Romantic love, Dr Fisher explained in a lecture at the 2004 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting, is not an emotion. Rather, it’s “a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain.” It’s a need that compels the lover to seek a specific mating partner. Then the brain links this drive to all kinds of specific emotions depending on how the relationship is going. All the while, she went on to say, the prefrontal cortex is assembling data, putting information into patterns, making strategies, and monitoring the progress toward “life’s greatest prize.”
Love also hurts. Dr Fisher cited one recent study where 40 percent of people who had been dumped by their partner in the previous eight weeks experienced clinical depression and 12 percent severe depression. It is estimated that 50 to 70 percent of female homicides are committed by lovers and spouses. Annually one million women and 400,000 men are stalked.
Dr Fisher divides love into three categories involving different brain systems: 1) Lust (the craving for sexual gratification), driven by androgens and estrogens; 2) Attraction (or romantic or passionate love, characterized by euphoria when things are going well, terrible mood swings when they’re not, focused attention, obsessive thinking, and intense craving for the individual), driven by high dopamine and norepinephrine levels and low serotonin; and 3) Attachment (the sense of calm, peace, and stability one feels with a long-term partner) driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.
“I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there to get looking for anything at all,” she told her audience. Romantic love, she thinks, developed to focus one’s mating energy on just one individual while attachment works to tolerate this individual long enough to raise children as a team.
These systems are also connected. “Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with,” she half-jokingly tells her students, “because indeed you may do just that.” Testosterone can kickstart the two love neurotransmitters while an orgasm can elevate the attachment hormones. But the brain systems remained separate units, probably to allow each partner to cheat on the other. This would have enhanced Alley Oop’s chances of transmitting his genes. A philandering Clan of the Cave Bear babe, meanwhile, would have had an insurance policy had her main squeeze ended up as a baby mastodon’s throw toy.
Romantic love, Dr Fisher believes, is a stronger craving than sex. People who don’t get sex don’t kill themselves, she said. On the other hand, it is not adaptive to be romantically in love for 20 years. “First of all,” she confided, “we would all die of sexual exhaustion.” Not surprisingly, the subjects in her study who had been in love the longest (17 months) displayed markers in the brain indicating the beginnings of “the satiation response.”
In a related undertaking, Dr Fisher found evidence that romantic love exists in 150 societies, even though it is discouraged in many of them. But with many women from these countries now entering the workforce and acquiring a sense of independence – together with medical science keeping us relatively younger longer – we can expect to see romantic love on the rise worldwide, she predicted.. Via