Chemistry of love: discover what happens when someone attracts you

Albert Einstein once said that explaining what we feel for that special person under the strict terms of the chemistry of love is to take away the magic of the matter. However, whether we like it or not, there are processes such as attraction or the most obsessive passion where neurochemistry itself delimits a fascinating and extremely complex territory that also defines part of what we are.

Love and passion, from a romantic or philosophical point of view, is something that poets and writers talk to us about every day. We all love to immerse ourselves in these literary universes where a feeling is idealized that sometimes, it must be said, gives shape to more mysteries than certainties. However, of falling in love – as such and from a biological point of view – it is neurologists who can give us more precise data; Less evocative, yes, but objective and real nonetheless.

Let us begin

Likewise, anthropologists also offer us an interesting perspective that fits very well with the chemistry of love that we know through neuroscience. In fact, if something has always captivated this area of ​​knowledge, it has been the idea of ​​being able to identify the processes that underlie those couples that create lasting bonds and that they are capable of building a stable and happy commitment.

Anthropologists explain to us that humanity seems to make use of three different brain “tendencies.” The first is one where the sexual impulse guides a large part of our behaviors. The second refers to “romantic love”, where relationships of dependency and high emotional and personal cost are generated. The third approach is what makes up healthy attachment, where the couple builds a significant complicity from which both members benefit.

Now, beyond understanding what guarantees stability and happiness in a couple, there is an aspect that interests us all. We talk about falling in love, we talk about the chemistry of love, about that strange, intense and disconcerting process that sometimes makes us put our eyes, our minds and our hearts on the least suitable person. Or on the contrary, in the most accurate, in the definitive…

The chemistry of love and its ingredients

It is very possible that more than one of our readers thinks that falling in love is explained solely from a neurochemical point of view. May attraction be the result of a formula whose variables adjust to the chemistry of love and the neurotransmitters that mediate this process. There where our capricious brain orchestrates said magic, said desire and obsession at will…

It is not like this. Each of us has certain preferences, very deep, idiosyncratic and sometimes even unconscious. Likewise, there is clear evidence that we tend to fall in love with people with characteristics similar to ours: similar level of intelligence, similar sense of humor, same values…

However, there is something striking and fascinating at the same time in all of this. We can be in a classroom with 30 people with characteristics similar to ours, similar tastes and similar values ​​and we will never fall in love with all of them. The Indian poet and philosopher Kabir said that The path of love is narrow and there is only room in the heart for one person. So… What other factors lead to such a spell and what we understand as the chemistry of love?

The scent of genes

Intangible, invisible and imperceptible. If we say at this very moment that our genes give rise to a particular smell capable of arousing attraction among some people and not others, it is very possible that more than one person will raise one of their eyebrows in a grimace of subtle skepticism.

However, More than genes, what gives off a particular smell – of which we are not aware, but which guides our attraction behavior – is our immune system, and specifically the MHC proteins.These proteins have a very specific function in our body: they trigger the defensive function. It is known, for example, that women are unconsciously more attracted to men with an immune system different from their own. It is the smell that guides them in this process, and if they prefer genetic profiles different from their own it is for a very simple reason: offspring with that couple would give way to a child with a more varied genetic load.

Dopamine: I feel good with you, I “need” to be by your side and I don’t know why

We may have an extremely attractive person before us, and yet there is something wrong. It doesn’t make us feel good, the conversation doesn’t flow, there is no harmony, no comfort or any type of connection. Many would not hesitate to say that “there is no chemistry”, and in saying so they would not fall into any error.

The chemistry of love is authentic and it is so for a very simple reason: Each emotion is driven by a specific neurotransmittera chemical component that the brain will release based on a certain series of stimuli and more or less conscious factors.Dopamine, for example, that biological component that “turns us on”. It is a chemical substance essentially related to pleasure and euphoria. There are people who suddenly become the object of all our motivations almost instinctively. Being with them gives us undeniable pleasure, sensational well-being and sometimes blind attraction.Dopamine, in turn, is that neurotransmitter that also plays the role of a hormone and is associated with a very powerful reward system, to the point of having up to 5 types of receptors in our brain.

Likewise, something that we have all experienced at some point is that persistent need to be with a specific person and not with another. Falling in love makes us selective and it is dopamine that forces us to focus “our entire world” on that particular someone, to the point of becoming “obsessed.”

Norepinephrine: everything is more intense with you

We know that a person attracts us because it produces a roller coaster of chaotic, intense, contradictory and sometimes even uncontrollable sensations. Our hands sweat, we eat less, we sleep for only a few hours or none at all, we think less clearly. Thus, almost without realizing it, we see ourselves converted into a small satellite orbiting around a single thought: the figure of the loved one.

Have we lost our minds? Absolutely. We are under the control of theorepinephrine, which stimulates the production of adrenaline. It is what makes our heart race, our palms sweat, and all our noradrenergic neurons are activated to the maximum. The norepinephrine system has just over 1,500 neurons on each side of the brain, which is not much. but when they are activated, an overflowing feeling of joy, effusiveness, and excessive nervousness is “unbridled,” so to speak, to the point of deactivating, for example, the feeling of hunger or the induction of sleep.

Honey, you shoot me the “phenylethylamine”

When we are in love there is an organic compound that completely dominates us: phenylethylamine. As the word itself already tells us, we are faced with an element that shares many similarities with amphetamines and that, combined with dopamine and serotonin, synthesizes the perfect recipe for a movie love.

As a curious fact we will tell you that If there is a food famous for containing phenylethylamine, it is chocolate. However, its concentration is not as high as in cheese. In fact, the phenylethylamine in chocolate is metabolized very quickly compared to that in some dairy products. Now, if we ask ourselves about the exact role of this organic compound, we will tell you that it is simply amazing. It is like a biological device that seeks to “intensify” all our emotions.

Serotonin and oxytocin: the union that strengthens our falling in love

The neurochemicals that we have talked about so far (dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine) They are the three sparks of unquestionable power that govern the first moments of falling in love, where desire, nervousness, passion or obsession with the loved one guide each of our behaviors.

This does not mean at all that oxytocin and serotonin were not present in that first phase, which they were.. However, it is a little later when the latter become more relevant, when both neurotransmitters will intensify our bonds much more, encouraging us to enter a more enriching stage where we can strengthen the bond.

Let’s look at it in detail:

Oxytocin is the hormone that shapes love in capital letters. We are no longer talking about mere “falling in love” or attraction (where the aforementioned substances intervene more), we are referring to that need to take care of the loved one, to provide affection, to caress them, to be part of the loved person in a commitment to long term.

Serotonin, for its part, could be summed up in one word: happiness. If it acquires greater relevance beyond falling in love, it is for a very simple reason. It gives way to a time in which we realize that being next to that specific person is to experience more intense happiness. Therefore, it is necessary to invest efforts and commitments in that relationship to maintain that positive emotional state.Serotonin gives us well-being when things are going wellgives us optimism, good humor and satisfaction. However, when after falling in love we begin to experience, for example, that the other person moves away, that things get cold or that we do not go beyond the sexual level, serotonin levels can plummet, sometimes approaching a state of helplessness and very intense anguish where depression can appear.

To conclude, as we have seen the chemistry of love orchestrates, whether we like it or not, a large part of our behaviors. It does so both in falling in love and in those later phases, where other factors come into action aimed at building commitment and stability in the couple.

Likewise, Dr. Helen Fisher points out to us in her works that human beings are not the only creatures capable of falling in love. As Darwin himself pointed out at the time, in our world There are more than 100 species, from elephants, birds and even rodents that…