With my last TS670 paper written and sent to the prof, I've gleefully embarked on my month of recreational reading. September is the entr'acte between Summer and Fall terms, and I plan to fill it with a lilting intermezzo of emotional and non-scholarly books. Fa la la.
The first of which is "Why We Love" by Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who teaches at Rutgers. She dug into the brain chemistry of people in madly in love, or recently rejected by a lover. MRI technology allowed her to see the areas of the brain stimulated by those feelings and analyze what produces the highs and lows, the obsessive behavior, the passionate craving, the calm attachment, the crushing depression.
(okay, maybe it's a little scholarly. pop science.)
The cocktail of chemicals at work include dopamine, norepenephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and testosterone, in varying levels. Yikes! I kind of picture the chemical combinations like a graphic equalizer applied to music... you change the feel of the sound by boosting this range, lowering that one... except when you're in love, someone ELSE is messing with your levels - someone you're crazy about, and whom you hope feels the same!
More on all that later, maybe. For now, I want to summarize a section from the book where the author categorizes types of love according to which of these three main groupings of feelings it contains: passion, intimacy, commitment.
infatuation - passion only, no intimacy or committment
convenience - intimacy only, no committment or passion
dutiful love - committment only, no passion or intimacy
fatuous love - committment plus passion, lacking intimacy
companionate love - committment plus intimacy, lacking passion
romantic love - intimacy plus passion, lacking committment
complete love - intimacy, committment, passion - all active
Interesting take. And hey, who's to argue? After all, in the words of Sir Henry Finck (Queen Victoria's behavioral scientist): "Love is such a tissue of paradoxes, and exists in such a variety of forms and shades, that you may say almost anything about it that you please, and it is likely to be correct."
No kidding. It sure confuses me, that much I know.
Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go pop some St. John's Wort to raise my serotonin levels; writing about this has me all trippy. Darn that dopamine.
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2 comments:
Take it from some one who knows a little bit about what he is talking about-"How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?" Albert EInstein ;-)
But I really like this one- "Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle." -Amy Bloom
In direct opposition to the hopefully tongue in cheek, tho acidic observation by Ambrose Bierce, "Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage."
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