Human beings have a lot of necessities; eat, sleep, move, and breathe, but there is also one thing that for us is as essential as those already mentioned, love.
Love is a word that could not be described exactly with a worldwide definition, some say is an emotion, a feeling, a state of mind, a phase, a goal, or from a more medical point of view, love is a mix of a big amount of hormones produced by your brain that makes your body behave in a certain way thanks to a stimulation given by another human being. So, to enclose the things already said, love is a many-splendored thing that people search for all of their lives, even unconsciously.
As Dr. Nicki Nance, licensed psychotherapist, and professor at Beacon College in Florida, explains in a more evolutional way, love is a drive to keep the species in existence by reproduction (Hoyt, 2018), this necessity of reproduction conforms to the first stage of falling in love.
Before anything else, it is necessary to understand how this stage of sexual desire starts; basically, as it was said before, the human brain produces a lot of hormones that make human beings feel every emotion related to what we know falling in love is, for example, dopamine makes humans feel pleasure and happiness, oxytocin helps to be relaxed and feel those ‘loving emotions’ when an individual is stressed out or going through an anxiety phase and thinks or sees something related to that other person, and there are a lot of more hormones who contributes with this process. The main thing to know so is easy to understand this topic, is how hormones work in the human body. Basically, the body and the brain understand these hormones as drugs, so these become addicting once they are produced so regularly and hugely. The signs that tell when a human being is in love are; the heart starts to beat really fast, the systolic blood pressure (tells the maximum pressure executed by the heart) increases (Sheps, 2019), the body releases fat and sugars, the muscular capacity expands so generates more red blood cells to accomplish a better transport of oxygen in the blood (Domínguez, 2018). In other words, when an individual is in love, their body responds just as it does with exercise or some physical activity, falling in love expends a lot of energy and work.
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Now, going back to the process, let’s proceed with the first stage already mentioned, sexual desire. What happens in this step is a purely physical attraction to another person, that makes humans behave in a completely non-smart way, doing a pretty foolish playing. The ventral tegmental area of the brain is the one that sets dopamine free to stimulate four essential parts of the brain: the Nucleus Accumbens, in charge of developing pleasure, laugh, fear, aggression, addiction, and placebo effect; the Septum Pellucidum or “translucent wall”, which is related to the neutral systems of the emotions (Collado, 2017); the Amygdala, who performs a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression); and the prefrontal cortex (Domínguez, 2018). Is obvious to notice that a lot of emotions or results are repeated in a lot of parts of the brain, but remember that the brain is a perfectly constructed working machine that develops these many sexual hormones thanks to each and every part, if something is wrong with one of this parts, the result would not be the same, for example, if something happened to the Amygdala, potentially there would be a case of Alzheimer that would not help the person to remember the feeling of the ‘drugs’ created by the brain, as a result, not being able to constitute the addiction.
In this next stage, the human body turns completely addicted to the sensation. These “drugs” make the person become dizzier and duller than before. These substances produced by the own brain are called ‘Endogenous Hormones’, assembles in the cerebral cortex. When a person is in love, dopamine, oxytocin, and phenethylamine, the hormone of smell and one of the main neurotransmitters of the brain, increase 7000 times than the normal prescription the brain develops. Dopamine increments desire but phenethylamine is the one that gives the feeling of love; the brain gets under an effect similar to the one it gets with Amphetamines, all because of dopamine, oxytocin, and norepinephrine, a hormone of stress and a neurotransmitter similar to adrenaline who increases blood pressure and sugars, take place together. Something important to keep in mind is that neurotransmitters are the ones who produce sentimental arrangements when the brain is stimulated, with that, is better to understand that when serotonin decreases and the brain reward centers become full of dopamine and norepinephrine, the person is numb and foolish, as a result of the effect caused in the brain being the same as consuming a really addicting drug. (Domínguez, 2018)
In stage three, the person in love goes from passional love to real love, this means, because of what happens in the last stage, humans lose the capacity for concentration and rationalization, by reason of being in love consumes a lot of resources, mental and physical; for that cause humans can’t stay in a period of falling in love forever, the body and the brain gets tired and causes this action goes against its surviving instinct. According to the professionals Dr. Ortega and Dr. Gasset, this “Transitory stupidness” last between 6 months and 3 years, but after this period of time, can happen two things, that drive the process to its last and most decisive stage of falling in love. (Domínguez, 2018)
Finally, in this phase, the brain needs to make a decision and it can be this next two: firstly, can get pretty addicted to the high amounts of these substances and leave the person who used to give it those stimulations to find them with someone else, just to repeat the addicting feeling. The other thing that can happen is that, as time pass by, the organism becomes resistant to these hormones, so it starts to disappear gradually but without producing any kind of anxiety or uncomfortableness while leaving behind those drugs effects, that is why, here the brain and body begin to control those doses and it comes a feeling of security, comfortableness, and peace.
The human brain is an amazing and perfectly working machine, love is just part of its functioning and necessities. The sentence “find real love” can be actually very accurate because the human is on the work of looking for that stimulation that its brain does not get tired of, that is why the search for a partner comes with nature and it is part of the pure instinct of reproduction, but in another point of view, it is also a need of the brain to release and create those amount of hormones, cause the body needs it and one or maybe the only effective way or reason that can achieve that is love. Love is important, love is necessary, and love is a must for every single living creature.
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