As the days before Valentine’s Day roll out, stores line their shelves with heart-shaped candy and roses, romance seems to be in the air. In such a time of love, it’s easy for teens to get lost in their emotions, but what causes us to feel this way? To get so attached, to feel the physical pain of leaving one another and euphoria when being in each other’s arms. The answer to all of these questions lies in studies of how the human body reacts to its surroundings, specifically, how the brain interprets these outside factors into feelings of love.
Love can be tricky to study and fully understand due to, as Dr. Philip Stieg puts it, there being “no single ‘love spot’ in the brain telling us how to feel.” When interviewed by Health Matters magazine article, The Science Behind Love: How your Brain and Five Senses Help You Fall in Love, Dr. Stieg revealed that love is a chemical reaction with no one true beginning, but commonly what people perceive as the initial feelings of attraction are caused by an increase in testosterone or estrogen, AKA lust. This allows for increased levels of certain neurotransmitters such as “dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin” (Lapping-Carr, The Science of Love: What’s Happening in Your Body, 2024) as well as a release of norepinephrine which leads to “a faster heart rate, restlessness and loss of appetite.”(Stieg, 2022) While norepinephrine, or noradrenaline is commonly associated with a response to stressful situations, in this case, it is love. The brain continues to work as people become more attached, releasing other hormones, resulting in increased positive feelings which overtime move from sedimentary attraction to deep-rooted love. Dr.Steig goes on to explain that the use of our five basic senses is what allows one’s brain to create a certain idea of things we are attracted to and recognize them in people.
Our senses help build us towards these feelings, each building towards a separate part of what makes us love someone. Dr. Steig goes through how each sense works towards this final product. Sight leads to lust, providing visual stimuli which then leads to “higher levels of dopamine and lower levels of serotonin, which can lead to obsessive thinking when the moment strikes.” Touch, even simply holding hands, releases oxytocin and dopamine, a “result of physical interaction…since touching is capable of evoking strong feelings of pleasure.” Smell provides positive attachment, positive person equals positive smell, “your body’s dopamine system will register this interaction as a reward worth seeking again.” Sweet serenades, romantic ballads and other love songs can “elicit a mutually positive response” when listening with someone you love, when they’re hearing the same notes of romance that you do. Recent studies have found that “after people who consumed something sweet (such as a sugary drink or a cookie) looked at a photo of a potential partner, they were more likely to desire a relationship with that individual.” Eating something sweet releases dopamines, the same dopamines that are then released by an individual we like, and because of this, an association between the two is born.
Sometimes love triumphs, and sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it can hurt. Breakups can be painful, not just emotionally but oftentimes we seem to take a physical blow from the negativity we feel. A PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) study found that social rejection (such as a breakup) and physical pain share a similar pattern of symptoms in humans’ somatosensory system (the part of our brains nervous system that processes touch, temperature, pressure, and other feelings). The study was done using tasks, a social task and a physical task. “The Social Rejection task compared Ex-partner trials, in which participants viewed a headshot of their former partner and thought about their specific rejection experience.” The task also included a friend trial in which the participants were shown a headshot of a friend who was the same sex as their partner and were then asked to remember a positive memory with that person. The physical task also involved two trials: “Hot trials, in which participants experienced noxious thermal stimulation on their left forearm, and Warm trials, in which participants experienced non noxious thermal stimulation in the same area.” The main takeaway from this trial is that not only does experiencing a breakup release the same distress signals that experiencing physical pain does, but it also has a similar effect in our brain’s sensory systems, possibly being the cause of some physical pain disorders due to the similar somatosensory process.
Love is good, love is bad, and most of all, love is science. Feelings of attraction, love, and lust can all be boiled down to our brains taking in outside factors and processing them through certain neurotransmitters, and when these positive neurotransmitters are released and create positive associations, we find ourselves head over heels. This Valentine’s Day talk to the person you like, go get a sweet treat, listen to some love songs, hold their hand, smell the roses, no need to be shy or scared because now you have love down to a science.
