What is love
Love is not a scientific term, but a psychological and cultural one. Scientists talk more about attachment. And attachment is positive emotions when someone is close to us and is available, and negative emotions when he is unavailable.
We can call love a more stable feeling with a more stable attachment. And there is also what we call falling in love. In the physiology of emotions there is such a division:
- Affect is a quick emotional experience when, for example, you really liked a girl passing by.
- Emotion is a more drawn out experience when you want girls of this type to pay attention to us.
- The feeling is when we are interested in a specific girl, and only her.
There is also a mood – this is a background feeling when you have lived together for many years, and it makes you happy, no matter what happens around you. So love is probably more about feelings, and falling in love is about some kind of emotion or even affect.
How we choose partners
We’re not really very selective. How many men or women do you meet? Surely you will fall in love with one of them.
When people lived in tribes of 100–200 people, they had about 15–20 age-appropriate partners to choose from. This is quite enough to fall in love. Although our brain, of course, has selection criteria – some of them are innate, and some are the result of some kind of tuning and training.
Innate attitudes
Some ideas about a potential partner are innately given. They reflect an understanding of what our species looks like. Significant, for example, are a person’s figure, secondary sexual characteristics, pitch of voice, healthy skin, hair, and so on – everything that we classify as beauty, health, good physical shape.
We perceive these signs subconsciously. We generally like them because they demonstrate good immunity and the ability to produce healthy offspring.
Physiological compatibility
This is where leather scent comes into play. A woman’s nose is very sensitive to the status of her partner’s immune system. There’s the sweaty T-shirt experiment, where several boys are forced to sweat on an exercise bike and then the girls sniff their T-shirts with their eyes closed. And some smells are disgusting to the participants in the experience, but some may even be liked.
This reaction often means that the girl’s and the boy’s immune systems complement each other. After all, in order to get the most viable offspring, ideally the immunities of mom and dad should be different: this way the child will take on resistance to various infections from each of the parents.
Therefore, we sometimes like the natural smell of one person and cannot bear the smell of another.
A man’s nose, apparently, is sufficient to sense the level of sex hormones – fat-like molecules that exit through a woman’s sweat glands, especially in the armpits and genitals. And men are almost unaware of these smells. This is used, for example, in aromatherapy or perfumery. We can see in a tomograph how, under the influence of some dose, for example, musk, which is almost not felt, areas of positive emotions are turned on – first of all, the zone in the center of our brain, which is called Nucleus accumbens. Therefore, smells are extremely important.
Imprinting
There is also the concept of imprinting, or early childhood memory. These are adjustments that happen to us in childhood and puberty.
Human evolution took place against the backdrop of competition with other tribes, which often conflicted with each other. That is why the concept of one’s own and another’s is very important. In our case, our friend is, as a rule, someone whom we have seen and known since childhood.
Our brains train neural networks that remember that a potential partner looks something like the mature young men and women who surround us. In the modern world, the standard can be a hero of a novel or film, an actor or an athlete. Of course, in the 21st century, when people all over the planet are migrating en masse, these processes are not absolute.
Everything is mixed up in our brain – imprinting, innate attitudes, the influence of society, and personal experience of adulthood.
What happens to us when we fall in love
If the parameters we talked about above suit us when we meet, our brain, which constantly makes predictions, calculates that the object is suitable. Once this happens, a number of characteristic reactions occur in the body.
Where do butterflies in the stomach come from?
Fell in love – and the autonomic nervous and endocrine systems begin to work in a special way.
The endocrine system is a collection of endocrine glands that produce hormones. For example, stress hormones – adrenaline and cortisol. The autonomic nervous system is responsible for regulating blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, digestion, and sweating. She is a very important participant in the process of physical intimacy; without her, there will be no erection, moistening of the genital tract, release of sperm, or orgasm.
Falling in love is perceived by our body as stress.
Sweating may increase, heart rate may increase, and breathing may become shortened. Signals from these systems can reach the stomach and intestines. Not very clear, but very pleasant sensations arise – they are called butterflies in the stomach. And for particularly sensitive people, experiences can even make everything inside them ache.
Why do we think worse?
We can also observe how, when falling in love, the centers of positive emotions are activated, dopamine synapses begin to work more actively. There are so many emotions that rational activity is disrupted: decision-making processes are not as clear, and the impulsiveness of reactions increases. After all, in order to let someone close to you, to move on to hugs and kisses, and even more so to have sex, you must seriously “blow your mind.” This is necessary because reproduction is our most important innate program. And the most important goal of all living organisms.
Why do we need sex?
Love is a wonderful package and a wonderful variety of emotions, but the key task that underlies the relationship is reproduction. It is extremely important that offspring arise with a new, unique set of genes, and the child receives genes from his parents. Such mixing of DNA molecules is necessary for the survival of a biological species in an ever-changing world.
To unite the genes, chromosomes of mom and dad, it is necessary to create sex cells. At the same time, the egg is more valuable than the sperm: it carries a supply of nutrients. And there can be millions of sperm. Therefore, more often than not, the woman chooses how the relationship will develop.
The evolution of complex biological species is characterized by sexual selection, which Darwin wrote about. Females do not immediately enter into the mating process, but first must make sure that the male is the best, and that means the children will be of the highest quality. There are two options that will show that a male is really worthy of sex: courtship or winning a tournament with other males.
In the case of some species, including us Homo sapiens, evolution goes one step further. He assumes that males will raise offspring together with females and the pair will stay together for a long time. Therefore, people form relatively stable monogamous couples with each other, in which attachment arises.
One of the clearest proofs that we are monogamous is hidden ovulation.
In nature, ovulation in a female is a whole event, because the eggs should not be lost. During ovulation, females release pheromones, scream invitingly and in every possible way attract the attention of males. And in our country, sometimes the woman herself does not know whether she has ovulated, because her egg is not for all the men around her, but for one permanent partner, whom she chose after courtship, who is suitable for her and who will reliably take care of the offspring.
By the way, monogamy appears during evolution, apparently, precisely so that the offspring survive and reach their own sexual maturity with the maximum probability.
What is the difference between sex for love and for one time?
Emotional experiences are a complex cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones. For example, the signal that your actions achieve the goal and your movements are synchronous with your partner’s movements is dopamine. Immediately after orgasm, a lot of oxytocin is released, which enhances the monogamous mood. Sudden impulsive sex in an unusual place mixes norepinephrine, long-term intimacy on the verge of meditation – endorphins, and so on. This cocktail is unique every time.
Sex for one time is something closer to masturbation; it cannot be compared with real sex for love: the depth of psychological experiences is not the same, and the sensations remain mainly at the level of the body.
We are designed in such a way that it is monogamous relationships that bring us special joy.
In addition to sex, there is also intimacy, a feeling of empathy, positive emotions from the fact that the partner is just nearby; there are common goals, common memory, and so on. Sex is just one component of a monogamous relationship. When you form an attachment, become closer on an emotional and intellectual level, dopamine, oxytocin, androgens and estrogens, and vasopressin work in the brain, which affects, among other things, fidelity.
In general, the monogamous relationship is associated with the activity of the vasopressin system. If you look at how it is genetically established in a particular person, you can even make some statistical predictions about his predisposition to cheating. This does not mean that your partner will definitely be faithful or unfaithful. After all, we are rational beings, we also have control systems, moral guidelines, we are able to restrain ourselves. All these biological and social settings collide in everyone’s head, so we can simultaneously say that we love a person and cheat. You can also say this: in the head of every person, older polygamous programs and newer monogamous programs compete.
Is it possible to control love?
A certain cocktail of visual, auditory, olfactory signals, childhood and adolescent memory (imprinting), and hormones can blow the minds of another person. All this is mixed in our perception, and a person can almost instantly like him. At the same time, various processes compete in our brain. There is thinking and awareness, which give an idea of oneself, the rules of behavior, expediency, safety – this is what the parietal cortex does. And there are neural networks in the hypothalamus that encourage reproduction and sex. Signals are found in the frontal cortex, which generates programs and action plans and launches their implementation.
At the same time, we are intelligent beings capable of self-control, so we can either let sympathy flare up or not. So yes, in this sense we can control our love. And if you fall in love with the wrong person, then the simplest advice is to stay away, don’t meet, don’t correspond, let your brain cool down.
But it is also possible to manage another person’s feelings towards us, including at the initial stage of a relationship. We can push memory and associations to work – trigger a reaction to us with the help of sounds or smells, visual signals (clothing, makeup). But this dopamine sensation of novelty is just the beginning. When you strive to build a long-term relationship, you cannot do without constant attention, care, joint affairs and projects. After all, you do not live with a scheme, but with a real person in all his diversity.
Biology and chemistry are the foundation on which one can begin to build a connection, but this is only the sprout of a tree. Next, the tree needs to be groomed and cherished, cared for and protected. And this is daily work, but there seems to be no other road to true love. Actually, love is in many ways such a road.
A Scientific Approach to Relationships 💚💛💜