The Flip Medley

From: xxxx@neobeans.com
Subject: Re: National Geographic – Chemical Reaction of Love
Date: January 23, 2006 11:46:22 PM EST

Wow… very deep article. A few quotes stood out to me:

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Levels of serotonin in both the obsessives’ blood and the lovers’ blood were 40 percent lower than those in her normal test subjects. Translation: Love and obsessive-compulsive disorder could have a similar chemical profile. Translation: Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart. Translation: Don’t be a fool. Stay away.

Of course that’s a mandate none of us can follow…

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Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland did an interesting experiment with sweaty T-shirts. He asked 49 women to smell T-shorts previously worn by unidentified men with a variety of the genotypes that influence body odor and immune systems. He then asked the women to rate which T-shirts smelled the best, which the worst. What Wedekind found was that women preferred the scent of a T-shirt worn by a man whose genotype was most different different from hers, a genotype that, perhaps, is linked to an immune system that possesses something hers does not…

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Biologically speaking, the reasons romantic love fades away may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pule of dopamine that accompanies passion and makes us fly. Cocaine users describe the phenomenon of tolerance: The brain adapts to the excessive input of the drug. Perhaps the neurons become desensitized and need more and more to produce the high — to put out pixie dust, metaphorically speaking.

Maybe it’s a good thing that romance fizzles. Would we have railroads, bridges, planes, faxes, vaccines, and television if we were always besotted? … more seriously, if the chemically altered state induced by romantic love is akin to a mental illness or a drug-induced euphoria, exposing yourself too long could result in psychological damage. A good sex life can be as strong as Gorilla Glue, but who wants that stuff on your skin?

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Renu was lucky in the end. In Mumbai she met a man named Anil, and it was then, for the first time, that she felt passion. “When I first met Anil, it was like nothing I’d ever experienced. He was the first man I ever had an orgasm with. I was high, just high, all the time. And I knew it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, and so that infused it with a sweet sense of longing, almost as though we were watching the end approach while we were also discovering each other.

When Renu speaks of the end, she does not, to be sure, mean the end of her relationship with Anil; she means the end of a certain stage. The two are still happily married, companionable, loving if not “in love”, with a playful black daschund they bought together. Their relationship, once so full of fire, now seems ot simmer along at an even temperature, enought o keep them well fed and warm. They are grateful.

Would I want all that passion back?”, Renu asks. “Sometimes, yes. But to tell you the truth, it was exhausting.”

From a physiological point of view, this couple has moved from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment. Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of connection, bonding. It is released when we hug our long-term spouses, or our children. It is released with a mother nurses her infant. Prairie voles, animals with high levels of oxytocin, mate for life. When scientists block oxytocin receptors in this rodents, the animals don’t form monogamous bonds and tend to roam…

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Aron and Fisher also suggest doing novel things together, because novelty triggers dopamine in the brain, which can stimulate feelings of attraction. In other words, if your heart flutters in his presence, you might decide it’s not because you’re anxious, but because you love him. Carrying this a step further, Aron and others have found that if you just jog in place and then meet someone, you’re more likely to think they’re attractive. So first dates that involve a nerve-racking activity, like riding a roller coaster, are more likely to lead to second and third dates…

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So… all of that was interesting to me, but it seems to conform to something I’ve believed for quite some time — Love is part chemistry and another part logic, with a healthy dose of choice. I don’t believe in one person being my soul mate, but I do believe that of all the women I meet, there will be precious few who I will feel are the right person at the right time. And of them, I suspect only a handful (if even that many!) in my life would be a person I’d consider marrying.

In my perfect world, I believe that there has to be passion — for a variety of reasons. Passion is a byproduct of attraction, which is absolutely necessary in the beginning. It also gives both people an anchor for believing in the mutual attraction they have later — I have always found it comforting that the passion was there, because it gave me reason to believe that they wanted me physically as well as emotionally and intellectually. For me, feeling like a woman is physically attracted to me is pure gold, so the greater the passion, the more comfortable I am with the relationship. Finally, it also serves as a reminder for both people (or so I hope!) that great passion, while you can find it in lots of places, isn’t something that is impossible to find in that relationship since there is already a history of it… it may fade, but sometimes the knowledge that it is there, and lurking beneath a rock, just waiting to be tapped… can be enough to ride out the valleys in the relational sine wave.

That said, given that I also believe relationships are cyclical… true love involves choice: I have to choose to be with someone. Not out of obligation, but because I genuinely feel that they complement the imperfect, incomplete “me”. That said, different women “complete” me in different ways, which explains why, for example, I can be attracted to one person in a completely different way from another.

Finally, for all the science, I have a another aphorism I would offer up: Understanding the mechanics of a miracle doesn’t make it any less miraculous. The timing and significance of an event can make even the most mundane occurrence miraculous — anyone who has been in love and felt a tingle from the brush of their lover’s touch knows that to be true. I know that there’s a perfectly boring scientific explanation for that, but it doesn’t change how wonderful the feeling is.