Is Love a Drug?

What makes people fall in love? We find someone we are in love with, but two years later we wonder what we ever saw in them. No one can say this hasn’t happened to them, whether it was a high school crush or our first romance. Unrequited love is harsh. IT leaves us feeling rejected. Our feelings are so strong that we don’t understand why ‘He doesn’t love me back’.

Understanding what love is, and isn’t, can help us cope with the euphoria, and rejection that comes with love. Most important, if someone doesn’t fall in love with you, it’s not because you are stupid, poor, old, ugly, not smart enough, fat, too tall, too short, or unlovable. It is just because they didn’t have the right chemical release.

The research on love is extensive and covers various disciplines including, physical, chemical, environmental, psychological, spiritual, and many sub-disciplines.

The Mind

If you are single your mind is constantly hunting for another partner. It will react suddenly if it sees a suitable partner. You may instantly fall in love with this person. Each of us has a list of priorities, a check list, that includes the criteria we are looking for. This is why it is so important to heal emotionally and re-define your beliefs and core values before entering into a new relationship after a painful divorce or breakup. The mind needs to be reprogrammed. Hopefully, you’ll stop looking for the unhealthy aspects and replace them with healthy personality traits in your future mate.

People who believe in soul mates or the one may never recover from a breakup or divorce. Their mind has been programmed to believe that they can never have another meaningful and fulfilling relationship. This is not only false, it is a self destructive belief.

The Chemical

Many people with relationship problems have an addiction to the chemicals that create the euphoric feeling of love. That feeling that makes you believe that you’ve found the perfect person. That you have located your soul mate and they will never hurt you, heal you of all your pain, and teach you to live happily ever after.

In fact, scientists are finding that the same chemical process that causes addiction is responsible for our ability to fall in love. We are wired for romance from the time we are children. The existence of human pheromones was discovered in 1986 by scientists at the Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. A human VNO has also been found in some, but not all people. This is why smell is so important and may be more important that visual attraction.

The chemicals involved also include adrenaline, dopamine, Oxytocin, Vasopressin and serotonin. These drugs change the way we think. Dr Marazitti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa, discovered that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.

What Happens After Love

In most people these drugs return to normal levels within two years. That is why we start seeing the socks on the floor, bad habits, dirty dishes, and stack of bills. The theories as to why this happens vary. One common theory is that the drugs keep the male and female attached long enough to create a child and raise it until its chances of survival increase. Then the male seeks another mate.

However, when the couple is emotionally mature they can enter a deeper, more fulfilling phase of love. The introduction of Eros love, or passionate and lustful love is replaced by storage and Philia love. These mean affection and friendship, or virtuous love. These loves give way to a deeper love, agape, which we translate to mean true love rather than attraction or friendship.