It’s that time of the year! Now that snow has officially fallen and a miniature conifer unexpectedly materialized in my living room, pre-equipped with a Christmas bow, it’s time to do lots . I usually: watch Love Actually, make lists of presents to buy, make longer lists of presents to receive, guzzle eggnog, decide it’s really not that good, spike it with gin, decide that’s grosser, get drunk anyway, remember that December is really a euphemism for finals, decide that holiday merry-making transcends studying, keep drinking, try knitting a scarf because that seems seasonally appropriate, then abandon this for a less demanding task like reading all my friends’ Facebook posts about Christmas some creepily ubiquitous algorithm has compiled.
Now add “in bed, with (sexual partner of choice)” after each of these time-honored holiday traditions. For many of you, this may look something like: guzzle eggnog with Ryan Gosling…in bed. I personally would not mind this. The holiday season is also cuddling and doing-cute-things-together season, like tandem sledding and post-brunch mittened-hand holding, and consummating shag rugs in front of fireplaces blazing so merrily they look like they’ve been attended to by Hogwarts’ elf legion. The holiday season, in other words, is the season of love, and that is why I would like to dedicate this blog entry to love and its tentacular hold on our brains.
Depending on where we are in our lives, love can mean very different things. Our brains could be color:red’ xml:lang=”EN-US”> in lust mode, operating pretty much exclusively and automatically on sex pilot. Romantic love, on the other hand, is the stage where sleeping around hopefully starts to have a more individualized meaning—you’re focusing your mating energy on just one person. Attachment is where your grandparents are probably hovering around: you were able to tolerate this other human for long enough to raise a child, and now you’re serenely content with the comfort of human companionship, and maybe some These three brain systems aren’t mutually exclusive, unfortunately, which is why we’re prone to being miserable, cheating, and being psychotically obsessed with people who are best described as “random.” Sex is a rogue variable in the harmonics of love: an orgasm floods the brain with dopamine, which is associated with romantic love, and oxytocin and vasopressin, two hormones that engender feelings of attachment. In other words, we’re capable of “loving” more than one person at the same time. That is, we can feel lust and romantic love and attachment simultaneously and not necessarily with the same person, which can cause a lot of worthy complications in your life.
But during the holiday season, most of us are looking not for lust or long-term attachment, though those are certainly part of the package, but rather romantic love, of the Mr. Darcy-brooding-in-a-crepuscular-field-over-his-tormented-heart variety. Romantic love is produced and manufactured in a little factory called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Located near the base of the brain, the VTA is active in making dopamine and natural stimulants that are exported to different regions of the brain. The VTA is part of the brain’s reward circuit in the primal basement of our subconscious, where things like desire, motivation, focus, and craving are controlled. It’s the part of the brain that is activated by drugs, except there is no coming down from a VTA-sponsored love-high: you simply can’t stop thinking about this other person, as if they had established permanent residency in your brain.
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies the brain on love, conducted MRI scans of people who had just been dumped and found activity in three brain regions. She discovered that the reward system for wanting and craving, with the VTA at its nucleus, becomes more active when you can’t get what you want, which is why we like the “chase” so much and can’t stop obsessing over our long-gone significant others. This makes giving up love basically just as difficult as giving up a drug addiction (at least psychologically), especially since withdrawal is amplified by the “grass is greener” effect.
The second region of the brain that was activated was the nucleus accumbens, the brain region responsible for calculating gains and losses. This starts over-functioning post-breakup, spinning off questions like “what went wrong?” and “what does she have that I don’t!?” and curating an arsenal of oblique connections from your ex’s Facebook page. The little utilitarian within begins calculating the comparative advantage of doing things like throwing yourself at your ex in a final pride-withering supplication or waiting naked in his bed for him to come home. When it comes to love, we are risk-seeking, preferring to take huge risks for huge gains—and potentially huge losses.