Why Would We Ever be in Love?
One fine afternoon, I was listening to Bryan Adam’s When You Love Someone when I came across a lyric, when you love someone, you will do all the crazy things that you cannot explain. Then it came to my mind that this piece is somehow true and romantic. Indeed, when you love someone you will do anything, even if you have to jump over a train, cut your hands, or dancing and singing like a fool in a bloody-cold-and-freezing winter outside your crush’s house just to make them notice of your excessive love. I think Bruno Mars’ Grenade perfectly described what it’s like to be when you are madly in love. And why did I say excessive love? Because love is limitless. Even though you don’t have any more power to prove your love, you keep insisting to show them that it’s still there with every last drop of blood in your body and it has never gone away at once.
Imagine a time in your twilight years, with the face that lined with experience and wisdom, the winter-white hair with a distinct rosy scent, you’re sitting together with your so-called soulmate, your significant other, on an old bench at a garden behind your house. You‘re reminiscing about your delightful past while holding hands, smiling, laughing — sometimes with a kiss, and staring into each other eyes, the eyes that spark a strong memory in the olden days. As if you don’t have to say anything again, like telling, “Here we are now, close to the finish line. I’m happy that we’re finally here after living a colorful life with you. Thank you for keeping up with me in our happiest and hardest times, thank you for making our vow true.” That would be everyone’s relationship goals, wouldn’t it?
That just hit me right in the feels. Will such a ‘happily ever after’ love story exist? We all want to know how a love story ends, but, how does love work, actually? Why can love bring two different worlds together in a sacred bond? Why can love be a pleasing mutual feeling yet very painful when it’s an unrequited one? But first, let me make this clear that I am not speaking on behalf of the helpless people that are dying out there for love. I simply just want to write out my mind — my curious and thoughtful mind — in a way that you might say a little bit conservative, from a millennial girl’s point of view. By the time you’ve finished reading this, I am pretty sure that you will be on the same page with me. So to start, let’s find out first about our true human natures and how love occurs.
Biologist Jeremy Griffith defines love as unconditional selflessness. Why is that so? Humans seemed to be naturally born as selfish, aggressive, and competitive creatures. Griffith simply explained this by science as he said, “When our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a terrible battle broke out between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the extremely competitive, selfish and aggressive state that we call the human condition.” As a matter of fact, our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: it was fully cooperative, selfless and loving. That is why we find our true happiness by caring for others.
So, why do we fall in love? A recent study conducted by Rutgers University has revealed that there are three stages involved with falling in love — namely lust, attraction, and attachment. According to the study, each stage involves different types of chemical reactions within the body (specifically the brain). Lust is said to be the initial stage of getting involved with love. It is instigated by sexual hormones, estrogen and testosterone, two basic types of hormones present equally in men and women’s body that excites the feeling of lust within the brain.
The second stage is attraction, the phase when a person actually starts to feel the love. In this stage, our mind is only filled with the thinking of that specific person. There are three chemical compounds involved, adrenaline who is responsible for stress reaction, dopamine who stimulates the feeling of pleasure within the body and gives you the same reaction as if you consume cocaine, and serotonin who diverts your mind and bounds you to think about your lover and nothing else. It turns out that when someone is falling in love, he or she spends 65% of their day thinking about that specific person due to these sequential chemical reactions.
Last but not least, it is the attachment that brings a love relationship between two people into a whole new advanced level. It arouses the feeling of bearing children and falling in love with them wholeheartedly. In this stage, scientists discovered two hormones involved, namely, oxytocin and vasopressin who work consecutively. Oxytocin formulates the depth of love and forges the attachment to the partner. It plays a key role in the affiliation and attachments in humans while the releases of vasopressin is just as important to promote long-lasting relationship.
So now we begin to understand how love happens, we will move on to the next mystery of love, the question that probably has been asked a million times: how can love leave people in despair? I have been asking about this too for my whole life. Triggered by this adolescent inquisitiveness, I decided to browse the scientific explanation through Google and discovered a TED talk delivered by Helen Fisher who studied 37 people who are madly in love: 17 who were happily in love, 15 who had just been dumped. Nothing could go wrong when she said, “Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth.”
She then further explained that there is a little factory near the base of brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). This part of brain is controlled by our emotions and associated with wanting, motivation, focus and craving. In fact, this is the same brain region that will become active when you feel the rush of cocaine. So, can we associate romantic love with cocaine high, then? Well, romantic love is much more than that. It is an obsession. It possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You become addicted of thinking about this particular person. And the obsession can get worse when you’ve been rejected.
So, they put these brokenhearted people into the MRI brain scanner and found activity in the brain region that exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love. What mostly happen is when you’ve been dumped, the one thing you love to do is to forget about this human being and move on — but no, you just love them harder. It turns out that the brain system — the reward system for wanting, motivation, craving, and focus — becomes more active when you can’t get what you want. In this case, life’s greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner.
And as I have explained earlier about the three stages involved with falling in love that happened in three different parts in brain, the same things also occur when you’ve just been dumped. There is a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses. In this part of the brain, the core of the nucleus accumbens, actually, becomes active as you’re measuring your gains and losses. It is also the brain region that becomes active when you’re willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and losses.
And lastly, they found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual, the reason why many people suffer from the rejection of love around the world. When you’ve been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you feel deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is then working, and you feel an intense energy, focus, and motivation, and the willingness to risk it all to win life’s greatest prize.
Then she got my jaw dropped again by saying, “Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.” Yes, love is an addiction. It is deeply embedded in our brains. It works magically — and now you know that it works systematically — within our brains and bodies’ system. This is why love can hurt so bad and an instant craving can come back when you hear a song that reminds you of your ex.
However, I personally think although romantic love can slowly be explained by science, still it keeps myriads of mystery. For example, nobody knows how we can be attracted to a particular person — this one hasn’t been discovered yet. There might be lots of allegations and speculation to this question, but the truth is still nowhere to be found. For me, it’s a magic! Well, we tend to fall in love with somebody with the same socioeconomic background, the same general level of intelligence, and so on. But nobody really knows how. From my experiences, I found out that I have been falling in love with many guys with various backgrounds and sometimes just live a different life. To such degree, I would admit that neither you or I need a reason to fall in love with someone.
Finally, after the logical and curious part of me taking place in almost two-third of this article, I decided to let my childish, immature, and imaginable part of me on board again. I would like to let myself believe that each of human beings has a sincere love inside and love is probably the most surprising thing in the world. You’ll never know to whom your heart finally decide to love, how it is going to end, the reason why you are so attached to someone, why he or she keeps running around your mind all day and night, or the real reason why you have to go through a devastating break up.
Love is about understanding each other. It is only because of love that two different personalities can fit together. And yes, sometimes love can be the most horrible thing ever happened in your life, but you have to get over it. No matter how brokenhearted you are, let the universe surprise you. Good luck on finding your true love!
Ratih Nawangwulan is a master’s student in food technology at Wageningen University and Research and intern at Royal FrieslandCampina, the Netherlands. She likes to translate science into language that people speak.