Relationships are simultaneously the most irritating and most intoxicating thing you have to deal with in life.
The raddest Disney villain of them all, Hades, summarized this puzzling phenomenon best when he said: “We dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy”.
Except sometimes, you don’t go home happy. Sometimes you’re not even in the neighbourhood of happy.
It’s kind of like walking up to board a train and having the conductor kindly tell you that it’s 100% going to burst into flames before it makes it safely to your stop. But you, being the bright and self-loving human you are, decide to get on anyway and see what happens because hey, maybe it won’t explode (in which case, you’d be wrong).
The signs are usually totally transparent – and if you’re really lucky – might even come along with your very own conductor politely warning you that nothing good is ever going to come from this. But you’re so busy living in your rose coloured world that it all seems like a fantastically romantic idea. I mean, for decades cinema has been riddling us with this pretty damaging agenda of **risking it all** and doing **big romantic gestures** so it only seems natural to fight till the very last drunken and misspelled proclamation of love.
We’re doomed to conflate curiosity with romantic interest. We ignore red flags, compromise on deal breakers, and hope that things will just gradually (and magically) improve over time. This curiosity is the part where you just want to know more and more about this attractive person who (keyword:) seems to like you, too – and it’s thrilling. Completely mundane facts like their favourite colour and embarrassing stories from the 6th grade are like gold in this stage, and probably just drag you deeper and deeper into the feelings department.
But before you know it, the train is crashing, the flames surround you, and that pesky little conductor is off to the side of the tracks waving an “I-Told-You-So” finger at your disappointed face. This is the part where you go totally batshit. You get stuck in unhealthy behaviours, grow resentful (because your feelings are basically a punching bag at this point), and try desperate ways to keep it going. When it ends, you’ll likely experience some 20/20 hindsight and realize you bought an all express one-way ticket to heartbreak. So why do you keep doing it?
WELL, LISTEN TO THIS.
Lovely heartbroken human, meet dopamine.
It’s the neurotransmitter that deals with pleasure and reward-seeking. That first curious encounter with your crush where you felt literally intoxicated by their smile? Thank dopamine for that one. And the rush is so good it’s actually addictive. After it’s gone, you start to seek another hit (ie. hook up with the person who makes you feel these things). But our brain is always one step ahead and once it starts to anticipate the satiation of dopamine, it releases less of it. This accounts for that “comfortable” stage in the relationship where you’re a little less about honey-moon bliss and a little more about stability.
BUT, we (the silly people who chase relationships that are trying to get as far away as possible) have figured out a way to cheat the system. Turns out you can sustain a longer period of that initial excitement if you keep your brain busy with uncertainty. If it doesn’t know if the dopamine release is coming, it won’t be able to anticipate it as easily and then if/when it does come, you’ll be on cloud 9 for hours. And that, my friends, is how you get hooked on anticipation. Yes, you’re gambling with your emotions because the idea that you might win nothing or everything is more exciting than knowing you’ll get a predictable reward. You actually enjoy the idea that might or might not work out the way you want it to which, when you think about it, is admittedly pretty twisted. (Fun fact: this anticipation cycle is actually a physiological technique used to train dogs and accounts for the phrase “keep him on his toes”).
Once you add a splash of oxytocin (affectionately known as the “cuddle” hormone) to this addictive cocktail, you’re doomed. And it’s totally embarrassing.
There’s something slightly comforting in knowing that all these dead-end romances had at least something to do with neuroscience. I mean, come on. You were high on handsomeness and now you’re just trying to work it out of your system. Maybe making sense of how your feelings feel and why they happen will strengthen your brain’s argument next time it tries to convince your more unwilling organs that you should get out while you can. Delaying gratification totally sucks, but sometimes it’s necessary in this whole “emotional maturity” thing.