Relationship In Love

Helen Fisher’s latest research follows years of experiments analysing the nature of love. In one, she put 49 people through a brain scanner: 17 had just fallen in love, 15 had just been rejected and 17 reported that they were still in lover after an average of 21 marriage. She found defined patterns of brain activity that connected the members of each group. ‘If I put those people in the brain scanner and didn’t know anything about them, I would certainly be able to tell if they were in love or not and whether they were feeling a deep sense of attachment to their partner.’
Science can also now explain something that has long been the subject of poets. ‘Romantic love truly is an addition; we’ve found activity in brain regions directly associated with cocaine addiction,’ says Fisher. ‘Around the world, people pine for love, kill themselves and others for love and slip into clinical depression. We know this psychologically but without the basic science we might just assume it’s a bad childhood or that they’re weak. We can now say that there’s a genuine biological basis to the extreme behavior people express when they’re in love.’
She’s not found that romantic love is not an emotion but a mating drive, one that’s even stronger than the sex drive. ‘You can ask somebody to go to bed with you casually and when they say no, you don’t kill yorself. But around the world, when someone is rejected in love they can stop eating and sleeping, stalk people and commit suicide or homicide. Love is a powerful mating system,’ She believes evolutionary theory is backed up by literature. ‘When you read the great novels they’re not about people who died because they couldn’t get sex, they’re about people who died for love.’