Before country songs, romance novels, sappy poems, and The Notebook, came something so real, so fundamental, that we cannot possibly question its existence: the brain. It may not be revolutionary but it sure taught me a little something about this thing we call “love.”
While Albert Einstein once said that “science will never clinically sterilize the wonderment of love (first or otherwise),” on this Valentine’s Day, if you found yourself single, like me, it might help to actually “clinically sterilize love.” As Einstein, and so many others have pointed out throughout history, love isn’t this thing that simply happens to us, love is a part of us.
What we do know pretty clearly, is that the very primitive areas of our brains are highly involved with the feeling of romantic love. We can see it in these beautiful brain scans that regions of the brain literally light up when we talk about someone we love. How crazy is that? Our bodies also know when we are falling in love, and chemicals associated with reward are there to prove it. We get physical and emotional responses — passion, fear, sweaty palms, and racing hearts. Serotonin levels (the neurotransmitter dedicated to regulating mood and behavior) go down while the cortisol levels rise showing that your body is doing its best to figure out what’s going on. And we can’t possibly forget about dopamine (my favorite neurotransmitter and the one that deals with the reward system). That’s what makes love so damn good. It’s euphoria, pleasure, happiness, and bliss.
[And this is just some of the research out there about love — there is so much more and I highly recommend doing some exploring]
There’s a ton of science behind the power of visualization, and the central concept that “seeing is believing.” But maybe, just maybe, we have too much visualization of what we think is love. I went about my February 14th, scrolling through the likes of Instagram and Facebook, noticing the different experiences of those in love. So maybe we have too much visualization of what we think love should look like, and not enough of what it actually looks like in our brains.
But that is not to say that love is merely chemical; it is anything but. What I’m saying here is that love is so many things, and it is much deeper than you may have thought, and something your brain has likely already experienced. If we understood that–could really picture it, maybe we wouldn’t feel so alone. Love causes humankind some of our greatest joys and our greatest pains, and it all starts in our brains. That, to me, is pretty damn beautiful.