Chemistry and Culture

Passionate romantic love comes in graded forms, of course, from elation to despair, from calm to anxiety, depending on whether one’s love is reciprocated or unrequited. So I would expect that these gradations of feeling are associated with different levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, as well as other less primary neurochemicals.

To try to pinpoint the brain circuitry associated with passionate romantic love, my colleagues Gregory V. Simpson, Lucy L. Brown, and Seppho Ahlfors, neuroscientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, and I placed four infatuated individuals in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine and showed them photographs of their love object, as well as photographs of another individual, as a control. We have not yet conclusively analyzed these data, but I anticipate that areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, sectors of the anterior cingulate region, the nucleus accubens, the hypothalmus, and regions of the brain stem will be involved. We are continuing this investigation of romantic attraction with Arthur P. Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and psychology graduate student, Debra Mashek, also at SUNY, Stony Brook.

Attraction, as an emotion system, evolved to perform essential functions in the mating process. It enables individuals to select between potential partners, conserve and focus their mating energy, and maintain this focus until insemination occurs. But for humans, whom we fall in love with is an entirely different matter, one largely shaped by cultural forces.

For example, timing is essential; men and women fall in love when they are ready. Also, most men and women are attracted to someone who is somewhat mysterious, unfamiliar. This may have evolved as a mechanism to counteract inbreeding. But the primary factors that ignite the romantic blaze are our childhood experiences. Psychologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University theorizes that, somewhere between the ages of five and eight, individuals begin to develop a “love map,” an unconscious list of traits they will later look for in a mate. For example, some people want a partner who will debate with them, or educate them, or mask aspects of their personality they do not admire in themselves. This mental template is complex and unique; Money believes it solidifies at puberty.

So when you fall in love, with whom you fall in love, where you fall in love, what you find attractive in a partner, how you court your beloved, even whether or not you regard this passion as divine or destructive, varies from one society and one individual to the next. But once you find that special person, the actual physical feeling you have as you experience this passion is chemically induced. It evolved along with the rest of your body.

Romantic love can be joyous, but it also fuels human jealousy and possessiveness. As an emotion system, attraction almost certainly contributes to modern patterns of stalking, crimes of passion, and the incidence of suicide and clinical depression associated with romantic rejection.

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