Romantic love and neurochemicals

Factual Questions
1

Definition: by “romantic love” I mean a certain kind of excessively thrilling attraction-to-a-person, celebrated in song and rhyme, that is definitely NOT just the same thing as lust, brotherly love, adoration of the Lord, love of country, mother love, love for chocolate, psychotic obsession…and perhaps not quite the same thing as “infatuation,” though I’m not sure about that one. If you’ve never experienced it yourself, you’ve surely seen it in the movies, personified by Meg Ryan or Sandra Bullock or Ben Stiller.

I’ll assume you know what I mean.

Let’s assume a very vague, very tentative quasi-medical account of this phenomenon. Specifically, in certain situations, for reasons not entirely clear, some part of the brain is flooded with a neurochemical, yet undiscovered, which I will call “Cupidalene.” If your brain is flooded with Cupidalene at a moment in which it is occupied with thoughts of some person or other, you will fall in love with that person–in “romantic love.” You’ll feel the rush, hear the voice of God telling you he/she is The One–etc.

So goes the theory.

Now: the question.

If person X has been once Cupidalened with respect to person Y, does current thought on how roughly similar kinds of neurochemicals operate suggest:

a) though the effect will fade for X, the fact of the original exposure increases the probability of intermittent recurrences connected to being with Y? (“Sure, you fall out of love, but stick it out with that person–it comes back now and then.”) --OR–

b) the effect fades, and it is as if you have developed a tolerance (in the medical sense) for person Y, a specific resistance to further flashes of romantic love. (“You fall out of love, and find yourself married to your best friend.”) --OR–

c) the effect fades, and its recurrence with person Y is as random as its initial appearance. (“Who knows?”)

I ask this as a person who doesn’t much enjoy the company of others, but finds the memory of romantic love, and the hope of its recurrence, an overwhelming motivator. (We’ll save the problem of mutuality for another occasion.)

2

Well, that’s an interestingly posed question. Let’s see…
Let me say first that I think, while this form of drawing analogies between extremely subjective (experiential, internal) aspects of human conscious experience and extremely objective (external) ones is done only tenously. But it can be a really cool way to develop both aspects. I think that the idea that the emotion of love, as defined by you scott, is mediated in the brain (and body some say) by neurochemicals is believed by a number of neuroscientists. If that were the case, then, in addition to your hypotheses, it could be that the trigger for the release of the neurochemical changes, and that Y no longer represents that trigger. X would remain as succeptible as ever to the same dose of the chemical. It could be also that the human organism develops biologically in such a way that the “Cupidalene” system itself shuts down, much like the menstrual cycle. So that everyone becomes less succeptible over time to that kind of love.

But what I really want to say is that these are just more examples that may or may not fit with the evolving science of neuropsychology. They are more than likey transient ways of understanding that, while more developed and possibly more accuate than previous models, are incomplete. The internal experience you seem so keen on is just as valuable, if not more valuable, than then objective one. The Greeks words “eros” and “agape” define, for me, a poignant definition of love. “Eros” is the love that Cupidene would cause. It’s powerful, addictive, unbelievably over-the-top. But it is, by definition, fleeting. “Agape” is what one hopes to discover with another person, and is the love that lasts, that creeps up on you when you are buying milk for someone, or maybe when you are holding someone’s hair while they vomit. The old man who still adores his old wife, who opens the car door for her and tells her she’s the most beautiful woman in the world - he has agape. It’s still love. So when X loses eros for y, he doesn’t lose love for her, and he gains another kind of love than what you listed. Maybe we’ll call the neurochemical that mediates that kind of love “Agapelene?”

3

Thanks, Livelykid.

I thought, mistakenly, that “agape” specifically referred to religious love–love of God.

I think the “Cupidalene” system does shut down over time (but perhaps not totally, and not for all people). As pure speculation (as if the rest of my post isn’t!), perhaps there is a connection between said shut-down and the organism’s attainment of its goal. In other words, when the brain registers that the Cupidalenesque object has been attained–romantic love is mutual, ecstatically shared–the chemo-releaser sticks a neural cork in it. Maybe, just maybe, agape can then be experienced.

I’ve never had that mutuality. I think I’ve sometimes tried to proceed directly to agape: not only was it again not mutual, BUT I got to know an unsettling truth about myself, that I’m so hungry for the Cupid experience (which, remember, I do NOT define as just sexual lust) that I can’t persist in a relationship in which said experience never happened at all.

(…is it painfully obvious I’ve had a recent example?..)

The reason this is framed as a question about how mood-affective neurochemicals (I’m thinking about such stuff as serotonin, norepinephrine, etc) decline, relation to stimuli, tolerance issues, etc., --is that it all seems in a very LITERAL way to be very like drug addiction.

So–if my fictional Cupidalene acted “like” an SSRI, what sort of effectiveness profile would one expect to see, re the patterns I mentioned in my OP?

4

But maybe, just maybe, love of any kind is more a matter for Great Debates…

5

What about the neurotransmitters for religious ecstasy? If I could synthesize it, I bet I could start one heck of a cult!