What is love? Love is more than ‘a-butterfly-flutters-in-your stomach’ or ‘flying-to-the-sky’ feeling. It is more than a psychological event when your body holds a strong affection emotion. Have you ever wonder where do those feelings come from? Those ‘stomach-fluttering’ and sudden nervous are called infatuation.
What is love? What does it do with infatuation? Why does it make you do foolish admiration?
Love is complicated. It is something more than just an L-O-V-E. It is more than a feeling. It is also more than a verb. It is all about chemical reaction events on your body.
people that fall in love is cannot control their brain. When we attracted to somebody, with an irresistible of chemicals, our brain makes us to fall in love. Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if a person fancies someone.
There are many researches of love and its effects to our body. To make the observation easier, a Rutgers University scientist named Helen Fisher has divided the stages of love. Every stage has different hormone chemicals that produced in our brain. The stages are lust, attraction, and attachment. The hormones are serotonin, dopamine, estrogen, testosterone, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Each of them affects different part of brain too.
LUSTLust is the first stage of love. According to howstuffworks.com, lust is also known as the desire of love. This experiment is common to be found when human reaches puberty. It plays important role in our life. According to an article by Lisa Diamond, lust and romantic love are two different things caused by different things. Lust evolved for the purpose of sexual mating, while romantic love evolved because of the need for infant/child bonding. Love relationships usually begin with a strong physical and emotional attraction that produces consciousness.
Beside works based on estrogen and testosterone (sexual hormones that cause puberty in human development), the brain also saturated with a hormone called endorphin. According to innerworkspublishing.com, endorphin creates the feeling of pleasure that accompany love infatuation. The feeling is same with a person after they eat something pleasurable like chocolate and after they have a strong exercise.
ATTRACTIONIf the relationship keeps continue, the next stage is attraction or romantic passion. In this stage, both the woman and man are reeling with romance and passion until they finally find out the true side of each person. The attraction stage can be felt when the person feels the heart is making more sense than his or her brain. “Love is blind” saying is really accurate in this stage.
According to Ruth D. Kerce, attraction stage works both in emotion and physics. The physical area is when the body reacts to another’s. It affects the heartbeat systolic rate, temperature rises, palms get sweaty, stomachache, and the throat tightens. Usually, this is called the love symptoms.
The emotion affects usually when the couple starts to give interest to each other and do some shares each other about their career, family, etc. It is usually happening when the couple doesn’t do physical activities. The feeling is also usually stronger than physical.
According to youramazingbrain.com, scientists believe that attraction stage has three neurotransmitters involved. Neurotransmitter is a chemical that transmits a message between nerve cells in the brain. They are dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin. Dopamine stimulates the rush of pleasure so it makes human become over-excited, adrenaline is increasing human heartbeat rate so it makes them sweat and asphyxiated, and serotonin which makes human can’t stop thinking about their lover in their head. In addition, norepinephrine also produced in this stage. It is similar to adrenaline which is producing bliss and excitement.
ATTACHMENT If the couple keeps the strong feeling in attraction stage, they would move to the further stage which is called attachment. Attachment is usually when the couple chooses more serious relationship like marriage. There are two major hormones that have important roles in this stage. Oxytocin produced right on the climax of sexual orgasm during mating. It makes couples feel much closer to one another after they have had sex. It is also responsible for a mum’s breast automatically releasing milk. The important hormone is vasopressin aka anti-diuretic hormone and also produced after orgasm. It works with kidney to control thirst.
According to people.howstuffworks.com, each hormone has its own section pathways in the brain. Serotonin flows through frontal lobe in human cerebrum, limbic (storage of memories and emotions, also in cerebrum), and majority in other parts of cerebrum while the norepinephrine flows through the cerebellum (small brain) and the serotonin flows through the hypothalamus which is the control center of all biological daily activities of the body.
In conclusion…Human body is amazing. It has division of labor to manage each reaction for complicated chemical feeling, like love. It works in each particular pathways in brain marked that human body is able to manage the biological metabolism and other reaction in specific. The each part of human body has their roles in a purpose of something. Everything manages everything inside human body.
Labels: biology, chemical, love, neurology, reaction
