I know it feels like cloud nine when you fall in love but truth be told, you are just a victim of your bodies biochemistry. When you are attracted to someone, it is because subconsciously you like their genes. You could smell it. It really isn’t us doing the choosing but a mixture of hormones in our body drawing us to people that are genetically suited to produce offspring with us. It is our subconscious that rule when it comes to finding a partner.
The sense of smell.
When we choose a partner, there is evidence to suggest that we unconsciously avoid partners with an immune system that is similar to ours. This is our bodies way of ensuring preservation so that our offspring would be able to fight off infections.
Human pheromones are chemicals detected by our nose and sends a message of ‘awesome’ or ‘not good’ to our brain once we get close to a person. It is not limited to humans. It is a known fact that rats, for example, use the vomeronasal organ in their nose to sniff in the right mate.
Similar experiments in humans confirmed that women consistently preferred the smell from a worn shirt of men who had a different immune system to theirs.
The sense of sight.
Have you noticed that many married couples look very much alike? It is no coincidence. There are studies that have confirmed that we are unconsciously attracted to people who look like us and the studies also confirmed similarities in overall ear size, middle finger lengths and lung volume.
Some studies have taken a person’s face and changed it with the help of computers to what they would look like as the opposite sex and consistently without knowing, these people preferred their own face over other faces.
Falling in Love as a three stage process.
Stage one: This is the ‘get you in the mood’ stage. You feel you are ready for love. This stage is controlled by hormones testosterone and estrogen.
Stage two: This is the ‘cloud nine’ stage. You think of nothing but that person. You see no fault in the person but this is because of a few monoamine neurotransmitters.
Dopamine hormone is one of these neurotransmitters. Dopamine (Dope for short) is the same hormone cocaine will release in you if you take it. It is a feel good, happy hormone that sees no wrong.
Norepinephrine is the other hormone that is released at this stage and it is responsible for making our heart pound and skin sweat when you are with ‘the chosen one’.
If you had any doubts before that falling in love is a mental illness, doubt no more.
Hormone serotonin which is implicated in many mental illnesses is also released at this stage. So, if the lover is not listening to common sense advice and is acting like a crazy person, well it is because he/she is temporarily insane!
Stage Three: The stability stage.
This is the period where lovers mature and stay together for the long run, a lifetime. This is if their hormones come out right for them.
Oxytocin – Have you noticed the love between a mother and her newborn child? Well, this love is courtesy of the oxytocin hormone. In animals who had this hormone blocked after delivery, they abandoned their babies. Similarly, animals injected with oxytocin cared for babies that were not theirs like it was theirs. The brain releases oxytocin to maintain this matured stage of the relationship.
Oxytocin is also released by both sexes during orgasm so the more sex couples have the more oxytocin they make.
Take home message for the couples not ‘feeling the love’, well, now you know what to do to get more oxytocin into your system!
