The Physiology of Love

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Each year, Valentine’s Day offers us a day to reflect on and celebrate the joyful and meaningful of love in our lives. Whether it’s romantic love, love of friends, family, ourselves, or a loyal pet, most of us are lucky enough to have some kind of love for which to be grateful. With all this love in the air, it’s also a great time to examine what exactly love is in our bodies and brains. Love is one of the most profound physiological manifestations of emotions and interpersonal relationships that humans can experience. Love is also exceptionally joyful! This time of year is an excellent opportunity to celebrate that by investigating just how our bodies produce one of life’s greatest gifts. 

Think about how love feels in your body when you experience it. Love is not just an emotion or abstraction - it’s a deeply visceral sensation. There are many different types of love and different corresponding physiological underpinnings to these feelings. The term “love” is kind of a catchall for a wide variety of distinct emotions and situations. The ancient Greeks had more than seven unique words to describe what we call “love.” They used distinct terms for love of family, love of God, love of the body, love of the self, love of the mind, love of a child, and playful love. Today, scientists who study love break it down into smaller parts as well, using terms like attraction, lust, desire, attachment, and bonding. 

You probably already know that all of these intense and often all-consuming feelings are products of chemical messages in your body and brain. Without getting too bogged down in the nitty-gritty neurobiology of it all, human feelings of love are the result of complex cascades of potent chemical cocktails of neurotransmitters, hormones, and neuropeptides. That may sound a bit clinical and decidedly unromantic, but these tiny envoys of the body are at least a big part of what love truly is in terms of how we experience it. 

The physiological sensations of love are dizzyingly powerful. Sometimes your heart races, your palms sweat, your mouth might go dry, and you might find yourself tripping over your words. Alternatively, love might wash over you like a warm hug and fill you with a profound sense of calm and complacency. Romantic love might send your hormones into overdrive, filling you with lust and raw sexual desire. Love of a child or pet might overwhelm you with warm and fuzzy feelings and elicit the need to protect and nurture. All of these sensations are some version of the physical and socio-emotional feelings of love. Each of the sensations is stimulated by a unique mix of biochemicals in the body and brain. 

Some of the major neurotransmitter players involved in this intricate work might have familiar names: oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin. The hormonal components should be quite familiar as well, namely estrogen and testosterone. You may have heard of oxytocin; maybe you’ve even heard it called the “love hormone” before. This neuropeptide certainly plays a significant role in the human experience of love. Oxytocin is essential for social bonding, sexual reproduction, orgasm, birth, and lactation. It is a major component of how we bond with our young. Fascinatingly, the mere presence of an infant can instantaneously release oxytocin in adults. It is like we’re biologically programmed to love them! Despite the critical role it plays, oxytocin doesn’t do all the work of eliciting love alone. In fact, it works closely with a related peptide called vasopressin that doesn’t enjoy any of the recognition oxytocin gets. Often oversimplified as something like the molecular equivalent of love, oxytocin is just a piece of the bigger puzzle of how our bodies love. 

We all experience love differently, and just as every love is unique, the physical manifestations of love vary widely from person to person and depending on the situation. Nevertheless, one constant holds true - love feels good! Humans love to love and to be loved. This phenomenon is partly because of dopamine, the body’s feelgood neurotransmitter. Dopamine carries out many crucial functions in our bodies, but a major one is invoking our sense of pleasure and reward. Helen Fisher and colleagues found in a 2005 study of people in love that their brain’s reward centers light up when they see pictures of their beloved. The area involved, the Ventral Tegmental Area or VTA, is not only associated with pleasure but also with general arousal, focused attention, and motivation to pursue and acquire rewards. Fisher, therefore, postulates that romantic love is not so much an emotion as it is a motivational system - one that drives us towards being with the one we love.

A true cynic would say that love is an evolutionary trick our brains play on us to get us to mate and take care of our offspring. Even the most clinical of scientists usually concede that there is at least a little more to it than that. Nevertheless, there is a strong biological and evolutionary component to love as well. Love is useful, it feels good, and it keeps our interpersonal bonds secure. While we can never truly know if lesser evolved animals “love,” there is strong evidence that several other mammalian species show intense parental investment and form lasting bonds with other individuals. There is even some evidence that animals grieve or feel profound loss when a partner or offspring die. Of course, human love, like other emotions, is more complex and nuanced than that of our ape ancestors. However, its roots are distinctly biological and reside somewhere back in the more primitive parts of our brains. Without love, even if all of our other biological needs are met, humans fail to flourish or report strong overall life satisfaction.

One of the best things about love is that scientists find that not only is it immensely enjoyable, it’s incredibly good for you! Unlike many activities that directly target your dopamine pleasure centers, love is one of the few with no downside (other than the occasional heartbreak, of course.) Studies show that love can have enormously positive effects on mental and physical health in both the short and long term. Love reduces stress and increases overall life satisfaction; it promotes feelings of well-being and joy and has been linked to longer, happier lives. It may even offer immunoprotective factors and reduce the likelihood of disease and hospitalization. Conversely, heartbreak and grief are also profoundly physical experiences, as well as emotional ones. Studies show that heartbreak can send almost every one of the body’s systems into overdrive and tax the heart and cardiovascular system through stress.

Valentine’s Day is not about chocolates, flowers, cards, or expensive gifts - it’s about celebrating one of the most joyful and profound parts of the human experience: Love. This Valentine’s Day, take a minute to appreciate the miracle of love in your life. Also, take time to marvel at how our bodies, as finely tuned biological machines, are capable of sensing, promoting, maintaining, and enjoying that love.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

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