The biochemistry of love

In September I’m moving to Germany for a while, to a small town called Lindau. One of the great advantages of working online is being able to do it from anywhere in the world. And Covid has given us more than enough practice! For professional and personal reasons I decided to go away for a while, and life has taken me there. Life is funny, the twists and turns it takes… Anyway, I now have to practise my German as if there were no tomorrow, which is why I spend a lot of time watching every YouTube video I can get my hands on, even if I only understand half of it! The point is to practise. While I was looking for videos to motivate myself and convince myself I’m making progress with the language… lots of videos by Marian Rojas Estapé kept popping up, because I listen to her quite often. I really like her, because when I listen to her videos the first thing that comes across, besides the fact that she’s very well trained in her field and a great communicator, is the passion she has for her work.

I came across one of her videos I hadn’t seen and decided to give myself a break from German… The video is about the physiological basis of love. It’s a subject we’ve all heard about, at least in general terms. I find it a lovely and very interesting area because, once again, we can see how “we are a whole”. Mind, heart and body are always in communication. Whether it seems that way or not.

I’m going to give you a short summary of the video, of the parts I found most interesting, and I’ll leave you the link at the end in case you’d like to have a look. Let’s start by explaining that love goes through three key stages:

1. Sexual attraction: at this stage there may be lots of people you find physically and sexually attractive.
2. Romantic love or infatuation: this is when we fall in love with one particular person and only have eyes for them.
3. Settled relationship: this is a more established relationship, in which the two people have been together for some time and have built a more solid bond.

If we focus on the second stage, falling in love or romantic love, several biochemical changes take place that are responsible for many of the things that happen to us when we’re in love, such as not being able to think about anything but that person, talking about nothing else, feeling nervous when we see them, checking our phone a hundred times a minute… and so on.

So what are these changes?

Some studies have found that serotonin drops, which has been linked to more obsessive thinking. That’s why it seems you can’t think about anything other than the person you’re in love with. On the other hand, oxytocin, which is linked to affection, tenderness and trust, goes up. And that helps create a special bond with that particular person that we don’t create with anyone else.

The amygdala, an area of the brain closely involved in fear, becomes less active, at least according to some brain-imaging studies in which people in love looked at photos of their partner. And what does that mean? It’s a simplification, but it could help explain why we become braver, so we do or say things we wouldn’t dare to in any other situation. You become bolder.

On top of all that, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain we use to reason and make decisions, also seems to become partly less active, just like the amygdala. As a result, we don’t think things through or analyse them as much, and we’re more impulsive during this stage.

In fact, as the video explains, when we’re in love, the same reward system is activated as with drugs. With two important differences, mind you! First, here the reward doesn’t come from an external, harmful substance. And second, in the case of love it isn’t bad for your health; quite the opposite.

Some experts estimate that the most intense falling-in-love stage lasts around a year and a half, although there’s no fixed timeframe: the figures vary between studies and, above all, from couple to couple. The truth is that, although it feels extraordinary and is lived very intensely, it would be very hard for our bodies to keep up that pace in the long run; that’s why it has a use-by date… As we know, that doesn’t mean what comes next isn’t beautiful. It is, but mind, body and heart experience it at a calmer pace. And this is where each person’s effort comes in to keep alive the flame, the spark, the chemistry (call it what you like) that arose between those two people from the start. And all that whirlwind of emotions, that hurricane, those butterflies… gradually give way (if we get it right) to something more solid, stronger, a far more powerful and more genuine bond. And there, at some point… each at their own moment, we make the big shift from being in love to loving.

Here’s the full video (in Spanish):

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