Two thousand years ago, Plato stated: “The God of Love lives in a state of need” to describe love, one of life’s greatest mysteries. Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, in Newark, New Jersey devoted 40 years to uncovering the mysteries of romantic love. She wrote five books on the evolution to the human sex drive, monogamy, adultery, divorce, the chemistry of romantic love, and why we fall in love with someone in the first place.
She argues that love is a brain system that gradually changed over the last 400 million years of human evolution. “Love is not a stage. Rather it’s a serious brain system, such as the fear and danger systems,” says Dr. Fisher, “that evolved into lust (sex drive), romantic attraction (romantic love), and attachment (deep feelings of union with a partner).”
She argues that love is a brain system that gradually changed over the last 400 million years of human evolution. “Love is not a stage. Rather it’s a serious brain system, such as the fear and danger systems,” says Dr. Fisher, “that evolved into lust (sex drive), romantic attraction (romantic love), and attachment (deep feelings of union with a partner).”
In her book “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love,” Fisher and neurologist Tina Brown, studied the brain activity of 49 men and women after they underwent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) that defines the anatomy of the brain. Seventeen had just fallen in love; 15 had just been rejected by someone; and 17 were still in love after 21 years of marriage.
In her study, Fisher examined lust driven by the sex hormones of testosterone and estrogen—in both men and women—that did not necessarily involve intercourse, followed by the activation of the neurotransmitter adrenaline. “When you are falling for someone, your levels of adrenaline increase, and you may sweat as your heart beats stronger,” says Fisher. She discovered the attraction between a man and a woman was evident with the presence of high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, found below one’s cognitive thinking and emotions, in the reticular core of the brain. “Dopamine is responsible for feeling pleasure, triggered by desires and rewards,” says Fisher, “It’s like feeling the rush of cocaine!”
In her study, Fisher examined lust driven by the sex hormones of testosterone and estrogen—in both men and women—that did not necessarily involve intercourse, followed by the activation of the neurotransmitter adrenaline. “When you are falling for someone, your levels of adrenaline increase, and you may sweat as your heart beats stronger,” says Fisher. She discovered the attraction between a man and a woman was evident with the presence of high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, found below one’s cognitive thinking and emotions, in the reticular core of the brain. “Dopamine is responsible for feeling pleasure, triggered by desires and rewards,” says Fisher, “It’s like feeling the rush of cocaine!”
Fisher found other chemicals pulsing through the brain when you fall for someone. An increase in serotonin may explain why the person you are romantically in love with remains in your thoughts. While oxytocin, a hormone released during orgasm, deepens feelings of attachment, and vasopressin, a hormone released after sex, keeps the bond long-lasting. In another study, published in her book “Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray,” Fisher sets out to explain the seven year itch—a human phenomena of marry and remarry. What she found, by examining marriage, divorce, and adultery across 100 different societies and cultures, is that the seven year itch is a myth. We actually start to get “itchy” after only four years. “It makes evolutionary sense,” says Fisher, “in the first four years the child is an infant, then he joins others at play dates, and parents can break up afterwards.”
The data also showed that you are less likely to get divorced with more kids: 23 percent of those divorced have one kid as opposed to 7 percent who have three kids. She adds: “97 percent of mammals do not pair up to raise the young after four years, while monogamy is common among the 3% percent” Fisher also proved that love was indeed universal. She concluded that the experience of love became transparent across different age, gender and ethnic groups. “When I did studies of 400 Americans and 400 Japanese, of gays and heterosexuals, I found them all to experience romantic love,” says Fisher, though she found some surprises among different age groups. “The youngest to fall in love was a two-yearold boy who was stroking the hair of a girl at a play date,” she told me. So what triggers the brain system for romantic love? “We build a love map, an unconscious list of what we look for in a partner. It’s simple: that person walks into a room, says something funny, you have the same interests, and then you fall in love.” Apart from hormones, Fisher believes that matching up personality types—“explorer, director, builder, and negotiator”—guides the behavior of love (So much for the belief that opposites attract- for more on this see our piece “Clearing the Mist” in the Mind, Body + Soul section).
Fisher’s work transformed her into a believer in the power of love. “We have so many crimes of passion when we are rejected by love, yet love may treat clinical depression, and bring down suicide and murder rates,” she says. Though she remains unmarried, she has fallen in love more than once. As Plato suggested, we simply need love and can’t live without it.
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