're going to [find and keep love]. I mean, that's the problem. We have a brain that can simultaneously feel deep attachment to one person while we feel mad romantic attraction to someone else.
salon: It seems that in your book you caution against casual sex. Did I read you right?
...I do think knowing what we know about how these brain systems are connected, it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on whom you copulate with. Because casual sex might not be so casual. Most liberated contemporary adults have copulated with someone they will never love. And women are just as able to copulate without love as men...But neither women or men are too good at love 'em and leave 'em. You can be the other woman -- for a while. But at some point some of that brain circuitry kicks in and you fall in love.
These three brain systems -- the sex drive, romantic love and attachment -- are connected, particularly the romantic love and sex drive. When you fall in love you want to start hopping in bed with the person, in part because the elevated levels of dopamine associated with romantic love can trigger testosterone, the hormone of desire, of sex craving. But the reverse can happen -- testosterone can elevate the activity of dopamine and you can fall madly in love with someone that you hadn't intended to.
salon: So the idea that one could always keep having sexual adventures without real emotional consequences, that's a fairy tale we've been telling ourselves?
It's not gonna happen. With orgasm, levels of oxytocin go up in women and vasopressin in men -- they call these the satisfaction hormones because they do give a sense of calm and peace and security and often a cosmic sense of union. If you have enough of them with somebody you're going to feel attached to them.
salon: How can we control love?
The only one way I really know of to kick in that dopamine system and to help spark love, particularly in a long-term relationship, is to do novel things together. Novelty is associated with elevated activity of dopamine and norepinephrine -- those are the same stimulants associated with cocaine and amphetamines. Novelty can step up that system. Some people can just go to a different restaurant. You don't have to go skydiving. Other people, maybe they should.
-----------------------------
"Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love"
By Helen Fisher
Henry Holt & Company
320 pages
Nonfiction
---------------------------
