Love is Blind

When we are falling in love, chemicals associated with with the reward circuit, flood our brain, they start to produce an emotional and physical responses ,we then start to experience things like, racing heart, pour palms sweat ,flushed cheeks, and with that comes feeling of passion and anxiety.

In the initial phase of romantic love, the level of cortisol increase, and we have to cope with that crisis.

With the level of cortisol rising, the serotine becomes depleted, and while its happening ,we are experiencing things like ,preoccupying thoughts, terror of early love ,and hope, which are obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with the feeling.

High level of dopamine is also released when we are being love-struck. Dopamine is the chemical ,that gets the reward system going, it activates the reward circuit, which make love pleasurable experience, similar to euphoria which is associated with alcohol and cocaine.

There are other chemicals ,which are also at work ,during romantic love, they are Oxytocin and Vasopressin , those hormones have their roles in other times as well, like ,pregnancy, nursing, and mother and infant attachment.

They are released during sex and heightened by skin to skin contact.

Oxytocin ,make us deeper our feeling of attachment, which makes couples feel closer, after having sex. Oxytocin is also known as the love hormone, because it gives and provoke the feelings like, calmness, security, and contentment, which are associated with bonding.

Vasopressin is linked to behaviour which will produce, the long term monogamous relationship.

Those differences in behaviours can show, why passionate loves ,fades as attachment grows.

Love also deactivates our natural pathways, which are responsible for negative emotions, for example, fear and social judgment.

In those two types of feelings, (positive & negative), we have two neurological pathways. Positive is prefrontal cortex connecting to nucleus accumbens and negative is nucleus accumbens connecting to amygdala.

While we are romantically involved with someone, neural machinery, which is responsible for critical assessment of the people, including those, we are involved with romantically, shuts down, that’s why quite often, we hear the phrase LOVE IS BLIND.

Written By Honorata Czestochowska

Source of information can be found on Harvard Medical School website .https://hms.harvard.edu/