Why We Love, Why We Cheat

I was unable to attend Dr. Lucy Brown’s lecture on Tuesday evening, so I took the liberty of checking out the website she had sent out to us seeyourfeelings.com. As I was scanning through the website briefly, it became obvious that the two women at the forefront, Lucy Brown and Helen Fisher, are two incredibly smart and fascinating women. Both these women have invested their lives to the science behind love. Due to the inability of being in the lecture on Tuesday, I decided to listen to a TED talk by Helen Fisher titled, “Why We Love, Why We Cheat”.  From the beginning, I started to question what it means to be “in love.”

Fisher spoke on romantic love saying that we seek special meaning, we are sexually possessive, we emotionally crave the other person, we are motivated by the other person, and we become obsessed with the other person. Fisher conducted research where she looked at the brain of people who were in love and those who were in love, but heartbroken through a machine. She asked multiple questions, but the two most striking were “What percent of the day do you think about him or her?” and “Would you die for him or her?” To Fisher’s surprise, people answered the first question with “all night and all day” while the second question was answered with a “yes.” When the brain was actively in love it looked like it was on a drug, Fisher gave the example of cocaine.

Fisher explained that three brains are involved in the process of loving; lust, romantic, and deep attachment. Lust is responsible for the sexual drive—the “intolerable itch” we have to please. The romantic aspect focuses on the energy it takes to mate with one person while the attachment aspect is to be able to tolerate the other person.

Fisher discussed that more marriages today would be considered symmetrical marriages meaning that the two people are equal. This stems from the continuous advancement of women in the world in regards to economic power, health, and education. Fisher also elaborated on the strengths that women have over men such as verbal ability, imagination, the ability to collect data, and the ability to plan. This woman is awesome in giving other women a moral boost!

Fascinatingly, we can and are allowed to love multiple people at once. Fisher referred to this as the mental “committee meeting.” Honestly, I am not sure about how I feel about being able to be in love with multiple people to fill different needs because I certainly don’t want to share my boyfriend with anyone unless I give it the OKAY!

Lastly, Fisher discussed the use of anti-depressants and its relation to love. She said that anti-depressants are being used at a greater percentage than ever and it has effects on our ability to love. First, anti-depressants alter the dopamine levels which are associated with romantic love and the emotional connections. Secondly, anti-depressants used long-term kills the sex drives which kills orgasms therefore killing our ability of attachment to the other person.  As Fisher said, you mess with one part of the brain you ultimately mess with the other parts too! I believe that we need to love to be living, just like if we did not desire we would dead and as Fisher put it, “A world without love is a deadly place.”