Your Brain is your most Romantic Organ

Thoughts About Your Brain In Love

Did you know that it is not your heart that chooses your partner; it is rather your brain? We know that our heart dances and sings when we fall in love, but it is the brain that calls the tunes and gives the instructions.

Do you remember the first days and weeks of your romance, when you experienced an almost unbearable attraction to your partner? Contemporary neuroscience tells us that this explosion of romantic excitement and attraction is the result of a chemical cocktail of phenylethylamine and norepinephrine, which act like amphetamines and perk you up, and dopamine, a powerful anti-depressant. This cocktail stimulates lovers to stay up all night talking, to become sexually aroused, to have endless patience, and to feel exhilarated so much of the time. However, this chemical combination blinds you to the realities of your partner, to the behaviors and traits that will eventually frustrate you, but go unnoticed by a brain "marinated in love."

Have you been confused by the sudden ending of the romantic phase of your love? Have you thought that perhaps your partner changed, or even worse, tricked you into believing that he was kind of guy who always brought you flowers; or she was kind of woman who would never ever be judgmental and critical? Keep in mind that you were intoxicated by the chemicals of infatuation that were making you feel terrific, and when you feel terrific you are terrific. Remember the song, "Everybody loves a lover"? Of course, everybody does, because that is part of God's-or Nature's-plan.

The romantic phase of a love relationship lasts anywhere from a few days to eighteen months. Why does the cocktail of love last only this long? The answer is simple: because the release of all these chemicals is no longer needed, since their only purpose was to attract two people, get them glued together long enough to bond and produce babies. It all makes sense biologically, but does it make sense from the perspective of long-term, committed relationships?

Looking at this from a 21st-centrury perspective, we understand now what we did not in the 20th. When the love intoxication wears off, all bloody hell breaks loose in relationships. In place of bonding, attraction, and euphoria, comes frustration, grief, and hurt. After feeling so high, the partners feel like they're falling into the valley of the shadow of death. It can feel like withdrawing from drugs-because that is in fact what is going on.

The power struggle that ensues after romantic love is as natural a process as night following day. The good news is that romantic love is supposed to end, to be replaced eventually by a long-term, committed adult relationship. The bad news is that we are going to fight like hell to get our partners back to that romantic and yummy place when "everything was beautiful at the ballet," and they could do no wrong. But typically the way we do this is with judgment and criticism, attacking our beloved partner for the very things we used to find adorable and attractive. What is going on here? Beneath the surface of this nastiness is the truth that our brain has selected a partner who is a "perfect match" for us. Unfortunately it is not the rosy choice that we see on eHarmony.com; rather, the perfection is in the stress and tension that we call the power struggle, from which we are supposed to learn, to grow as individuals and as couples, by bumping up against each other, and like the oyster that makes a beautiful pearl out of its stress, so too can we create the relationship of our dreams-right out of our nightmares!

Twenty-first-century interpersonal neurobiology is discovering that the brain is much wiser than we knew in the 20th century, quite literally attracting us to partners who will drive us crazy until we grow up and realize that their unique combination of attractive and gorgeous traits and unattractive and ugly traits is supposed to put us in touch with both the reality of who we are as people, as well as who our partners are, and assist us in healing our woundedness from the past. Another way of saying this is that our "impossible" partner is to be thanked for pushing us to finish the unfinished business of childhood.

How exactly do we do this? Consider this: your partner reminds you of painful and negative traits of your parents, and you immediately fall into a kind of hypnotic trance, reacting in a manner that is little more than a grown-up version of the way you acted to protect yourself from the pain you experienced as a child. Now, we ask, why would God, or Nature, put us through this hell all over again? The answer was offered us by Sigmund Freud when he coined the expression "repetition compulsion"-we humans are destined to repeat the errors, mistakes, and pain of the past until we have "worked them through." Working through means both psychologically and etymologically "to make real," to grow out of our fantasies about who we are and who are partners are, and to accept the reality and deep truth of both ourselves and our partners: we do this by learning how to accept the dark side of our partners, as well as of ourselves; we learn how to accept and love both, and in the process we become stronger relational beings and better individuals.

The "miracle" that our brain wants us to pull off is simple: accept in our partner the shortcomings that we ourselves carry deep within us, yet tend to project onto our partners rather than own these truths as part of ourselves. Our brain wants us to change patterns, not partners. Our brain wants us to grow up, leave romance behind, and discover the amazing secret: romantic love is only the precursor to a great life-long romance-if we are willing to follow its lead.