Love is a feeling both difficult to define and understand, promising happiness or agony to all who feel it (and often both). Can science provide any help in describing the word? Writer Emily Finch provides an answer just in time for Valentine’s day.
It might seem that only the great philosophers would be able to provide an answer to this question. Saint Augustine famously wrote that “love is the beauty of the soul.” As a people we agree that love is extremely important, and in many ways, we value it above everything. Yet, we know strikingly little about love itself. What form does it take? Love is as much a concept as it is a feeling, an action, or a cultural norm. But where does it come from? Love is inherent to us as humans. To quote Ghandi, “where there is love there is life”. We have love for our families, our friends, our pets, our possessions. Yet romantic love comes out on top. Falling in love is seen as both a great privilege, to which only a lucky few are privy, as well as an inevitability, which determines the course of our lives. This demonstrates love’s paradoxical nature. How, then, can we ever understand what love is? Turning to science to capture the allusivity of such a complicated phenomenon seems like the sensible thing to do. Love is embedded in our biology. Its evolutionary purpose is to aid with reproduction by promoting coupling, ensuring humanity’s continued survival. While this sounds thoroughly unromantic, it shows that love is natural, and opens up the question of whether love serves a purpose.
The cynics amongst us say that love is nothing more than chemical reactions in our brains. So, what happens to our brains when we fall in love? Many of the physical responses we associate with falling in love, for example ‘butterflies’ (which are really an increase in heart rate and increased energy levels), can be attributed to the production of noradrenaline. This initial stage of love causes reduced activity in our frontal cortexes, which impairs our judgement ability. This explains the phrase ‘love is blind’. Falling in love reduces our capacity for critical assessment, which has the evolutionary benefit of ensuring that pair bonds can form in less-than-ideal conditions. This blindness also extends to social judgement, as it has been found that love reduces the capacity for negative emotions such as shame. Unfortunately, this means our friends really don’t see the red flags we try so hard to point out.
The primary chemical associated with feelings of love is dopamine, the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter. Love creates a reward circuit in our brains, where the search for the next pleasure hit is satisfied by the presence of our partners. Without these stimuli, we experience increased cortisol, simulating a crisis, which explains lover’s compulsive preoccupations with their partners in the initial phase of a relationship. When we find new partners, we really can be ‘love struck’; the levels of dopamine present in the initial stages of love are comparable to that of cocaine use. Lovers really are addicts then, which explains how love seems to transcend sense and takes the front seat in many people’s lives. Lots of these popular adages about love can be explained by our chemical responses. For example, what it means to ‘lose the spark’ in long term relationships is the brain’s eventual return to normal levels of serotonin and cortisol equating to the reduced intensity of a lover’s desire. Long term attachment is characterised by the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin, which are released as a response to skin-on-skin contact, similar to the attachment between a mother and their child. These chemicals are associated with feelings of calm, and so contrast with the initial intensity of love, and instead indicate the stability of long-term partnership.
This chemical picture of love is striking. As our understanding of neuroscience develops, so too will these insights into the scientific basis of our experiences. Yet, I can’t help but feel that some important features of love are overlooked in these explanations. Can my feeling of being in love really be reduced to chemical reactions in my brain, which themselves serve an evolutionary purpose? These questions have no easy answer. While the philosophers hash it out over the meaning of love, it seems most plausible that these scientific explanations can provide an insight into the biological basis of love, without making the love we feel for our romantic partners any less real or special. Scientists must be the greatest lovers of all.
