When we were kids, we used to read fairy tales like a
beautiful lady captivated in a tower waiting for a charming prince to come and
rescue her. When her ‘charming prince’ comes and they see each other, they fall
in love with each other at ‘first sight’. The prince rescues her and they live
happily ever after.
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Love is mostly associated with care and trust. These two
concepts of care and trust come from our preconception about love.
According to psychologists,
all starts with caressing, kissing, and nursing of an infant. This is when the
infant learn what it feels like ‘to be loved’. However, they learn to respect
their parents. The love they know is a form of respect for their parents and
the love they get from their parents is in form of care and comfort. When infants
are around the age of 6-12 they make friends and experience a new type of
imminence, and they learn more about love. After the maturity phase (aged 12-13
for girls and aged 13-14 for boys), they suddenly feel attracted to opposite
sex. During this time, the attraction is mostly toward celebrities, which can
also be termed as ‘Hero-worship’. Then after 15-16 years of age, teenagers tend
to feel different types of attraction towards a specific person of opposite sex
(same sex in case of homosexuality is not discussed) and try to hang out with
that person in small groups generally of mutual friends. Then, the feeling of
being alone only with boyfriend/ girlfriend triggers and they start to avoid
social gathering to spend time with their so-called ‘beloved’. Now-a-days, teenagers
are quite advance in learning more about love rather than their textbook facts.
That is the reason why teenagers even from the age of 13-15 knows how to
attract, select, express love and if anything goes wrong, they decide to
breakup. They tend to think that every new love (generally) is a true love.
Each love for them is deeper and more realistic than the previous one (not
always).
Now the question is why
we fall in love?
Psychologists say that
romantic feelings are associated with pubertal development. An individual fall
in love as a series of hormonal cocktail that influence our sexual growth also
trigger the so called ‘falling in love.’
It takes between ninety seconds to four minutes to get
smitten by someone. According to Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, this
process of falling in love has three steps:
Lust
Attraction
Attachment
However, the main chemical
responsible to make a person feel being in love is phenylethylamine (PEA). This
makes the heartbeat faster, dilates pupil, and may give ‘butterflies’ in the stomach.
Lust
The first stage of lust
is trigger by sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen in male and women
respectively. The hormone best known for its role in inducing labor may influence our
ability to bond with others, according to researchers at the University of
California, San Francisco. The
hormone oxytocin is said to be responsible for bonding with another person and
found to maintain healthy interpersonal relationship with other people. Therefore,
it can also be said that oxytocin initiates an urge to form a bond with the
person we get attracted to. (Oxytocin is generally associated with attachment
stage).
Attraction
Psychologists assume that three types
of hormones are responsible for attraction:
Adrenaline
Dopamine
Serotin
Adrenaline
Psychologists agree that during the initial stage of love, stress
response is activated and both adrenaline and cortisol level in the blood
increases. These two hormones has a fascinating effect on an individual who
might be talking with his/her new love or might have bumped onto him/her,
increasing the heart beat, along with sweating and the mouth go dry. Thus,
adrenaline and cortisol is responsible for the beautiful feeling a person
experience in love. Due to this reason, most people say that when they are with
their loved one, they had a strange and unexplainable feeling and they assume
to be in love.
Dopamine
The neurotransmitter dopamine stimulates desire as it triggers a
intense rush of pleasure. The effect is similar to the effect of cocaine. Due
to this hormone, an individual in love feels more energetic, less need for
sleep or food, more attentive and find exquisite enchantment in the smallest of
details of his/her new love. It can also cause intense euphoria.
Serotonin
Due to the effect of this hormone upon an individual in love, the
new lover keeps on popping up in the mind. An individual often romanticize and
magnify the virtues of their love one. This hormone is responsible for making
us blind of the flaws our loved one is having.
Due to all this chemical cocktail, an
individual in a new love often tends to think that he/she has a relationship
more deeper and special than he/she had experienced before (not always) or
might have experienced. Thus, it makes the lovers want to stay with their loved
one and they proceed to the next stage of love i.e attachment.
Attachment
Attachment is referred to the bond
that keep couples long enough even to give and raise child. Psychologists
believe that mainly two hormones is responsible for attachment
Oxyticin
Vasopressin
Oxytocin
Oxytocin or cuddle hormone deepens the feelings of attachment and
make an individual feel more closer to one another which also explains why
couples after coitus have problem in leaving his/her partner. Oxytocin is a
powerful hormone that is released by men and women mainly during sexual
relationships. Therefore, it’s always advisable to the teenagers not to indulge
in any physical relationship as if the relationship doesn’t last then the
feeling of guilt, loss of hope, despair and the feeling of being betrayed can
cause problems in both personal and social life.
Vasopressin
Vasopressin is a very important hormone that plays crucial role in
long-term commitment and released after coitus. However, how it helps in
keeping the bond between a couple is not fully known but scientist in an
experiment found that, after the subjects are given drugs to suppress the
effect of vasopressin, the bond with their partner deteriorated immediately as
if the devotion and faithfulness towards their partners had vanished by some abracadabra.
Thus, it was concluded that vasopressin also plays vital role in keeping a
couple together.
Therefore, understanding these hormonal stages
responsible for ‘being in love’ can make it easier to deal with the
infatuation.
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