Love, as well as love at first sight, are all real! How we fall in love is beyond our conscious control.
There is a famous saying: “The heart has its reasons, and these reasons are not explainable.” Is this really the case? In fact, the role played by the brain, or more precisely the “intellect”, in falling in love is far more important than we realize!
For many years, scientists have been studying the most mysterious and complex organ of the human body: the brain. At every stage of love: from having a crush to passion fading, from having a relationship turning into emotional bondage, what probably happened in your brain?
We believe that “love” is an emotion closely linked to survival, regulated by a mechanism that also helps us fight danger. That is, the brain regions responsible for unconscious fighting in response to environmental stimuli are also responsible for falling in love.
Let me explain it with an example. You are walking in the grass on a summer day and see movement in the grass. If it’s a snake, it takes six milliseconds to escape. If it’s your own dog, it also takes six milliseconds to relax vigilance. These six milliseconds determine our actions, including falling in love. Falling in love with someone only takes six milliseconds, then another six milliseconds to figure out what happened: I saw someone attacking me, in six milliseconds I was ready to run away or fight back; then another six milliseconds for the brain to tell me ‘run quickly’ or ‘relax’. These brain activities explain the principle of love — you make a decision before you realize it.
This is why we say cannot decide who to fall in love with, but it happens by chance.
We may say people fall in love with those who remind them of happy memories, but this process is more like a stranger punching us and becoming an indispensable part of our life. We feel the accelerated heartbeat, and our brain decodes these changes to learn we are in love.
So can we say love is a war between reason and emotion? In fact, when we fall in love, the core of love is the brain.
The serotonin levels decrease in lovers’ brains, while dopamine levels increase.
Dopamine level is higher in lovers’ brains, explaining the emotional state is high when people fall in love. Happiness, energy, desire for spirituality, etc. all these pleasures brought by this relationship.
When in love, serotonin decreases but dopamine, is associated with happiness and satisfaction. Therefore, falling in love can be seen as embarking on a crazy journey, people are always emotionally high. Lovers’ reactions make us happy or desperate at any time. We miss our lovers all the time, and he/she become the most special person in our eyes. Conversely, excessive dopamine can lead to delusions, such as jealousy.
This also explains why for some more vulnerable people, romantic relationships can become a major crisis in life, or even induce mental illness, and abnormal behaviors such as assault.
Although falling in love triggers dopamine and brings great happiness and addiction, the levels of that decrease after six months inevitably. At that time, passion extinguishes and lovers’ flaws become apparent.
The next stage after the honeymoon period is another mechanism that comes into play: the feeling of dependency, and the pleasure of being together and interacting with each other. It is not surprising that attachment hormones such as oxytocin increase during this phase. Therefore, marital crises usually occur within the first three years, as the initial neurobiological drive has disappeared and willpower is most needed to intervene.
All in all, falling in love is uncontrollable and often involuntary, while maintaining a relationship requires willpower.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash