The Future of Love

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Increasingly, Fisher and other researchers are coming to view what we call love as a series of complex biochemical events governed by hormones and enzymes. "People cling to the idea that romantic love is a mystery, but it's also a chemical experience," Fisher says, explaining that there are three distinct mating emotions and each is supported in the brain by the release of different chemicals. Lust, an emotion triggered by changing levels of testosterone in men and women, is associated with our basic sexual drive. Infatuation depends on the changing levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine (PEA), also called the "chemicals of love." They are natural--addictive--amphetaminelike chemicals that stimulate euphoria and make us want to stay up all night sharing our secrets. After infatuation and the dizzying highs associated with it have peaked--usually within a year or two--this brain chemistry reduces, and a new chemical system made up of oxytocin, vasopressin, and maybe the endorphins kicks in and supports a steadier, quieter, more nurturing intimacy. In the end, regardless of whether biochemistry accounts for cause or effect in love, it may help to explain why some people--those most responsive to the release of the attachment chemicals--are able to sustain a long-term partnership, while thrillseekers who feel depressed without regular hits of dopamine and PEA, are likely to jump from one liaison to the next in order to maintain a buzz.

In his latest work, A Little Book On Love, philosopher and San Francisco State University professor Jacob Needleman writes, "The social and sexual revolutions of the 20th century have shown us that relaxing marriage laws and customs, in the end, simply replaced one sort of suffering with another. If we love who and when we want and then break the bond whenever the impulse to do so is strong, we see that it brings no happiness to our lives. Nor, of course, did it bring happiness tensely to maintain the old rules, the old customs. So the meaning of living together in love cannot lie in either direction."

Although the experimentation of the `60s and `70s unquestionably wreaked havoc, it was a vital and creative havoc, without which we might have remained trapped in old, unsatisfying patterns of relating. "Two important developments in the `60s laid the ground for a more adult stage of couple consciousness, which we seem to be entering now," says Welwood. "The women's movement cast off old stereotypes and made relationships more egalitarian. And the dissemination of psychological ideas into the culture--mostly through pop psychology books--started to give people a new language and a new set of concepts, unavailable to previous generations, to talk about what actually goes on in a relationship." Moreover, adds Needleman, the `60s were also the beginning of an awakening, the time when people began to realize there is such a thing as transcendence.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print