# Love, Lust, and Chemistry



## Daniel (Jun 22, 2009)

Dear, I love you with all my brain
_Los Angeles Times, _Health Sense
by Judy Foreman

June 22, 2009

*Dopamine brings people together and oxytocin keeps them attached, studies show. Is love just chemistry?
*
For centuries, love has been probed -- and of course celebrated -- mostly by poets, artists and balladeers. But now its mysteries are yielding to the tools of science, including modern brain-scanning machines. 

At State University of New York at Stony Brook, a handful of young people who had just fallen madly in love volunteered to have their brains scanned to see what areas were active when they looked at pictures of their sweethearts. The brain areas that lighted up were precisely those known to be rich in a powerful "feel-good" chemical, dopamine, which brain cells release in response to cocaine and nicotine. Dopamine is the key chemical in the brain's reward system, a network of cells that is associated with pleasure -- and addiction.

In the same lab, older volunteers who said they were still intensely in love after two decades of marriage participated in the experiment as well. The same brain areas lighted up, showing that, at least in some lucky couples, the honeymoon feeling can last. But in these folks, other areas lighted up too -- those rich in oxytocin, the "cuddling" chemical that helps new mothers make milk and bond with their babies, that is secreted by both sexes during orgasm and that, in animals, has been linked to monogamy and long-term attachment.

It's way too soon (and, we can hope, always will be) to say that brain scientists have translated all those warm and fuzzy feelings we call romantic love into a bunch of chemicals and electrical signals in the brain. 

But they do have a plausible hypothesis -- that dopamine plays a big role in the excitement of love and that oxytocin is key for the calmer experience of attachment. Granted, the data are preliminary. But the findings so far are provocative. And it's conceivable that, as Emory University neurobiologist Larry J. Young pointed out in the journal Nature this year, once scientists understand the chemistry of love, drugs to manipulate the process "may not be far away."

*Better interactions*
A new study published this year in Biological Psychiatry supports that idea, showing that oxytocin may help human couples get along better. Swiss researchers gave 47 couples a nasal spray containing either oxytocin or a placebo. The couples then participated in a videotaped "conflict" discussion. Those that got oxytocin exhibited more positive and less negative behavior than those given the placebo. Oxytocin was also linked to lower secretion of cortisol, a stress hormone. 

In the Nature paper, Emory's Young also noted that nobody knows yet whether drugs used to treat problems such as depression and sexual dysfunction can affect relationships by changing brain chemistry. But, he noted, both the antidepressant Prozac and the erection enhancer Viagra appear to affect the oxytocin system.

In the initial love study at Stony Brook, 10 women and seven men in intense, "early-stage" love were put into a functional MRI brain scanner, which can detect activity in specific parts of the brain. They were then shown pictures of their loved one or a neutral person. 

In these lovebirds, one dopamine-rich region in particular -- the ventral tegmental area -- consistently lighted up upon viewing the loved one, but not the neutral person, according to the research, published in 2005. The intensity of the brain's response to falling in love, says co-author Lucy L. Brown, a neuroscientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, suggests that it "is not just an emotion but a drive, a real goal like food or water." 

In a second experiment, the team found the same brain areas at work in people recently rejected by a loved one. Perhaps loss of love triggers the same kind of craving as withdrawal from cocaine or cigarettes, suggests Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who also worked on the study. 

In new data presented at scientific meetings in 2008 and 2009, Bianca Acevedo, now a post-doctoral fellow in social neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara but formerly at Stony Brook, focused on 10 women and seven men still in love after 21 years of marriage. Like the young lovers, when these volunteers were put in scanners and shown pictures of their partners, their dopamine-rich areas lighted up. 

"But in contrast to those newly in love," Acevedo says, other brain regions did too, including areas rich in oxytocin, vasopressin (a similar chemical) and serotonin, a brain chemical associated with well-being and calmness.

The link between long-term attachment and oxytocin has long fascinated researchers, among them, Sue Carter, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Carter's work has centered on prairie voles, known for their enduring bonds. Compared with other rodents, prairie voles -- part of the only 3% of mammals that form monogamous bonds -- have more active oxytocin. Moreover, brain cells with receptors that specifically latch onto oxytocin lie in the very brain regions believed to be important in forming attachments, Carter says. 

Other researchers have shown that when mice (not known for their monogamous ways), are injected with a gene containing instructions for making the receptor of oxytocin, the mice cozy up to their mates like voles.

Lack of oxytocin is important too. For instance, if female animals are stressed by being isolated, their oxytocin drops. In humans, Emory University research shows that women who were seriously abused as children have low oxytocin levels as adults. 

*Choosing partners*
One question emerging from all this is whether knowing the chemistry of love can help in picking a compatible partner in the first place. 

Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist, who consults for the dating websites Match.com and an affiliate, Chemistry.com, thinks so. She thinks that certain personality types correspond to the preponderance and ratios of specific chemicals in the body; her team is examining blood, urine and saliva samples to test her theory. 

Creative, risk-taking personalities, which she calls "explorers," may have more active dopamine systems, as well as more activity of another brain chemical, norepinephrine, she says. In a study that involved 28,000 people using Chemistry.com Fisher built personality profiles based on people's answers to a long questionnaire. She sorted people into different types and then followed their dating experience to see which types were attracted to which other types.

She found that explorers are particularly drawn to other explorers." People she calls "builders," conventional, calm, conscientious folks, may have more active serotonin and may also be drawn to other builders. 

By contrast, Hillary Clinton types -- "directors" -- who are analytical and tough-minded may be high in testosterone and are regularly drawn to their opposites, the "negotiators" like Bill Clinton, who may be fueled by estrogen and oxytocin, Fisher says. 

Whether this love chemistry will pan out in the new research is still an open question. In the meantime, remember those prairie voles -- they get what Fisher calls "life's greatest prize -- an enduring mate and partner."


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## Daniel (Jul 5, 2009)

*How to Tell True Love from Lust*

*How to Tell True Love from Ersatz Love*
by George E. Vaillant, M.D._
Positive Psychology News Daily
_
_Feb 15, 2009

_*First, what is “real love”?
*To understand love, those usually helpful resources—the ancient Greeks, the poets, the psychologists, even Cupid—all fail us. Too readily, these experts become preoccupied with lust and forget about lasting attachment. And the Buddha, too, lets us down; for he was too preoccupied with compassion to appreciate lasting attachment. True, love is compassionate; but compassion is not always love. Real love is attached, selective and enduring. In contrast, compassion does best when it is detached and rooted in time present.Mature mammalian, not just human, love involves enduring, remarkably unselfish limbic attachment. If “real” love remains remarkably independent of free will, mammalian evolution has liberated love from the reflexive neuroendocrine dominance by the hypothalamus. Mate choice and bonding, if relatively involuntary, is based on the altruistic, if still biological, motivation of oxytocin and mirror cells.    

The Greek philosophers did not and the cognitive psychologists do not always understand attachment. The Greeks’ agape (universal unselfish love) is not selective, and the Greeks’ Eros (testosterone, estrogen and all-about-me lust) is not enduring. Love, like the sacred and our image of God, has a timeless quality. The spirit behind the New Testament words “God is love” can be found in even the self-consciously atheistic Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which explains to us “Love is the point at which the opposing elements of the biological and the spiritual, the personal and the social, and the intimate and the universal intersect.” The novelist Laurence Durrell reminds us that “the richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.” In contrast, lust marches to a marvelous but much more urgent drummer. The object of a passionate one-night-stand may seem boring and ugly the next morning. But what a wonderful evening!

The Buddha feared attachment; he correctly saw attachment as the root of much sorrow. Welcome to the world of love. Love is dangerous. Indeed, for many of us, love, like joy, is sometimes difficult to bear; for love – like joy and gratitude – makes us feel vulnerable – sometimes so vulnerable that we are afraid to take love in, let alone give it back. What if your child died, or your sweetheart left you. In contrast, William Blake understood the importance of attachment: both its loss and its restoration. Thus, Blake reminds us, “Joy and grief are woven fine…Under every grief and pine runs a joy with silken twine.” Savor lost loves: don’t just mourn them.

*What is the difference between addiction and attachment?
*The lonely cynic sneers that “falling in love” is just another form of addiction. Attachment fueled by oxytocin is indeed, dangerous stuff; it makes you fall in love and never get over it. Don Juan and the Buddha had the right idea: Don’t get attached! Consider Henry Higgins’ lament: “I was serenely independent and content before we met; surely I could always be that way again—and yet I’ve grown accustomed to her look; accustomed to her voice; accustomed to her face. Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!” What is the difference between addiction and mammalian love?

Ah, let me count the ways. First, mammalian love is uniquely fueled by oxytocin and linked to limbic brain centers not linked to addiction. Admittedly, both addiction and love are fueled with the much less specific neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine, interestingly, is concentrated in brain centers that also contain opiate receptors. These centers are linked to heroin addiction—an ersatz and often lethal “love”—that is also selective and enduring.However, there is a second critical difference between heroin and love. Addiction is all about me; attachment all about the other. Addiction shouts, “Alack, poor me!” Love compassionately asks others, “Are you feeling better?”

Third, we rapidly habituate to our addictions; we need more and more for the same effect. In contrast, the soft touches of real love never stale.

Fourth, an addict in withdrawal is in a crisis of sympathetic arousal: fever, sweating, tachycardia, hypertension, and irritable screams at anyone who tries to hug him. In contrast, a husband at his wife’s gravesite is in a state of parasympathetic withdrawal: sobbing gently, with slow pulse, but grateful for a friend’s arm around his shoulder. In other words, *grief over a loving attachment is in some ways still a positive emotion and in time helps us to broaden and build. Addiction destroys us—physically, mentally and spiritually.*

Finally, “the morning after” is always the crucial test between true attachment and addiction. Mother bears are delighted by what they find cuddled up to them the next morning; lusty participants in bacchanalias are less enthusiastic about what they find at dawn’s early light.

*Where does love come from?
*We do not learn how to love from religious education or from life coaching. Love does not come from the Buddha’s mindfulness.

We learn love from our genes, from our biochemistry and from the people who love us and who let us love them.

The brain hormone, oxytocin, is released when all mammals give birth. Oxytocin seems to permit mammals to overcome their natural aversion to extreme proximity; and, thus, oxytocin has been rechristened the “cuddle hormone.” In human newborns, there is a short-lived overproduction of oxytocin. Oxytocin goes up in human puberty in parallel with adolescent crushes. Put a newborn baby in a mother’s arms or bless a couple’s sexual union with mutual orgasm and brain oxytocin levels rise. If they are genetically deprived of oxytocin, monogamous, maternal, loving prairie voles (a species of rodent) turn into another subspecies—the heartless, promiscuous, pup abusing montane voles. Without oxytocin, parental cooperation and responsibility vanishes.

But love is not just about genes and hormones. If, as the French planter sings in South Pacific, “you have to be taught to hate and fear,” you also have to be shown how to love. The ethologists studying imprinting in ducks and the evolutionary anthropologists studying hunter-gatherers know enough to show us rather than tell us how love evolves.

Love is about attachment, music, and odors; states that do not lend themselves to words. Song maybe, but not words.Thus, the behavioral self-regulation that we associate with love does not come from a solitary brain, but from one brain evolving and becoming shaped forever through attachment to a beloved other. Monkeys raised in isolation go on eating binges and cower in corners. Instead of playful roughhousing, they fight with their peers unto death; and they never really get the hang of copulation. All their lives such isolated monkeys remain inept “at doing what comes naturally.”

In contrast, isolated monkeys who are subsequently raised by mothers or with siblings for even one year can learn to roughhouse—gracefully stopping once social dominance is achieved; and to skillfully negotiate the dance steps to successful impregnation.

In closing, I may do well to remind the reader of Aren Cohen’s useful suggestion in “How Sweet It Is…” that love songs, too, are for the transmission of love.No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?
~ Robert Lowry, 1860
​_George E. Vaillant, M.D. has studied adult development, including the lives of 800+ men and women over 60 years as a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vaillant’s past books highlight many of his results in this field. His current book, Spiritual Evolution (2008), demonstrates the necessity of positive emotions for human development and survival. This is his second article for PPND. The earlier is titled A Fresh Take on Meaning._


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## justhere (Aug 1, 2009)

------ I am attracted to men who have a similar familiar outlook...something within their makeup that reminds me of me.  I can trust them more than someone who has no understanding of "dark night of the soul" or any such spiritual depth, etc.    I imagine that this is a good thing, but having said that, if we both have our periods of isolation, it takes one to reach out and not be crushed by rejection should the other be going through something.  That is where I get hung up.  I want to reassure the man that I know what he is going through, I understand, and that I wont stop loving/caring.  
On the other side of the coin, this dynamic is safe for me because I always fear suffocation and intimacy because of my so called issues can overwhelm and scare me.  
This dynamic can work, but it takes a man who equals my strength and can hold me when I am in need which is very difficult for me to trust.
I hope this makes sense to someone..I wrote it free style, off the top of my head. 
In posting this, I suppose I am wondering if anyone has a relationship that sounds like this...I hope that it works.   I just cant stand the thought of intimacy with a partner who doesnt experience the lows.  It is also a creative outlet for me.  Ironically, it is a companion: the lonely inner self


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