Are Our Love Songs Getting It Right?

Love is a mystery, love is a battlefield, love stinks, love hurts, love is all you need. To hear our artists go on about it, love is as impenetrable and mystical as it is powerful. But in a digital, big-data, genome-sequenced age, we know a lot more about the “magic” of attraction than ever before. So for this Valentine’s Day, we decided to unromantically break through some of the enigmas and investigate the science behind love. We spoke to experts including Dr. Leslie Vosshall, professor and olfactory scientist at Rockefeller University, and Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and chief scientific advisor at Match.com, and asked them to help explain.

Is love like a drug?

Dr. Helen Fisher and her team have done a number of fMRI studies, scanning the brains of over 100 people who have recently fallen in love, who have recently been dumped, and who have been in love for years. Love, as it turns out, is very much like a drug. When we’re in love, our biological reward system goes bonkers. The VTA, or ventral tegmental area, is activated; this is “the brain system for wanting, for energy, for focus, for motivation, and in this case the motivation to win life’s greatest prize, which is a mating partner,” explains Dr. Fisher. The VTA produces dopamine, the neurotransmitter that makes us feel happy, and sends it out to a number of brain areas, causing a similar rush of good feeling one initially feels when snorting cocaine. Dopamine also causes our eyes to dilate, giving us that attractive dopey swooning look mastered by cartoonists.

For those who had recently had their hearts broken, the activity in the VTA was huge. “When somebody dumps you, you actually end up liking them even more,” says Dr. Fisher. Her team noted activity in areas linked with romantic love, attachment, craving, addiction, and physical pain. When love ends, it’s hard to quit “cold turkey.”

Are we gonna have to face that we’re addicted to love?

Yes, we get addicted to love pretty quickly. Love also lights up activity in the nucleus accumbens, an ancient reptilian part of the brain that has been linked to all sorts of addictions. Lovers follow the same destructive path as other addicts: We demonstrate increasing tolerance (and need to see our love more and more); we go through withdrawal when we can’t see that person; we find ourselves willing to engage in risky behavior just to be with that person. Things that were once essential—eating, sleeping, doing anything productive—become less important. Sound familiar?

Dr. Fisher also found activity in the similarly ancient brain region known as the caudate nucleus, which receives the dopamine from the VTA and integrates all our thoughts and feelings. “Your whole brain gets involved, as we all know. In fact, brain regions in the front of brain, where you make decisions, begin to shut down,” Dr. Fisher explains, “so that you can overlook all kinds of things.” Love is blind, as Chaucer and Paul McCartney have said, and it’s also truly irrational.

Can we really be crazy in love?

Love may not literally make you insane, but it certainly leads to similar symptoms. In particular, the early stages of romance are linked with diminished levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin and its receptors. These molecules are also depleted in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, giving rise to the idea that falling in love is a mild, temporary form of obsessive behavior. It is associated with feelings of anxiety and obtrusive thoughts, though obviously to a much lesser degree than in obsessive compulsive disorder.

The main difference Dr. Fisher found between those newly in love and those who had been in love for many years (study participants who had been married, on average, 21 years), was in that those who had been married a long time did not show the same activity in parts of the brain associated with anxiety. Instead they showed increased activity in the areas associated with attachment, calm feelings, and pain suppression.

Can the deejay get us falling in love?

What causes us to fall in love with one person over another? It’s a good question, one that scientists like Dr. Fisher are attempting to answer. As detailed in her latest book, Why Him, Why Her, Dr. Fisher has pinpointed for four broad personality styles that link particular brain systems to constellations of behaviors and personality trains.

The Explorer (who has an extremely active dopamine system) is energetic, creative, flexible, and likes novelty. The Builder (led by the serotonin system) is more traditional, a rule follower, cautious, orderly. The Director (led by the testosterone system) is logical, tough-minded, skeptical, and good at mechanical tasks. And finally the Negotiator (led by the estrogen system) is imaginative, sees the big picture, has good verbal and people skills, and is emotionally expressive.

Dr. Fisher designed a questionnaire that measured these traits and surveyed 13 million people worldwide through match.com. She then observed who was naturally drawn to whom. The results were contrary in some ways: Explorers and Builders tended to want to find people like themselves, while Directors (those expressive in testosterone) were well-matched to Negotiators (high in estrogen), and vice versa.

Is love thicker than water?

There has been buzz in the last several years about pheromones, and how these chemicals can attract a mate. Perfumers have even begun peddling their products by claiming the use of pheromones—pitching their own versions of love potion #9. But is it real?

“The first pheromone was identified in silk moths in 1959—a single chemical substance (bombykol) released by female moths that immediate triggered mating behavior in male moths,” explains Dr. Vosshall. But despite what your perfumery might assure you, when it comes to humans, pheromones are controversial. “Obviously humans are not moths,” Dr Vosshall continues. “We use lots of cues to pick a mate: how they look, how they speak, what their mind is like, and of course how they smell, and hundreds of other things.”

Though no specific chemical has been identified, there are certain indicators that scent affects mood in both men and women, says Dr. Vosshall, citing menstrual synchrony in women as one example. In a study by biologist and zoologist Claus Wedekind, women were asked to sniff men’s sweaty shirts and rate which they found most attractive. Women tended to chose the shirts of men whose immune system genes—the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes—were most unlike their own. It is in our biological interest to find mates who are genetically different from us in order to allow our children the benefit of heterosis, or hybrid vigor, and scent may play a role in this evolutionary process to protect our genes and progeny.

Many scientists who believe that the idea of pheromones in humans should be abandoned, because there is nothing like bombykol for people—there isn’t a substance on earth that can cause us to have sex after just a sniff, Axe ads notwithstanding. But Dr. Vosshall’s view is more nuanced. “Scent cues are used by essentially every animal studied—bird, fish, insect, mammal. It seems implausible that humans would stand apart and not use chemicals to communicate information. [The] issue is just that the science has not caught up yet to understand pheromones in humans and so the real scientific evidence is still sketchy.”

Has everything changed now that we’ve got digital love?

It’s a widely cited statistic that one in five couples meet online now. Many dating websites—and there are multitudes—claim different strategies for helping you find your mate. The science behind them is, for the most part, veiled. eHarmony has its patented “Compatibility Matching System®;” How About We asks users to describe dates and then uses those descriptions to match people, and so on.

OKCupid founder Christian Rudder explains the basic math behind his company’s formula in this TedEd video. The algorithm is based on a seemingly endless series of questions asked of the user, any number of which she can choose to respond. The user is also asked how she’d like her partner to answer that same question, and then how important the question is to her. This seems like a promising way to find a good match, if you know what you want, but it negates the ancient biological processes that scientists like Dr. Wedekind are uncovering, at least initially. To get to the genetic-compatibility portion of courtship more quickly, there are now genetic matchmaking sites, such as InstantChemistry.com, which provide genetic testing for individuals and for the use of matchmakers to ensure genetically diverse couples.

These are interesting new tools, but none of them can yet trump evolution’s carefully honed mate selection processes, according to Dr. Fisher. “The human brain has not changed in 200,000 years,” she reminds us. “These not dating services—these are introducing services. The only real algorithm is your own human brain.”

Will love keep us together?

A ray of good news: Science is beginning to prove that however you get there, once you find it, love does last. One of the hallmark discoveries of the fascinating Harvard Grant Study, which followed 268 men for 72 years beginning in their sophomore year in college, is that beyond career, health, and wealth, love is the key to happiness. As George Vaillant, who directed the study for over four decades, put it: “Happiness in only the cart; love is the horse.”

So on this Valentine’s Day, you can rest assured that love is out there, your brain and body are well adapted to find appropriate mates, and that love confers long-term benefits. Love’s not easy, but it’s worth the battle.