Like most people, I am a sucker for love.
Romantic love is a force. It takes you over. It is the pumping artery that fuels all other emotions. We live in a culture of love. It informs us.
I will never forget the moment I lost my first true love. As fairytales, movies, songs, books, and our parents would tell us, this is the most impactful love of all. The one that kickstarts your entire understanding of the phenomenon. Like the illogical importance put on virginity, a person’s first love is the ultimate head game you can only work through.
When Nic and I broke up I was devastated. I remember drinking whatever I could get my hands on, putting whatever I could up my nose, accepting any form of sexual attention from another person in an effort to erase the hurt that overtook me.
I am a dramatic motherfucker.
I always have been, but this loss was like nothing else. I dwelled. I cried. I lashed out. I did horribly embarrassing and stereotypical ex-girlfriend things. I couldn’t help it. I felt like someone had cut off my arm and I had no idea how to grow a new one by myself.
But the thing about love is this: It’s so powerful and so amazing that you always take the risk of hurt to have that feeling again. I rarely think about how a relationship will end when I am at the beginning falling in love, again. I’m too busy being totally naive and forgetting everything I learned from the last heartbreak. As much as I like to trick myself into thinking I’m realistic, I’m not. I am romantic through and through.
After my first big heartache (which, believe me, took years and years to finally get over), I read everything about love I could get my hands on. And I’m not talking about romantic poems or idealistic musings that suck you into a vortex like a Big Star ballad. I wanted to break love down into a science. I wanted to rationalize my emotions so that I could understand and hopefully squash them.
In my desperate search, I came across this American anthropologist named Helen Fisher. She has spent most of her career researching the neurological affects of love on our brain. Fisher has taken the love-struck and love-sick, stuck them in an MRI machine, and watched. Among other things, she figured out the brain in love experiences increased activity in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and parts of the caudate nucleous. The VTA is high in cells that produce and distribute dopamine to the caudate nucleous (which is also the part of our brain associated with attention and the motivation to acquire rewards).
Fisher argues that this part of the brain is reptilian. It’s below our cognitive and emotional states; it’s like hunger or something basic. Therefore love is not an emotion but primarily a motivational state designed to make us pursue a preferred partner.
When she studied rejection in love, she found links to cocaine addiction. I like this science. She suggested that romantic love and cocaine addiction behaviors share survival system activation in the brain, helping to explain the strength of the obsession. Love is like a drug addiction, the exact same parts of our brain are activating: Obsessiveness (wanting more, more, more as our tolerance grows), withdrawls and relapse all happen. You can be addicted to a human the way you are addicted to oxycontin.
Getting over anything hurts; we turn into crazy people. When you stop doing drugs, you start kicking. When your lover rejects you, you start depressing. You get fucked up. You get high. You do anything to take away that feeling. What else do people want but to love and be loved right back?
I don’t remember exactly when it was, but one day I realized I was actually over my first love. I had thought this many times before but I was only lying to myself. So much time had passed. We had both grown into different people with our own successful lives. I saw him and instead of hurt, anger, jealousy, craving, or sadness, I felt totally calm. That’s when something clicked: The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
I don’t think love can ever be replicated. It’s too individual. It’s too unique. It’s too circumstantial. It’s never repeated. I will never fully understand love, but I will always succumb to it in all forms.
It’s so good, it’s worth the risk.
