“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
Have you ever thought that love is a chemical process where the brain changes resulting from the feeling of love are very similar to the changes associated with some mental illnesses! Our attraction to a person may, in fact, be an attraction to his genes, which our body can perceive through his smell.
It turns out that love does have a chemical formula!
C8H11NO2 + C10H12N2O + C43H66N12O12S2 or in other words Dopamine + Serotonin + Oxytocin = LOVE.(1)
For every degree of love, there are hormones responsible for the chemical changes of the body in and all states of love, its cravings, and addiction can be summed up by the integrated work of seven different compounds, namely: Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), testosterone, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin.
Thus, we can divide the stages of love into three:
1- Desire stage:
The sex hormones lead this stage: testosterone and estrogen, knowing that both of these hormones are present in different proportions in both sexes.
2- Attractive stage:
And here begins the “blind” love, where we start thinking about the lover in a way that is like addiction and the practice of daydreaming. The compounds that work at this stage are: dopamine (neurotransmitter), which is the same compound that the abuse of nicotine and cocaine activates, norepinephrine or adrenaline, which makes us sweat and makes our heart (beat with love!) Serotonin is the hormone responsible for the so-called “madness of love” (It appears that Romeo and Juliet had high levels of this hormone!)
The effects of serotonin in people who are in love are the same as in people who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which explains that when we fall in love, we lose the ability to think about anything else. It also demonstrates that antidepressants hinder our feeling of love; at the same time, they cure our diseases!
“Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone you really saw.” Fran Lebowitz
3- Attachment stage and long-term attachment:
The hormones responsible for this stage are oxytocin, which is secreted by the hypothalamus gland, which is responsible for the strong bond between the mother and her child, as it is secreted in large quantities at birth. It is also secreted during orgasm, which causes many physiological responses, and for this reason, it deserves the name (binding hormone). And vasopressin, whose levels are elevated for people in love.
There is an additional role for the brain in falling in love with the limbic system. Its task is to generate a particular emotion called the limbic resonance, which is the ability to share deep emotional states, and this emotion includes the effect of two hormones, namely dopamine, which is related to the state of emotional harmony, And norepinephrine, which stimulates feelings of fear, anxiety, and anger. In addition to the limbic system, where magnetic resonance images of the brains of lovers showed the presence of two areas of the brain that are more active than others when falling in love. The first is the region called the media insula; this brain region remains something of a mystery. Its location deep within the brain makes it difficult to explore, which is associated with instinct. At the same time, the second region is the anterior cingulate cortex, which is related to feelings of euphoria.
Among the hormones responsible for love, we also find testosterone, which is considered a manly hormone, but in fact, this hormone is secreted in men and women, but it is secreted in more significant proportions in men, and it is also secreted when lovers become closely close, as it is considered the primary catalyst for the development of the relationship.
But some will ask about the reason for the rapid heartbeat, feeling confused and high body temperature, sweating, stuttering, and feeling ashamed when seeing our loved ones. The answer to this lies in the body’s secretion of the hormone noradrenaline, this hormone is secreted from nerve receptors and cells connected to the nervous system. Its effect is enormous on different areas of the human body. In most cases, it is referred to in its generic name as the fight and flight hormone. Its role lies in the extent to which it emits nervous signals as a reaction to some situations in our lives. It is responsible for the increased heart rate, high blood pressure from time to time, and the expansion processes in the lungs caused by the process of inhalation and exhalation. It is also secreted in the case of narrow blood vessels that are not important in the human body. Noradrenaline stimulates sensory receptors scattered throughout the body and nerve impulses.
After addressing the hormones responsible for love, we will move on to knowing the links that make love cohesive. The body has some genes accountable for recognizing foreign bodies when they enter them, and they are called histocompatibility compounds. Bodies secrete these compounds through sweat and saliva. People have significantly different compounds, But studies have shown that lovers are similar and their compounds are compatible; as for the attraction before love, the more diverse these compounds are, the greater the attraction.
While pheromones, which are chemical vectors, are believed to have a significant role in the physical attraction of lovers because the lover’s scent is a powerful tool for interest. It is noted that many women wear their lovers’ shirts, and many men keep the handkerchiefs of their lovers.
Love is one of the positive emotions studied by Fredrickson(2), the primary emotion. Love is not a single emotion but rather a complex feeling experienced by people in all its varieties (romantic, friendship, familiar bonds, etc.). According to Fredrickson, we need to distinguish between love relationships and love experiences; even if in love relationships, there can be a lot of love experiences. People have love relationships with intimates, and loved ones. Love experiences instead are broader and can occur among strangers. While love relationships last a long time, love experiences are momentary. The psychophysiological concept of love explained here is related then to the context of love experiences, where love is experienced as a moment of connection or, in Fredrickson’s terms, positivity resonance, as explained below. From this psychophysiological perspective, love can be denned as an emotion, a momentary state of shared positive emotions between two or more people, that arises to infuse mind and body alike, creating a biochemical resonance that alters the activity within one’s body and brain in ways that trigger parallel changes within another person’s body and brain. This true sensory and temporal connection is characterized by mutual care and is accompanied by a feeling of oneness, between two or more intimate people or even between strangers.
“When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time, it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is an exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most – you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
(1) EM Parker.; LX Cubeddu (1988). “Comparative effects of amphetamine, phenylethylamine and related drugs on dopamine efflux, dopamine uptake and mazindol binding.” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 245 (1): 199.
(2) of Psychology & Neuroscience leading the Positive Emotions and Psycho-physio-logical Laboratory (a.k.a. the PEP Lab) at the University of North Carolina (UNC)Chapel Hill, USA. For more information about her theory, see Barbara L. Fredrickson, What good are positive emotions?, “Review of General Psychology”, 2 (1998), pp. 300–319; Barbara L. Fredrickson, The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, “American Psychologist”, 56 (2001),pp. 218–226; Barbara L. Fredrickson, Positive emotions broaden and build, “Advancesin Experimental Social Psychology”, 47(2013), pp. 1–53.