Love is a hormonal conga

If you are into the Valentine frenzy, your “love” hormones are doing the conga today. Even if not today, you must have fallen in love at least once in your life, so you must have felt what that was like. In fact, when in love, your “love” hormones are probably doing not just the conga but a dance fest including Olympian molecular feats like millisecond sprints across the neural highways crisscrossing your body. They (the molecules/hormones) don’t know this, of course, but you do, at least when you are able to occasionally gasp for air, awash in the sea of love within. This is because when in love, you are both a victim and a volunteer. Here’s why.

No one knows exactly what makes one fall in love with someone. That is what makes it such an exciting (and also troublesome) chase! We are all wired to fall in love (sort-of-victim). Nature is fixated on genetic continuity so she wants you to multiply (victim) and throughout natural history, loving someone has been proven to be a very reliable way to make you do that though you can still make that choice even if some groups think they should make that choice for you (victim/volunteer).

Dopamine is always involved when we fall in love. But dopamine is a very big multi-expertise conglomerate of a molecule that has clients all over your brain. It is also a player in other things like attention, addiction and even Parkinson’s disease. The power it unleashes on our behavior depends on along which highway it gets sent in our brains, where it is received and how. 

If dopamine passes through the mesolimbic dopamine system deep in our brains, we feel rewarded every time we see our beloved or encounter anything that has to do with him/her. And the brain likes rewards so we get obsessed in getting these “hits” so we want more and more of the one enabling those dopamine “hits” (victim/volunteer). Molecularly speaking, your beloved is really your trigger-happy dopamine wielder.

But why do the skies seem bluer, the stars seem brighter and even your usual breakfast bread tastes better when you are in love?  It is because dopamine generally lowers your bar for pleasure. This means it could be exactly the same pan de sal as yesterday but when you are in love, it is manna from heaven. As such, it does not take much to please you so you generally repaint your view of your days and nights as one that is rosier (happy victim/volunteer). And there is even a bonus twin to this rosy view of the world: you do not get as easily disgusted or feel pain.

And for the feeling of inexhaustible energy and motivation to be with your beloved, we credit a hormone called norepinephrine. It is what makes you think that a 4-hour drive to your beloved, where the traffic makes you feel like you are an ant swimming in thick honey (victim), is actually a joy ride (volunteer).  And that you can actually do that drive? You have to thank (or blame) adrenalin, which makes all that energy and motivation rush to your muscles. 

Then the hormones of desire and lust, estrogen and testosterone, also march through your brain like you personal molecular soldiers of passion. Now this is where you do or allow certain things to happen, which blur the line that defines whether you are a clear victim or volunteer for love.

The crazy, mighty, super glue of hormones – oxytocin – also joins the hormonal dance craze. More and more of it are made within you when you gaze or touch your beloved (victim/volunteer). Oxytocin increases your feeling of bondedness to your beloved although that is not the only thing it is known to forge. It is also raised when mothers give birth, kicking in a hormonal process that makes mothers produce milk for their babies. Oxytocin seems to be the sticky bun of the hormonal bakery.

That is just the science gyst of it. A lot more wheeling and dealing in the alleys and crevices of your brain happens when you are in love. All science knows is that biology and chemistry are involved in falling and being in love.

But science also knows that explaining love only by its science is like defining a dance simply by Newtonian equations. Equations can account for a dance’s movements but not for the gravitas of its grace or its power over the human spirit.

I read a random poem everyday and a few nights ago, a phrase – “yeast of the night” – from Pierre Jorris’ In Betweenness caught me. I think love is like the yeast of night. It inserts itself within the imprinted marks of clocktime and then unleashes its leavening powers to make moments filled with love, rise and expand, making the walls between days and nights crumble.   And there, in that crumbled sumptuousness, you simply surrender (victim/volunteer).

Love leavens spacetime, creating a cavity in between, filled with things oblivious of what has gone before or after the lines crossed by the clock’s hand. And in that glorious cavity, where you are neither victim nor volunteer, but luscious bread, you just revel in a loving that Pablo Neruda described as “a journey with water and with stars, with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour: loving is a clash of lightning-bolts and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.”

May we all have those leavened moments. – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.”  Her column appears every Friday and you can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.