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Passion, Pizzazz and
a little chemistry
Being in
love entails a lot more than sweaty palms or a faster heartbeat.
Romantic attraction, writes Raj Kaushik, sets off quite a stunning
chain reaction in the body
LOVE is mysterious. While some
people quite literally go the “till death do us part” route, there’s
Britney Spears who claims it’s a mockery. How would she know? Well,
her love for a childhood friend vanished in a couple of hours.
In the last few decades, researchers have been increasingly
interested in understanding the way love works. In the mid-1960s,
psychologist Dorothy Tennov surveyed 400 people on what it’s like to
be in love. Most respondents talked about fear, weakness and
stammering. But there’s a lot more to falling in love than sweaty
palms or a faster heartbeat or sublime thoughts. Indeed, romantic
attraction sets off quite a stunning chain reaction in the body and
brain. People produce more than 30 hormones in various organs called
endocrine glands, as well as in the brain and kidneys. Without
hormones, our bodies wouldn’t grow or mature sexually. Hormones
actually cause our hearts to speed up under stress and help the body
convert food into energy. In fact, recent studies have focused on
exactly what kind of chemical and brain activities occur at
different stages of human courtship.
Fantasy
Fairy tales have
always been an integral part of our childhood. Girls dream of boys
(think of the prince who appears in most fairy tales) with slightly
feminised faces because they appear warmer and kinder. Even when we
aren’t in love, imagining about being in love arouses us emotionally
and sexually. In the early ’70s, Dr Julie Heiman, a psychologist at
the University of Washington asked his female students to wear a
tampon-like device that detected blood flow to the vagina. While
they wore it, young women listened to romantic tape recordings and
to erotic ones. In this study, women, like men, were found to be
more aroused by erotic tapes than romantic ones.
Today, cyber
love is blooming. Dr Neil Clark Warren, clinical psychologist and
author of the book Finding the Love of Your Life predicts that long
distance relationships will continue to become more and more common.
A long distance relationship is kind of a fantasy. Long distance
lovers often engage in erotic chats and experience sexual and
emotional arousal without seeing, touching, smelling and cuddling
the person at the other end.
Lust
In the past few decades
scientists have discovered chemicals and hormones that are triggered
when we’re attracted to someone. They now know that for both men and
women it’s a combination of testosterone (a hormone that triggers
our sex drive) and neurotransmitters in the brain that boost our
heart rate, blood pressure and sweat production. During puberty,
testosterone levels are at their lifetime peak. This release of
testosterone is what gets us interested in the opposite sex. A
British study has revealed that women with the most alluring voices
have the most attractive faces. British researchers played
recordings of 30 young women to men who later saw their photos and
judged women with attractive voices as the best looking. Love at
first sight is the state of a brain submerged in phenylethylamine
(PEA), a cerebral chemical substance that releases sensations of
elation, exultation and euphoria.
David Givens, an
anthropologist and director of the Centre for Nonverbal Studies in
Spokane, Washington, has spent the past 35 years studying human
courtship. He says that love at first sight can be traced back to
our animal ancestors.
While lusting after one’s current romantic
partner clearly can have positive effects in a relationship, a
research by Mari Sian Davies, a psychology researcher at the
University of California suggests a potential downside when it comes
to commitment: People who have a lot of sexual desire for their
partner may have a hard time suppressing sexual thoughts about
others. Love addicts, like actor Salman Khan go from one
relationship to the next in search of the excitement that releases
the production of phenylethylamine (PEA).
Obsession
When you
fall in love, your brain becomes intoxicated with elevated levels of
neurotransmitters like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin and
particularly phenylethylamine which contributes to that almost
irrational, on-top-of-the-world feeling. Sometimes, this sort of
love turns into obsession, as it happened in the case of Salman
Khan. He exhibited some abusive behaviour on the sets of a couple of
films starring Aishwaraya Rai. Salman even misbehaved with her
parents and co-stars. Psychologist Judith Coche, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania who specialises in therapy and education
for couples, says unleashed hormones can also cloud a person’s
judgment, which can lead to bad relationships and the repeating of
unconscious, self-destructive patterns.
Psychiatrist Donatella
Marazziti, of the University of Pisa, noticed how lovesick
youngsters’ one-track thoughts mirrored those of people with a
mental illness called obsessive compulsive disorder.
Tests on
students have revealed that those who were in love had suffered a 50
per cent drop in serotonin levels, just like people with
obsessive-compulsive disorder. Serotonin is closely associated with
the control of moods, which can fluctuate drastically in the journey
of love. When the researchers tested the students a year later, they
found their serotonin levels had returned to normal and their
obsession with their partners had died down.
Romance
Norepinephrine, a euphoria-inducing chemical in the
brain, stimulates the production of adrenaline and makes our blood
pressure soar when we make romantic moves. To be timeless and
boundless, love requires time and space. Scientists believe that
phenylethylamine is typically released for 18 months to four years.
They believe that after this period one’s body gets used to this
love stimulant. As the brain can’t function with phenylethylamine
for very long, it replaces phenylethylamine with endomorphines, a
sort of opiate that diminishes romantic love and leads to the
development of what Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love, calls
“attachment.”
Attachment
Our brain’s hypothalamus controls
“primitive” behaviours such as sex, aggression, and feeding. It
produces two hormones - vasopressin and oxytocin (the latter also
known as “cuddle chemical”). Dopamine stimulates the production of
oxytocin. Scientists have known since 1906 that oxytocin stimulates
human female contractions during childbirth. It blunts the physical
pain of childbirth and induces sensations of pleasure. The role of
oxytocin in males is not yet known.
Oxytocin’s romantic power
was first recognized in 1979 when virgin male rats whose brains were
injected with the hormone began to display maternal behaviour.
Several research studies have shed light on oxytocin’s role in the
early stages of sexual passion and in the process of bonding beyond
birth.
In a preliminary study published in the July 1999 issue
of Psychiatry, oxytocin is shown to be associated with the ability
to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships. Both men and women
release oxytocin at the moment of sexual orgasm, suggesting that it
might be involved in strengthening the bond between couples. A sense
of belonging brings further increases in oxytocin, which might
explain why some couples would long to be together in life and
death.
Love is Life
“When you feel loved, nurtured, cared
for, supported, and intimate, you are much more likely to be happier
and healthier. You have a much lower risk of getting sick and, if
you do, a much greater chance of surviving,” Dean Ornish concludes
in his book, Love and Survival, the Scientific Basis for the Healing
Power of Intimacy (HarperCollins, 1998). In a similar vein, a
10-year study by doctors at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Scotland
suggests that chemicals produced during sex enhance mind and check
the aging process. Dr Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, director of health
psychology in Ohio State’s College of Medicine and Public Health,
says, “There’s growing evidence that the quality of love-life is
related to health.” Love is creative as well as curative. Falling in
love is a grand feeling; but it is being in love that leads to
health and happiness.
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