Why Do Fools Fall in Love?
Is Love a Losing Game
In 1956, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, a singing group, launched the famous song, Why Do Fools Fall in Love? In it they crooned, “love is a losing game” that is almost certain to end in “defeat.” While it is certainly true that teens, and lovers of all ages, are likely to experience a broken heart at some point as they pursue love over the course of their lives, is love actually a losing game?
There is actually solid research evidence that helps to answer this question. The neuroscientific study of emotion provides a strong guide to what creates love and what makes it last. The basic story is not especially romantic. The element romance is a human add-on. But underneath the romance that is the subjects of 1000’s of love songs, courses fundamental neurobiological realities that exert a surprisingly strong effect on who it is we fall in love with and whether we are likely to stay in love.
The Neurobiology of Love
Love is not a unitary experience. Love is constructed of at least three stages: Lust, Attraction, and Attachment. These stages are, to a surprising degree, driven by hormones and other molecules that travel through our bloodstream and bodily organs. These chemicals are released as part of our inborn, evolutionary drive to reproduce. These same chemicals fuel the Lust and Attraction phases of love. They largely decide for us, despite our felt experience that we are the ones making conscious and deliberate decision, who it is to whom we are drawn. Lou Reed, another singer, was scientifically quite right when he sand, My love, my love, my love, love is chemical.
These ancient and powerful urges draw us to the person that triggers in us the release of these chemicals. They convince us that this person is that “special one,” and are responsible for the delusion that the feelings we have toward that special someone will last a lifetime. They don’t. They aren’t designed to. They are, sad to say, merely designed to get us to “hook up” and reproduce. The honeymoon phase is a real thing. After that phase wanes, after a few months to several years, as we seen in innumerable species of animal, the chemistry of love only get’s resurrected when the female comes back into “heat” or estrus. That is, when she is ready to mate again and produce another generation to assure the survival of the species.
Falling in Love and Staying in Love
Deep in the lower parts of our brain, sitting below the areas from which conscious awareness arises, sits a structure called the periaqueductal gray of PAG, for short. In this brain region, the molecules of sensation and pure emotion that flow through our brain get interpreted into the conscious feelings we experience as sad, happy, mad, anxious, playful, horny, and terrified, and as combinations of all seven. Feelings are what we can describe consciously. We are aware of our feelings. Scientifically speaking, emotions, on the other hand, are the molecular building blocks of those feelings that are activated by different social contexts fed by memory traces involving reward and connection. And, they largely operate outside of our conscious awareness.
The Lust and Attraction phases of love, those elemental launch codes for connection operate beneath the surface of our awareness and get us to approach each other, are driven by complex neurochemical networks that activate our desire to seek a partner and the strong feelings of lust toward a specific partner. The “falling in love” part of the cycle operates just fine on the basis of the activity of these seeking and lusting neurochemical networks, which include chemicals such as serotonin, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine.
We know only too well, however, that seeking someone and lusting after them can, as Frankie Lymon sang, lead us into love as a losing game. Whether experienced as dizzying breakups, the stinging betrayal of affairs, or merely losing interest and drifting apart from each other, something more than “falling in love” is needed to stay in love.
To better understand what makes love last, let’s turn our attention to a creature that weighs in at a mere 1.5 ounces. The prairie vole, a mouse-like rodent with a stubby little tail has taught us volumes about human love. Prairie voles mate for life. Montane voles, on the other hand, are randy little creatures that look to cheat on their partner the moment the other’s back is turned.
The chemical difference lies in the amount of two other chemicals they secrete into their brains: oxytocin and vasopressin. When the levels are high, love lasts. When low, the “notches on the belt” add up quickly. The amazing thing is that when you provide the cheating vole with more of these lasting love chemicals, they stay bonded. They become lifelong lasting partners. When you provide the monogamous prairie vole with vasopressin and oxytocin blockers, they start to roam.
Lessons for Human Love
Humans are more complex creatures than either Montane or prairie voles. It is humbling, nevertheless, to learn that aspects of our love life are explainable on the basis of the same neurochemical patterns we share with voles. When baseline vasopressin and oxytocin levels run higher on a longer term basis, we are more likely to remain in a committed relationship. These chemicals support long term bonding, or attachment bonds, and are the biochemical substrate for long term relationships.
You might be wondering whether love is simply reducible to the chemical cards you are dealt. If you are lucky enough to draw the high oxytocin/vasopressin card in your self or your chosen partner, you are headed for lifelong bliss. Bad hand? Too bad. Plan on heartbreak and, at best, a life of “serial monogamy.”
That scenario is too simplistic. Our baseline chemical levels do play a role, but people’s brains are massive learning systems. Regardless of our starting point, couples can learn to modify and strengthen their attachment bonds. They can learn to construct a balance where short term arousal and desire sits on a solid foundation of lasting attachment. They can learn to “put a little spice in their love life” even as this increases the strength of their attachment bonds. The key, as you see, isn’t to keep the lust and attraction systems humming along for decades. The key is in building strong attachment bonds, and then sprinkling those bonds with various forms of “emotional foreplay”, the aphrodisiacs that not only make love last, but make the lifelong journey filled with feelings of ongoing attraction and fulfilment.
If you are seeking to repair your relationship, don’t hesitate. Reach out and connect. With my years of therapeutic experience that is grounded in our brain-based urges, our deeply grounded relationship values, and our timeless yearning for fulfilling and satisfying love connections, we’ll work together to put the lasting back into your love story.