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The Biochemistry of Falling in Love

The past few years have yielded a great deal of new knowledge about what lies at the basis of the beautiful and glorious feelings we all feel when we fall in love. Phil Donahue nicely summarizes much of this material in his 1985 volume THE HUMAN ANIMAL (see especially chapter six of that work). The available data indicate that romantic love feelings commence in the region of the lower brain that is known as the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is composed of a dense cluster of nerves which controls hundreds of bodily functions and impacts in a large host of ways the entire nervous system. Whenever a person subjectively perceives another human being as romantically appealing a portion of the hypothalamus transmits a message by way of various chemicals to the pituitary gland. And in turn the pituitary releases a host of its own hormones which rapidly suffuse the entire bloodstream. The sex glands respond to these hormones by rapidly releasing into the bloodstream their own hormones which have the effect, even among preadolescent children, of creating a more rapid heartbeat and a feeling of lightness in the head. Simultaneously the nerve pathways in and around the hypothalamus produce chemicals that induce-provided that these chemicals continued to be produced over a long period of time-what people refer to as "falling in love".

What current research especially needs to focus upon is the question of whether love-shys have a hyperactive hypothalamus that commences to respond and react with "love chemicals" significantly earlier in life for them than for most human beings--and whether these hypothalamus responses are stronger and more persistent over the first three decades of life for the love-shys than for non-shy people. As I have already documented in chapter two, many components of the lower brain stem are much more hyperactive in introverts than in ambiverts and extroverts. The neurons of the locus coeruleus and of other parts of the ascending reticular formation of the brain appear to be much more hyperactive among inhibited people than among the uninhibited. Thus, there is little reason to suspect that the "love nucleus" component of the hypothalamus (itself a part of the lower brain) might not also be hyperactive for highly inhibited, very shy men.

If this is so it would provide a key portion of the explanation as to why so many of the love-shy fall so deeply in love as early in life as age 5--much earlier in life than most people experience powerful feelings of romantic love. It would also partially explain why love-shy men tend to fall in love so easily and so often right from the earliest years of elementary school through the years of middle adulthood. Simply put, for severely love-shy men the "love nucleus" portion of the hypothalamus may "awaken to full operation" seven or eight or nine years prematurely, long before adolescence is arrived at with its normal surge of sex hormones. The prepubescent child who does not have any awareness of sex or of erotic feelings (as these do not usually occur prior to adolescence) interprets the powerful feelings he does feel as being those of overwhelming romantic love.

Among the first signs of "falling in love" is a giddy high similar to what might be obtained as a result of an amphetamine boost. This "high" is a sign that the brain has entered a distinct neurochemical state. This occurs as a result of the hypothalamus releasing a chemical substance (probably phenylethylamine) that is very much like an amphetamine and which, like any "upper", makes the heart beat faster and confers energy. This biochemically-based "high" is experienced by anyone "in love" quite irrespective of their chronological age. The problem for the love-shy of any age is that they are emotionally incapable of harnessing the energy that is a by-product of their biochemically-based "high". In essence, they are incapable of following through, flirting, and winning the attention of the loved person. If they did follow through and were rejected, the biochemical "high" would quickly and fairly easily come to a halt. In not being able to make the approach to the love object the biochemical "high" remains endemic in the love-shy child's brain for an indefinite, usually quite lengthy period of time. And the elementary school boy (or man as the case might be) becomes "hooked" on his own brain biochemicals. In short, for the love-shy male who cannot approach the girl, love swiftly becomes an overwhelming strong addiction that is probably every bit as strong and demanding as a drug addict's addiction to amphetamine might be. (The ability to share many experiences with the love object would operate to remove the "rosy coloured smokescreen" of infatuation, thus preventing this addiction.)

Of course, any "high" has to end. The evidence suggests that males who are able to start conversations with girls in whom they become interested are highly unlikely to experience any painful "crashes". At least their susceptibility to such "crashes" will remain very low until early adulthood. And even then they will be susceptible only if a boy/girl love relationship of many months duration breaks up against their wishes. In contrast, love-shy males are susceptible to such "crashes" from the age of five simply because their inability to start a conversation with and to get to know their "love-object" causes a long-term preoccupation and fantasy world to develop that can and does often last for many months. As the cases reported in this chapter suggest, all a 5 or 7 or 9 year old boy need do is look at his love-object in a school hallway or on a playground, and his hypothalamus will cause the release of a shot of blood amphetamines that are as potent (and distracting) as a shot out of hell! Despite the tendency of naive parents to use the disparaging expression "puppy love", the biochemical basis of love is really no different for the eight year old than it is for the adult.

A key consideration for anyone who gets hooked on drugs is that of withdrawal. Whether a person gets hooked on pills or on natural drugs that the brain produces, the "crash" of withdrawal can be highly distracting and debilitating for a person of any age. But of especial interest here is the finding that people who "crash" after having been deeply in love tend to have an unusually strong craving for chocolate. Very note-worthy is the fact that chocolate is high into phenylethylamine--the very substance that is released by the brain into the bloodstream as a concomitant of falling in love. When the love-feelings cease the body craves chocolate because it has developed a tolerance to the phenylethylamine which it is no longer getting--because the brain has stopped secreting them.

From early childhood some of the love-shy men studied for this book had always had a significantly above average craving for chocolate and other sweets; and they tended to consume significantly more of these items than did the non-shy men. This consumption of chocolate and sweets tends to aggravate the love-shys' problems in a whole host of ways as we shall see. For now, suffice it to say that this craving for sweets may be due in part to constantly being in the throes of hopeless and terminated, unrequited love experiences.

Finally, Jack Panksepp, a chemist at Bowling Green State University, has obtained evidence indicating that the brain also produces chemicals called opioids (which are quite similar to the highly addicting opiates) when a person falls deeply in love.

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