love
Your Brain on Love!
The Biochemistry of Love’s Ecstasy and Agony
This Huffington Post article by Glenn Braunstein (click above link), says so much, in so few words! I’m just going to focus on one aspect of it that I found particularly interesting. The old song that featured the lyrics, (I’m dating myself, now), “Love Makes the World Go Round”, really got it right. Love is a powerful consuming experience that is a complex interweaving of inner and outer experience. Love is a “drug” (as they say in another song), literally and figuratively. What really got me thinking is this statement:
“Research into “the brain chemistry of love” indicates that when a person sees a potential mate, it takes as little as a fifth of a second for the brain to launch a complex “love-related” chain reaction involving multiple areas of the cortical and more primitive subcortical portions of the brain”
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A fifth of a second to start falling in love?!?!??!! Wow! What happens in that fifth of a second to trigger the cascade of love potions in your brain? What could this possibly mean? Well, I don’t know for sure what this means, however, it is fascinating to play and hypothesize about it. Have you met your soulmate, the person you are fated to be with, and recognized him or her in that split second? Are you primed to be attracted to a certain type of person based on your past history, and the emotional experience you have with this new love object triggers those original patterns and feelings? You don’t have to be a psychologist to hold theories about what love is all about– we all have our theories. And our personal theories of why and who we love, influence how we end up approaching it. So, if I believe that these immediate feelings mean that I have met my soulmate–because why else would I feel this way–I will believe that this is fate, and will not look at the relationship with a lens that evaluates how it works for me. If I believe I am only reenacting old patterns, I may be more cynical or skeptical about the feelings and tread more cautiously into the fray, particularly if I have been disappointed in the past. If I believe that I have particular unmet longings and yearnings that are powerfully activated by how this other looks at me, I might believe that the experience of love is not so much “in” the lover, but is within me too, and I might try to think of ways to meet these needs rather than to feel that this one particular person is the only way I can feel met and loved. I would then come to the relationship with a stance of mutuality and interdependence, rather than with a fearful sense of utter dependence. What are your theories of love, where do they come from, and how do they influence your approach to love?
azita February 25, 2011 at 10:47 pm
I really agree with your interpretation of mature, conscious love.
this is my version:
Angelic was like a warm wine, heating up drop by drop, and slowly, vapor-like, mixed with her lover’s blood oxygen. Then somehow in the midst of love making of wine and breath, she would gather up the wine particles again, solidify them to a long stream of joy and would pour it back to the bottle of her own life, once again pure and everlasting rich .
Robin February 25, 2011 at 10:54 pm
Beautifully expressed, thanks Azita!
Abhinav February 5, 2012 at 7:13 am
I ralley agree with your interpretation of mature, conscious love.this is my version:Angelic was like a warm wine, heating up drop by drop, and slowly, vapor-like, mixed with her lover’s blood oxygen. Then somehow in the midst of love making of wine and breath, she would gather up the wine particles again, solidify them to a long stream of joy and would pour it back to the bottle of her own life, once again pure and everlasting rich .