Love, scientifically , Is a mammalian impulse, such as hunger or thirst. According to the expert Helen Fisher, the experience of love is divided into three stages: lust, attraction and attachment. Lust is the sensation of sexual desire; Romantic attraction determines which partners are attractive, saving time and energy by choosing; And attachment involves sharing a home, the duties of parents, mutual defense, and in humans involves feelings of security.
Love is a universal concept, it exists in all cultures. Although there are some differences as to the definition of love depending on the culture and context, there are a number of characteristics. In all cultures love is recognized as a particular pattern of feelings and behaviors that I will explain later.
Many people have thought about love, and some people still think of it as mystical and magical. That is why I will try to explain in this article what love really is, what it means, why we fall in love and how we fall in love among other things.
What is love?
Love has many meanings, 14 in all, in the SAR dictionary ( Royal Academy of the Spanish Language ). You can read them all, although I will try to elaborate here a definition that encompasses all the aspects that share the meanings (minus the meaning of cadillo that is a tree).
Love is a psychological and physiological state with a pattern of feelings characterized by the need to be with the loved one and that person feels the same towards us. These feelings are represented through a series of behaviors that demonstrate intimacy between people such as physical contact, altruistic behaviors or sexual relationships in romantic love.
Being such an abstract term it is difficult to look for common characteristics that distinguish it from other concepts such as friendship or veneration. That is why feelings are often confused, but this is normal because the brain does not work in terms of all or nothing, if not gradually. For example, not all the people we know are our friends, and we do not feel the same intensity with the friendship of all our friends.
What does seem clear is that love is the opposite of hatred which is described as a feeling of repulsion towards a person or thing. So if love is the opposite it would be defined as a feeling of attraction towards another person or thing.
Types of love
There are several types of love according to the object or person to which it is directed. The more general categorization would divide them into two groups, impersonal love and interpersonal love.
- Impersonal love Within this group are all the feelings of love that are not addressed to people. The recipient can be almost anything, an object, an act, a profession, a concept... For example, you can love a teddy bear because of the memories it brings; Someone can love skiing or swimming; One can love psychology or science (here I speak from experience); Or nature can be loved.
In all cases the person feels the need to be in contact with what he loves.
- Interpersonal love. When we talk about love we usually refer to this type of love. This group includes all the feelings of love that are directed at other people who are usually a family member, a friend or the couple.
Although these are the most common uses when talking about love do not forget that there is also self-love, or love for oneself, which is no less important than the rest. In fact, I would say it is even more important.
Falling in love and choosing the couple
In this section I will explain the process of falling in love and try to answer some very usual questions like what do we look at the other person?
The first infatuations usually occur in adolescence, although it is an immature love and usually not choose the right person. This infatuation and search for the couple is made to meet four basic human needs, firstly to have sex and / or reproduce (the hormones call us), secondly, to have and give companionship; Have an attachment relationship with the other person and fourth and last place to give and receive help and care.
To select the couple must be given a series of circumstances without which it is unlikely to find it:
- You must have access to the person, ie the person should be from our circle of friends or from another environment such as work and school, although today with social networks and partner search pages you can have access to The person is where he is.
- Do not repulse. It seems obvious, but by this I mean that it is not necessary that the person seems attractive from the beginning, in fact, I know consolidated couples that when they met did not believe the other person was attractive. If it is necessary that you do not seem unpleasant, at this point it has been shown that the smell is especially important as I will develop later.
- Let some tastes and expectations of the future be shared. In reality, when the couple is already established, people tend to mimic and imitate their partner, which is why they share many more tastes and expectations, but it is necessary that at the beginning of the relationship there is something that unites you.
But, once we meet a person in the right circumstances, what are we based on to choose our partner? Numerous studies have been done throughout history and have found some clear preferences that we present humans when choosing our partner.
These preferences are basically morphological, usually women look at the height and muscle mass index of men, while these are fixed at the ratio between the waist and hip. The symmetry and body odor of the person is very important for both sexes.
These preferences have a clear evolutionary sense, we choose the couple with whom we are most likely to reproduce and keep our young, large and strong men and women with broad hips.
Although the case of women's preference is curious, in a study carried out in 2005 it was shown that their preference for height of men depended on the phase of the menstrual cycle in which they were found. Women tended to prefer taller men when they were in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle (follicular phase).
Preferences based on symmetry and body odor may not have such an obvious evolutionary sense, but it seems that the more symmetrical people are considered more attractive because symmetry is an indicator that our genes are fine, there are no genetic errors, And that we are fertile.
As for body odor some studies have shown that this is an important factor in choosing the couple because it tells us if we are genetically compatible with the other person, can even tell us if it is fertile or if you suffer from illness.
A study by Havlicek and her team found that women who were in a fertile phase of their menstrual cycle preferred the body odor of more dominant men. This makes evolutionary sense, since the pair (or pairs) of the dominant male of a group of animals is also treated with privileges, for example, receiving more food and being more protected.
In addition, it has been proven that there is a correlation between the preference of the smell of the couple and the genetic similarity between both partners. In particular, the major complex of Histocompatibility (MHC), this complex consists of a group of genes that are important in the immune recognition of our tissues as well as those of other people. That is, this complex detects if our immune system is similar to that of the other person (this finding has an important application in organ transplants).
There are indications that the MHC complex produces a series of elements that participate in the creation of our body odor along with other factors, which create a specific and specific body odor for each person.
It has been proven that, as a general rule, people prefer couples who have a different MHC than their own. This makes sense, since this way they make sure that they do not repeat hereditary genetic errors that can cause diseases and disorders in their progeny, in addition if there is a greater heterogeneity in our MHC we will have a better capacity to protect us immunologically against infectious agents, like virus or Bacteria.
After checking all the biological aspects that influence our decision of a couple it seems that we are not free to choose, but we have written in our features what our partner should have.
But, nothing further from the truth, because there are many people who fulfill all the above and who could be our partner, choose a particular person depends on many other factors conditioned by our experience and our tastes. So not everything is genetic.
Brain changes produced by love
It is clear that when we are in love our world changes, especially if that love is reciprocated. It seems that there is only that special person, we attend to things that before seemed superfluous and meaningless, like dusk, and we stopped lending to other things or people that seemed important before.
The most graphic way that I can think of to describe it is to compare it to an addiction, it may seem ugly or exaggerated, but, in fact, the changes that occur in brain When we are addicted to something and when we fall in love are very similar.
The pleasant feeling of euphoria that we feel when we are with our partner or when it does something that we like, occurs as a consequence of the activation of the limbic system , Or system of reinforcement, produced by the increase of Dopamine . This feeling reinforces us and makes us want to be more and more with our partner.
This does not happen only with love, it happens with any reinforcing stimulus, that is, with anything that we like, and it is one of the bases of learning. It can happen by drinking chocolate, playing something or drawing. It also occurs when we take a drug because it is precisely one of the most important mechanisms in the regulation of addictions.
Other substances closely related to love and sex are the Oxytocin and the Vasopressin . These hormones are segregated while the couple is having a sexual relationship, both in the man and the woman, cause euphoria and analgesia, so that we do not bother any damage that could occur during the sexual act.
It has been found that during the first phases of the relationship the concentration of these substances increases markedly. In addition, oxytocin, also called the love hormone, not only acts in romantic love, is also related to maternal love, since women secrete it during childbirth and when they feed their baby through breastfeeding.
The obsession we feel about our partner, the feeling of wanting to be with her all the time and do everything with her, could be determined by a general decrease of the levels of Serotonin in the brain. In patients with obsessive disorders, a decrease in serotonin levels has been found similar to that occurring in the couple when they are at the beginning of their relationship.
The passion and unconditional love shown at the beginning of the relationship is related to the inhibition of the frontal cortex and the amygdala .
The amygdala plays a primordial role in the recognition of aversive stimuli, in the case of the pair would serve to detect behaviors of that person that we do not like, and the frontal cortex works as a filter that serves to control our impulses. This would explain that we have a less severe judgment on the person we love.
References
- De Boer, A., van Buel, E., & Ter Horst, G. (2012). Love is more than just a kiss: a neurobiological perspective on love and affection. Neuroscience , 114-124. Doi: 10.1016 / j.neuroscience.2011.11.017
- Fisher, H., Aron, A., & Brown, L. L. (2005). Romantic Love: An FMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice. The Journal of Comparative Neurology , 58-62.
- Maister, L., & Tsakiris, M. (2016). Intimate imitation: Automatic motor imitation in romantic relationships. Cognition , 108-113. Doi: 10.1016 / j.cognition.2016.03.018
- RAE. (S.f.). Love . Retrieved on April 5, 2016, from Dictionary of the Spanish Language: http://dle.rae.es/?id=2PGmlay
- Redolar, D., & Tobeña, A. (2014). Beauty and Love. Infatuation and Choice of the couple. In D. Redolar, Cognitive Neuroscience (Pages 593-577). Madrid: Pan American Medical.
- Xu, X., Weng, X., & Aron, A. (2015). The Mesolimbic Dopamine Pathway and Romantic Love. In A. W. Toga, Brain Mapping. An Encyclopedic Reference (Pp. 631-633). London: Academic Press.