How do I … fall in love?

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/12/how-do-i-fall-in-love

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Valentine’s Day cometh, that great day of romantic consumerism, in which those who have a partner are reminded to spend money on them and those who don’t are reminded they are alone, surrounded by loved-up couples holding hands and clutching gaudy gifts.

It’s a day to contemplate love itself: what is it? Great, poetic, imponderable – or base evolutionary drive dressed up for the sake of polite society? What on earth is going on in our brains when we fall in love and are we at its mercy or active participants?

Ménage à trois chemicals

Broadly speaking, says Dr Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute, New York, there are three hormones that flood the brain when we “fall in love”. Each one is tied to a different aspect of the process – testosterone is linked to sex drive, dopamine to romantic love and oxytocin is released as we form deeper attachments. They don’t necessarily hit us in that order, but attachment – whether it comes before or after we have come to desire someone – takes time.

Given that an estimated one in four relationships now start online, where you learn a great deal about someone before meeting them, the traditional progression from attraction to connection has shifted for a lot of people.

“Online dating is all about words and photos,” says Kate Taylor, a relationship expert for Match. “So it allows you to develop a connection and attraction based on factors like mutual interests, shared sense of humour and intelligence. When we fall in love offline, many more complex factors come into play: scent, pheromones, hormones and it’s much more of a primal and mysterious process.”

Biologically programmed stupidity

These hormones do indeed have a role and wreak havoc on a loved-up brain. Much of the starry-eyed dopiness of the newly in love can be traced to the effects of dopamine that floods the brain. This is what causes someone to obsess about their new love interest, with Fisher saying people can spend up to 85% of waking hours thinking about them.

“Then there’s craving for emotional union,” says Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love. “Yes, you’d like to sleep with them, but what you’d really like is for them to call, to ask you out, to tell you they love you. And you’re highly motivated to win this person, the ventral tegmental area, the part of the brain that controls this, is right near the areas of the brain that orchestrate thirst and hunger. It’s a basic human drive.”

Dopamine also causes people to see their beloved as completely unique and extraordinary. “Their car is different to every other car, the music they like is amazing,” says Fisher. The hormone also leads to intense emotions, both positive and negative, as well as sexual possessiveness, separation anxiety and high levels of energy.

And, in a finding that will come as a surprise to no one, the state of being in love hampers a person’s ability to make rational decisions.

“The ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the brain region that focuses on the negative, becomes less and less active when they’re madly in love,” Fisher says. “So they’re focusing on the positive and overlooking the negative.”

Brain regions linked with decision-making also show less activity because the individual is doing something even more important. Fisher explains: “You’re trying to win life’s greatest prize, a mating partner, and a whole host of brain mechanisms are built so we can do that.”

It does calm down a little with time. Fisher’s team compared the brain activity of people who had recently fallen in love with that of people who had been with their partner for an average of 21 years and who still described themselves as “in love”. They found very similar activity in the ventral tegmental area of the brain for both groups, with one significant difference.

“Among those who had just fallen in love, we found activity in the region linked to, I wouldn’t say anxiety, but intensity,” she says. “But among those who had been in love long term, there was brain activity to do with calmness – you still want to make love to the person, have fun with the person, would want to remarry the person, but you’re not anxious about the person.”

O love is the crooked thingThere is nobody wise enoughTo find out all that is in it,For he would be thinking of loveTill the stars had run awayAnd the shadows eaten the moon.

– WB Yeats, Brown Penny

What is this thing called love?

Psychology can reveal a little about why we find particular people attractive. For instance, we are more likely to fall in love with someone who is similar to us: from a similar socioeconomic group, level of attractiveness, education and religious background.

“I’ll tell you something you don’t want to know: you’re statistically more likely to marry someone who physically looks like your opposite sex parent,” says Madeleine Fugère, professor of psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Other surprising triggers of attraction include the colour red, which when worn by younger people enhances their attractiveness to partners, and a woman’s menstrual cycle, which affects the type of man she will be attracted to. During ovulation she is drawn to men with more masculine features – deeper voiced, taller, with a broader jaw and bigger build. When she is not ovulating she will tend to choose a man who looks less masculine.

But the idea that there is a scientific way of understanding precisely what makes some people attractive to us and others not, or the idea that we could fall in love with anyone given enough intimacy with them is, according to Fugère, ludicrous.

Despite all that we know about the psychology of attraction, there is still a lot of mystery in the question of who we fall in love with, she says. “There are other unconscious things that are driving our attraction to other people and we just don’t know what they are.”

Nicola Cornick, an award-winning writer of more than 30 romance novels, says the unpredictability of attraction is an issue for fictional characters as well as real-world ones.

“It does happen sometimes that you have a preconceived idea of how the story will go, where you’ve got two characters, where you put them in a situation and you think it’ll work and then it’s completely flat. That happened in my most recent book. I thought, ‘I don’t find this character attractive, why would my heroine?’”

She revised the characters – and acknowledges with a chuckle that that was much easier to do with fictional leading men than real ones.

Take the plunge

Because of the mystery of love, Fugère says meeting a wide range of people is crucial. She also has a sneaky tip: people are more likely to fall in love if their heart is racing and their temperature is up.

“We know that if you go on a date on a rollercoaster with someone who already finds you attractive they are more likely to fall for you,” she says. “It works with anything exciting – bungee jumping, strong hiking, something that really gets your heart beating.”

While she caveats that this only works if the person already finds you attractive, research also shows that going on a rollercoaster date with someone you don’t find attractive makes them even less desirable to you.

“I always tell people, a good place to meet someone is going to the gym because everyone’s hearts are racing, so as long as you look nice, you’re OK,” says Fugère.

Fisher’s advice is similar. “If you really want to fall in love with someone, do novel things together – take a hike, ride your bikes out to dinner rather than take the car, go to the opera, go skiing, take a trip to Paris for the weekend, have sex in a different room. Novelty, novelty, novelty. It drives up the dopamine in the brain and can push you over the threshold into love.”