Is love a drug?

Is love a drug?

"Amor é fogo que arde, sem se ver" Camões


New research suggests love may be a drive as primal as thirst or hunger. That seems to be one of the conclusions of a research conducted with lovesick college students.


In a brain imaging study a couple of years ago, Dr Arthur Aron, Professor at Stony Brook University, found that the students being tested (who had recently fallen madly in love) couldn't stop thinking about their partners. “That illustrates what a powerful force romantic love is”, said Aron. But, contrary to popular opinion, that force is not an emotion, he says. Rather, it is a motivational state, perhaps one as fundamental as hunger and thirst.
Recent research by Aron and others supports this theory. Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show that dopamine-rich areas of the brain light up when we think about a romantic partner. Such brain regions, such as the ventral tegmental area (VTA), are known as the motivation and reward system, and appear to activate whenever people get something they deeply desire—food, water, cocaine or perhaps a girl- or boyfriend's phone call, for instance. Some behavioral research, as well as people's description of romantic love, lends further support to the theory, Aron says. “For many people, the experience of falling in love is like being in a desert and suddenly seeing water out there,” notes Aron.”The fact that love, like thirst, can lead to a wide variety of intense feelings suggests that it's closer to being a drive than an emotion in its own right. People tend to think when you are in love you are happy, but love can also mean feeling anxious, angry, sad,” says Brown. (yep, we know that... been there…).


Another still unpublished study (by Bianca Acevedo) seems to confirm Brown's thesis. When students were given five target terms—anger, fear, joy, sadness or love— and asked to relate them to a list of 69 emotion words (affection, jealousy, bliss...), she found that people checked off about seven more list items when given the target term “love” than they did with the other terms! And what's more, both positive and negative words were linked to “love,” whereas the word “joy” only got positive associations. She concluded that “love”, in general, operates differently than emotions.

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Drug-like effects
It seems that all the basic drives are associated with the dopamine system, and so seems to be with romantic love. The increase in energy that people experience when they fall in “love” — their ability to stay up all night talking—may be due to a flush of dopamine. Dopamine-system activation is also related to focused attention, causing the feeling that one person is the new center of one’s world. Taken together, all the studies make believe that “love” acts somehow like cocaine, which also works through the dopamine system and causes intense craving. It seems that all addictions are associated with dopamine in one way or another… In any way, seeing love as an intense drive to be close to someone, rather than an emotion, may help professionals understand what people feel when they miss their loved-ones.

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Love's not sex
Most people think romantic love and sexual desire go hand in hand, and that you can't have one without the other. But while the goal of sexual desire is sexual union for the purpose of reproduction, romantic love is governed by the attachment with the goal of maintaining an enduring the bond between two individuals. Sexual desire is driven by the gonadal hormones of estrogens and androgens. Animal research indicates that attachment is mediated by the neuropeptide oxytocin (and it seems that a more robust oxytocin-receptor network is present in the female brain). While researchers think sexual desire is a key ingredient to passionate love, there seems to be a difference between what people find sexually attractive and what they find romantically attractive. It seems that “What turns you on physically is not necessarily what turns you on romantically”.

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The eternal question: Does love last?
One school of thought thinks love is destined to end and that every flame dies down, another finds it all depends on the lovers...
Elaine Hatfield, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii who has been studying love since the 1960s says “Passionate love provides a high, like drugs, and you can't stay high forever”... but companionate love as well —the less passionate, but affectionate emotion that is associated with more long-term commitment—declines over time, she adds. In a study performed in 1981, she and fellow social psychologist Jane Traupmann found that passionate love decreased precipitously over time. It seems that love decreased for men and satisfaction decreased for both sexes. However, for the couples who managed to stay together, measures of commitment increased. The question is what keeps marriages and other long-term relationships going? Hatfield believes that passionate love comes back intermittently, like small sparks that keep the relationship alive.


Conversely, psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, thinks that love doesn't have to decline, but in order for it to flourish, both partners must share the same love “story.” He believes that most people seem to see “love” as story-based, because “people seem to relate strongly to love stories”. In a research conducted in the 90ies Sternberg identified about 25 types of story that people use to describe love. As he detailed in his book “Love is a story” (1998. New York: Oxford University Press), the stories range from the “travel” story (“I believe that beginning a relationship is like starting a new journey that promises to be both exciting and challenging”) to the “humor” story (“I think taking a relationship too seriously can spoil it”) to the “autocratic government” story (“I think it is more efficient if one person takes control of the important decisions in a relationship”). In a study published in 2001 Sternberg and his co-authors found that the type of story wasn't the deciding factor in forming a lasting relationship, but having a matching story... He adds “It's not the only thing that makes a relationship work, but it's important”. “If the stories don't match, sooner or later people become unhappy or unfulfilled,” he found, adding that the more people's stories matched, the happier they were.

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Doesn't matter how these mechanisms work... here's to chemistry and biology for the wonders they perform... and in the end, maybe the dopamine effects fade away with time... but as brasilian singer and poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote, "let love not be eternal because nothing in this life is, but let it be infinite while it lasts". Thanks dopamine!

... so, do you share a romantic love story with someone?

read the whole story here.
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