Thanks to 80s day at my son’s school yesterday, I’ve been going around singing music from that spandexed epoch, including “What is Love,” by the inimitable Howard Jones. It got me thinking: What is love? I mean, we all know it when we feel it, but what makes us feel that way?
Furthermore, I wondered, how long does it take people to fall in love? Science tells us the answer is a fifth of a second. Yes, that’s right. Research by Professor Stephanie Ortigue at Syracuse University has found that our bodies unleash upon us the potent chemical cocktail that results in the love in less than one second, for the right partner. Considering that we blink about once every five seconds, this means we literally are able to fall in love faster than the blink of an eye.
Ortigue’s team found that 12 areas of the brain work together to create “love,” reacting to chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine and adrenaline. That we feel so much of this in our “hearts” could have something to do with the fact that we actually have a “second brain” in our gut. (Don’t believe it? Click to read about this amazing discovery!)
Cultural norms tend to dictate how and when we decide to say those three little words, however. Research on love shows that cultural beliefs about the emotion determine how, when and why humans express it.
One study shows that Russians and Lithuanians, who overall think love is temporary and inconsequential, perceive themselves to be falling in and out of love much more quickly that their American counterparts. The Eastern Europeans rarely identified love as a source of “comfort” or “friendship,” compared to the Americans, who almost always saw love that way.
I never believed in love at first sight, until I met the cowboy. As I recount in breathless detail in my forthcoming memoir about our relationship, I’d simply never seen a man as beautiful as he, and when he smiled at me I just knew. I was in love, deeply. Not having science to back up my foolishness then (as I do now) I held off on saying it out loud, until I could not longer contain it and blabbed the truth about a month later, thanks to a couple of glasses of Shiraz. It took this most stoic and independent of men another two or three months to return my volley, but I could have sworn I saw love in his eyes long before that…
Tagged: how long does it take to fall in love, love science, what is love
Thanks for confirming what I knew all along. Seriously.
I’ve always said Aug and I fell in love at first sight, although I saw him almost four years before he saw me and I was only a freshman in high school then. (And he was five years older than I.) When he finally saw me when I was a senior, that was it for him, too, he later told me. I always thought I was just a hopeless romantic. I guess it’s possible, too, to love someone forever.
Thanks again. Guess I wasn’t just a silly kid.
Omg great story i just read it to my friend and we both loved it!!
Have to tell you that I knew I was going to marry my Jim the first time I saw him at the incredibly old age of 16! i was almost overwhelmed with all the clatter in the room the night I met him….there were all sorts of new people in the room and he was one of many. When we were introduced, I thought he was sweet, but no bells went off. It took about five minutes later. I found his last name FUNNY, it just was, but I didn’t want to rude and laugh or draw attention to it. so I quickly left the room, put my hand over my mouth to control the giggling, only to find out my girl friend had followed me. I was giggling, almost uncontrollable, when I went white in the face and stopped in my tracks. It was God, and He told me in a voice as plain as I had ever heard, “Go ahead and laught all you want, but that name is going to be yours!” I literally couldnit speak, but when he called me two days later and the phone rang, I knew exactly who was calling! We have been married 45 years! Oh yeah, in case your are curious about the name.. CRABTREE
Since Beloved is my best friend’s older cousin, I have met him a couple of time when I was really to frivolous to understand if I loved someone or not… but there were moments, even when I was 14 years old when our eyes would meet on his uncle’s dairy farm, or when he drove off in his cutely ugly and nerdy little orange Toyota that I would wonder about him. When I got a job in the community, we became personal friends, I loved him from the first time he helped me when my little motorcycle broke down. It took a year to get over the denial though. He said that break down was a answer to prayers because he was looking out for me too, but didn’t want to scare me off so it took a while to ask me to be his girlfriend.
Reblogged this on Dating According to Gizel.