It seems to be everyones goal in life to find that special someone, but what makes someone more special than someone else? Why as humans do we fall in love? There actually has been quite a bit of research on this to help explain why
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According to a study done by Rutgers University, falling in love has different stages. The researches concluded that falling in love is actually a three step process. They called the first stage lust, the second stage attraction, and the third stage attachment.
Lust: The first stage of falling in love. Basically lust is when you first start talking to someone and you begin to find your self liking them more and more. This lust period is fueled by the gender hormones testosterone and oestrogen.
Attraction: The second phase in falling in love. According to the researchers, the stage of attraction is where people start to feel love. In this stage, you find yourself getting excited thinking about the other person and only thinking about them. The hormones adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin also play a key role in this phase as they begin to change the persons personality.
Attachment: The final stage of love. In this stage, you could say people are “head over heals in love” for each other. They have dreams of getting married or having kids and are taking their relationship to different advanced levels. At this point, they’re fully in love. The hormones oxytocin and vasopressin play a large role in this stage as they make the individual retain their love for their partner.
So, love is a science. Falling in love requires a number of chemical reactions in the brain that spark these three stages. Science has still not figured out why we fall in love with certain people however. However, for some reason different people cause the chemical reactions to occur for each individual person so you never know when you might catch yourself falling in love.
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I’ve heard of this before and I always find it super interesting to read. When we were kids, we never expected something as amazing as love to be something as simple as human chemical reactions. Now that we are older, I feel like that that is almost a relief, because we realized love isn’t always so amazing and explaining it as a chemical process makes it a lot easier than if love were some intrinsic, divine thing. While I’m slightly bummed that love is really just a chemical process, it’s a really interesting fact to be aware of.
This post really got me thinking about how we fall in love. I, as most people think, never think of love as a science. It was very entering to look at such an intimate topic through a scientific lens. But when it comes to loving someone other than a significant other (parents, friends, siblings), is there a different way that forms?
It is interesting to think that falling in love is a science. Based on what you read, do you think it is possible to be in love with multiple people? Are there different types of love (family, friends, signifigant other) ?
Cool post! I never would have thought of love as a three part process. It has me thinking about love at first sight though. Do you think that you can skip one of the parts of the love process? Is it possible to jump right to attraction in the case of love at first sight? I found a cool article that talks about love at first sight. http://www.byrdie.com/love-at-first-sight-science/slide2 . It seems that when you do fall in love at first sight, a lot is going on in the brain. This makes it hard for scientists to study. Do you think there is a way to find out the truth behind love or is it different for everyone. Love is a crazy and unexplained subject but how do we figure out how it works when it’s subjective? Hopefully science can figure out an explanation for love so we can all know how this phenomenon works.
This blog was interesting because I learned about the stages of love in one of my high school classes. I learned it slightly different though. I learned that that the initial emotions are infatuation. That is fueled by the physical appearance of the other person. Then from there a deeper connection forms like what you wrote about. I found an article that goes more into depth into the stages of love.
Article: http://menalive.com/stages-of-love/
Love is a crazy thing, and I am writing that in the least corny way possible. It is one of the craziest interactions between two humans. To care for someone so much is an amazing thing. I see love all around me in my friends, but particularly with my parents. They have a stable marriage, and met at a young age and together had my sister, brother, and me. As sad as it is though, people fall out of love, and I must ask the question, why does this happen? Divorces today are so common that the phrase “I love you” might be loosing its touch. It is a sad truth that must be discussed. Here is an article that talks about why marriages come to such an early end.