52000words #9 – Love – EasterlyMoves

BBC Theme – Love

Love, a topic that I postponed during this writing challenge a few years back. I was heartbroken. I didn’t want to cry any more and I couldn’t think of a good word to say. I wrote about bricks instead. Safe.

I think I might have paused my ability to “love” in a protective way for a long time. I don’t know if it’s fully back yet, but I am healing slowly. I think I am a loyal and trusting person. I tend to fall infrequently. I find it hard to bounce back emotionally after rejection or a failed relationship. This is hard to write.

Now this breakup wasn’t actually that traumatic. It maybe would have looked like a massive over-reaction. There was no infidelity, no game playing, no children, houses or pets. Plus all the signs were actually there, right in front of me. But I dunno, I guess I thought it could work, and it was outside of my control. We couldn’t make it work.

Luckily hindsight and getting a few years older have numbed, edited or erased the memories of that particular breakup, and I am a much stronger and emotionally confident person now. I know more about who I am, and I think I am ready to take on the topic. Obviously I will approach it in my slightly off beat science-y but not really way, so that will be fun.

What is love? Seems to be quite a difficult question to answer, much of what we call love could be to do with the chemistry in our brains. The effect this chemistry has on our body – a pumping heart, sweaty palms an inability to speak like a normal person is quite spectacular really. It’s these effects that made us, as humans postulate that love was an affair of the heart¹.

Some scientists think that romantic love is split into three categories: lust, attraction and attachment. The categories are split because they are primarily linked to different chemicals. A mix of testosterone and oestrogen trigger feelings of lust; dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin are essential for attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin cause us mortals to feel attachment. Lots of these chemicals come from the hypothalamus, a region of the brain which is a bit of a love guru – or a bit of an idiot. Depends on your point of view.

Attraction is thought to be like lust, but subtly different. Lust and attraction often go hand in hand, but they can happen independently. Dopamine is the king of chemicals when it comes to attraction, and combined with norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) it can make us go all wobbly and stupid².

So love is just a bunch of chemicals? Which signal to our brain and body, and makes it go all soppy, and sometimes a bit crazy?

Luckily like all good things, it’s not that simple. There’s evidence to show that these chemicals do more than just tell us when to feel ‘in love’. For instance ocytocin and vasopressin levels could affect how quickly wounds heal³. So scientists postulate that we’ve evolved to require love, that there is an evolutionary advantage to feeling it.

It also seems that love is a bit like obsessive compulsive disorder. In that it can make you suspend fear for some time, which is thought help unlikely pairings to get together and reproduce. If we’re being honest about why we’re such a successful species this might be part of the story. Couple this with some beer goggles and you’re onto a winner.

The strong initial feelings of lust and attraction tend to wear off, or reduce after 12 – 18 months, and this is where a deeper more relaxed and long term relationship can be built⁵ – that is attachment.

A question that many want to know the answer to. Why does being dumped hurt?

Most of us know what it feels like. Horrible, painful. There is perhaps a good science reason, because it seems that heartbreak can make you feel real pain. Your brain thinks you are physically hurt and it’s sending the same signals to the rest of your body as it would do if you were actually hurt. I think it’s that simple, I couldn’t find much other evidence to back up any other reasons why it hurts so much.

What’s love got to do with it? (go TT)

Apart from the chemicals, and the gooey feelings, there must be some reasons why we, as humans “fall in love”. It seems that it mostly started with sex. Or sexual reproduction to be precise, the key in the slow process of evolution. It’s how an organism passes it’s genes to it’s offspring – ensuring that traits are passed to the next generation.

As life on earth got more intelligent, brains got bigger. And as brains got bigger, so did heads. Interesting, but what’s this got to do with why we fall in love??

Bigger heads mean that offspring are born earlier, to allow this new giant noggin to get out into the world. The result is that a helpless underdeveloped child is ejected into the big bad world, parents then have to spend more time caring for them. Over thousands of years the offspring that were more likely to survive were ones that had a more than one pair of hands looking after them. Primarily, someone to fight off competing males, who would kill the young of others, to have their chance to mate with a fertile female.

What that means, is that a driving force in the evolution of ‘love’ seems to have been infanticide. Evolution favoured monogomany in some species, because it prevented, or reduced the chance of males killing babies. This happened in many species including humans, gorillas, monkeys and dolphins. There are other species which developed other strategies – including being highly promiscuous, as males will not kill offspring where they don’t know if they are theirs or not.

Now this is a super simplified, half told version of a complicated and interesting evolutionary tale, it’s also still being discussed by scientists, so there are some other competing ideas out there. But it makes some sense to me, why else would we be so fixated by love if it wasn’t for very good evolutionary reasons?

1042 words

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